Abstract
Since 1994, Quebec theatre and film director Robert Lepage and his company Ex Machina have reinvented theatricality through the lens of contemporary new media. His “immersive adaptation” of Alberto Manguel’s “The Library at Night” (2016) offers us a provocative case in point as it invites us to contemplate the cultural transition from “Typographic Man” to a new age of communication, exploration and discovery, knowledge-seeking and archiving, and a potential future of (trans)human consciousness. Over the course of the immersive performance, the audience encounters myriad ironic juxtapositions as they follow an itinerary through three contrasting scenographic environments – riffing on questions of representation, solipsism and collective imagining: 1) a theatricalized facsimile of Manguel’s private library which highlights the solitary nature of reading, 2) a “second chamber” which amalgamates the furnishings of a classic public library reading room with a surreal forest environment that riffs on the playful concurrence of culture and nature, and 3) ten VR environments (involving immersive 360° video technology) which facilitate our “visit” to some of the world’s most iconic libraries. The use of VR technology allows the audience to speculate on and experience the transcendence of “reading” and “print culture” as dominant modes of western knowledge transmission and of their own biological and geographic limits. “The Library at Night” not only engages in a transnational itinerary which touches on the historical, cultural, economic and political pressures that have impacted the history of various libraries but also apprehends the anticipated decline of a relatively “short history of reading.”
Presenters
Cordula QuintAssociate Professor of Drama, Drama Program, Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus—The Data Galaxy: The Un-Making of Typographic Man?
KEYWORDS
New Media, VR, Post-print, Knowledge-Seeking, Cultural Transmission,Transhumanism, Consciousness, Global Village
