Sally Jane Norman

Director, Culture Lab, Newcastle University (UK)

Theatres of Individuation: Shaping Shared Aesthetic Experience

Gilbert Simondon describes individuation as a permanent process in the living being since, contrary to inorganic entities, the living being is not just the result but the theatre of individuation. This statement is taken as a starting point to define theatre as a metastable system rich in different potentials (form, matter, energy), whose mediation yields a particular kind of aesthetic experience, namely, a celebration of shared space and time.

Theatre designates both a physical location, and the live performance activity this location hosts. It is characterised by permanent renegotiation of the temporal and spatial boundaries on which individuation of all live art depends. This paper relates selected historical cases and theories of theatrical individuation to current performance experiments in technologically innervated urban settings. Mediaeval encounter-patterns and other mobile theatre forms, which implement different kinds of boundaries to those employed in dedicated architectural edifices, provide a backdrop for descriptions of current experiments producing technologically layered, wilfully ambivalent spaces that lend themselves to multiple aesthetic readings.

In conclusion, shared aesthetic experience in our massively extended sensorium is seen to need new shaping powers, to heighten moments of metasynchronicity and proxemics of metagesture that can inform future theatres of individuation.

Sally Jane Norman , citizen of Aotearoa/ New Zealand and France, is a cultural theorist/ practitioner whose research is focused on live art and technology, author of studies for UNESCO, the French Ministry of Culture, and the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS). Docteur d' é tat (Paris III), co-/organiser of workshops, performances, and seminars exploring human interactions in digital environments at institutions including the International Institute of Puppetry - Charleville-M é zi è res, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie - Karlsruhe, Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music - Amsterdam, IRCAM - Paris. Engaged on EU Framework projects since 1997. From 2001-2004, Director General of the Ecole sup é rieure de l'image (Angoulême/ Poitiers). Currently Director of Culture Lab, a new interdisciplinary research facility at Newcastle University which hosts creative practice-led collaborations that extend and challenge uses of digital tools.  

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab