Art in the Age of Digital Re-Interpretation: Scratch Log

Abstract:Jivesh Parasram and Tom Arthur Davis (joint leadership of Pandemic Theatre) report on an experiment in long-distance collaboration, pondering the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has generated for theatre artists amid broader philosophical and technical concerns about digital performance and digital reproduction. After contextualizing their own work’s rationale for shifts in form and tone, and acknowledging the challenges that the pandemic posed to new performance creation, they explain their own response—creation of new dialogues through nearly instantaneous textual collaboration using Google Docs—and provide “samples” of the work-in-progress that has emerged. Finally, they situate this new work in the artistic and political context of sampling as it developed in Caribbean culture, questioning the omission of such cultural practices from early scholarship.