On virtual models

Abstract

This special double issue of Theatre and Performance Design, ‘On Virtual Models’, is both a succession and an expansion of research for our 2018 monograph, The Model as Performance. Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (Bloomsbury). The monograph was the outcome of a project initiated many years earlier within our creative practices and scholarly works. The Model as Performance intentionally focused on the physical scale model and its performative, epistemic, and cosmopoietic (worldmaking) capacities. In parallel to publishing the monograph, we guest-edited a special double issue of Theatre and Performance Design entitled ‘On Models’. We invited theorists and practitioners to respond to the overall ‘model’ project and contribute to a further discourse acknowledging and articulating the physical model’s agency across the disciplines of theatre and architecture. This current special double issue extends our focus to observe the virtual model and its capacity to redefine location, time, and narrative, provoking dialogues and connections that emerge between material realities and the immaterial virtual realm, beyond the functionality of the human-machine interface (HMI). Contributions to this special double issue explore the virtual model in the practice of scenography and performance, the reconstruction of lost performance spaces and the construction of theatres never built. We have identified three themes as an ordering principle for the journal while acknowledging that the intent of the publication is not encyclopaedic but rather a specific informed view on the virtual within an expanded performance context. Two visual essays complement the scholarly articles and engage with interactive AI (Artificial Intelligence) actors in performance and the merging of the real and the virtual through urban and personal memories. Each of the themes embraces the distinct spaces and qualities that reside within the virtual model, broadly defined here as ‘emergent spaces’, ‘dialogic spaces’ and ‘immersive spaces’. Emergent spaces devise new methodologies to make virtual spaces tangible through rigorous and creative re-reading and reconstructing from extant documentation. Immersive spaces explore the technologies and phenomena of immersion in the virtual realm, while dialogic spaces encompass thoughts on the discursive tension between different positions and locations and the dynamic spatial interaction between actor and virtual environment. In ‘Putting Virtual Theatre Models to Work: “Virtual Praxis” for Performance Research in Theatre History’, Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, and Jonathan Bollen explore how the virtual reconstruction of lost theatre and performance spaces can become a distinct method of performance research by immersing performers into the virtual space of the reconstructed stage. By inhabiting the virtual stage as a method, the authors describe the deliberate paradox as ‘virtual praxis’, new, embodied knowledge concerning the spatial dynamics of stage, auditorium, and building are uncovered in parallel to the virtual model being utilized as an active agent for performance research in theatre history. Significantly, Tompkins’, Holledge’s, and Bollen’s research creates highly nuanced spaces that emerge out of the exploratory process of the