Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: Virtual Theatres: An Introduction David Z. Saltz Gabriella Giannachi . Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 174, illustrated. £60/$90.00 (Hb); £20.99/$29.95 (Pb). Gabriella Giannachi's short book Virtual Theatres covers a considerable amount of ground, examining a rich assortment of Web sites, CD-ROMs, virtual reality environments, and interactive installations, along with the work of a handful of seminal performance artists and one choreographer. But readers should not come to this book expecting an analysis of the many theatre groups – such as George Coates Performance Works, the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, or i.e.VR, at the University of Kansas – that have experimented with interactive media over the past fifteen years. Despite the title, the book's focus is not theatre per se but the inherent theatricality of interactive technologies. Giannachi conceives of theatre, generally, as "the place to view, to observe the real" (10). Hence, "virtual theatre" is, for her, any site where the real – which includes the viewers themselves – meets and interpenetrates the virtual. The book's dominant theme is the way virtual events impact real bodies and real bodies are drawn into and mediated by virtual representations. After an introduction laying out the book's conceptual framework, Giannachi launches into the four chapters that form the heart of the book, each one analyzing a distinct category of virtual art. The categories are well chosen, highlighting significant distinctions and frequently producing unexpected and illuminating juxtapositions. "Hypertextual" works invite viewers to enter into and navigate through a virtual, screen-based world. For Giannachi, the category encompasses hypertext novels; interactive, multimedia CD-ROMs; subversive Web sites that confound viewers' expectations about interface and authorship; and interactive museum installations, such as Jeffrey Shaw's landmark Legible City (1988–91), in which viewers riding a real stationary bicycle explore a projected, 3. D model of a city constructed of enormous block letters. In works of "cyborg theatre," rather than viewers' entering a virtual world, the technology enters and modifies a performing subject. To exemplify this category, Giannachi looks to three performance artists: Orlan, Stelarc, and Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca. Interestingly, Giannachi shows not only how these artists allow technology to invade their own bodies but how they position themselves as objects of public debate and implicate viewers through direct ethical provocations. Giannachi's third category, "the (re-)creation of nature," blurs the distinction between nature and artifice, either by simulating organic, self-perpetuating, and self-modifying systems or by modifying real organisms. The [End Page 629] connections between the examples in this chapter are less pronounced than in the previous chapters and sometimes feel forced. At the same time, the elasticity of the category can be stimulating and suggestive. The works Giannachi discusses here include interactive installations that allow viewers to create virtual plants and other artificial organisms: Eduardo Kac's transgenetic art, which uses genes as an artistic medium (for example, by inserting genes from a jellyfish into a rabbit to make it glow green fluorescent); and, finally, Muds (Multi-User Dungeons) and Moos (Object-Oriented Muds), online communities in which participants interact with one another in real time under the guise of an avatar. This last example initially seems out-of-place. Most critical writing about Muds and Moos focuses on the way they destablize assumptions about authentic identity, which is not an issue brought to the fore by the other examples in this category. Ultimately, however, Giannachi makes a plausible case for analyzing Muds and Moos as artificial life, by emphasizing the way these virtual communities replicate dynamic, complex social structures that, in effect, take on a life of their own. The book's final category is "hypersurface," where the real and the virtual collide and intersect. Under this rubric, Giannachi discusses the "liquid architecture" of disorienting buildings that incorporate sensors and interactive lights and sounds that respond the people's movements, multiple-site installations that join together remote viewers using close-circuit video links, and Blast Theory's compelling performance/game/installation Desert Rain (1999– 2003. ). The penultimate chapter, "Towards an Aesthetic of Virtual Reality," has a miscellaneous feel. The title promises an analysis that synthesizes or problematizes the...

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