Haptic Theater of Cruelty

Abstract

This project 's title refers to the writings of Antonin Artaud, who proposed a "Theater of Cruelty" in France during the 1930's. In his manifestos and his larger work "The Theater and Its Double", Artaud invoked a fundamentally sincere and "essential theater", which would abandon the confining norms of the contemporary "artistic spectacle" to create an immediate experience shared by actors and audience.

The Problem: We live in a culture without shadows. We are unknowing participants in a continuous spectacle, resulting in experiences that are both anaesthetic and unreal. The theater, the television set, and the computer screen have inappropriately framed our signified experiences and removed us from them. Our reliance on visual culture has begun to impair our reception of information through the senses working as a whole.

The Question: How can we use technology to regain our lost experience by making multiple modes of information reception possible simultaneously? How can the now static human body be repositioned in space as a moving, feeling entity? How can our senses be challenged, enhanced, or altered completely via technological mediation? How can the senses be reconnected and dangerously reconstructed? How can the senses be privileged, making signified experiences lived ones?

Finding an Answer: We believe that haptics and synethesia coupled with rich media are the means by which we can redefine sensory information. Haptics refers to a psychological orientation of a person in space by means of touch instead of sight. Like a blind person using a cane to guide their passage down a sidewalk, the haptic sense can be extended. The cane, the automobile and the Segway© Human Transporter are all instances of this extension. We believe that all bodily senses can be combined and utilized in similar ways with new technologies, augmenting and transforming the experiences of both individuals and audiences. What if you could “feel” a shower of music instead of hearing it? What if you could taste shapes? What if all transcribed textual information, be it a musical score or literary text, could be interpreted through other sensory means working in combination with new media? Information once inaccessible to those with disabilities could be mediated through these other means. The Haptic Theater of Cruelty does not physically exact violence upon an audience. Instead, it inhabits an objective space, where technology is handled with ethos and participants are not merely observers. Our ultimate goal is to reconnect our audience to a lost humanity and a sense of memory that is kept through action, even violent action. The phenomenological and logical combine with rich media to create a “common sense”, a place where all of our senses meet with our collective consciousness to create holistic perception.