On-Line Simulations/Real-Life Politics A Discussion with Ricardo Dominguez on Staging Virtual Theatre

Abstract

FUSCO: Electronic Disturbance Theater’s actions since 1998 have become the focus of intense interest in the field of performance studies. It would seem that EDT is being viewed as an ideal bridge between disparate worlds. Unlike other kinds of virtual performance that are fixated on the interface of bodies and machines in strictly formal terms, EDT’s work stresses how the Internet is a dramatic scenario that can facilitate social and political engagement with issues in the offline world. Whereas much Latin American performance and theatre that is celebrated as representative of a distinct cultural identity relies on ethnographic or folkloric representations of “nativeness,” EDT’s support for Zapatismo combines the political struggle for indigenous self-determination with a critique of neoliberalism. What is your point of view about the explosion of academic interest in EDT’s work? DOMINGUEZ: There has been a proliferation of analysis of EDT in different academic communities: in the fields of new media and robotics, art history, performance studies, electronic politics, virtual architecture, urban studies, and recently globalization studies. We have also been examined by experts on information war and security and the RAND Corporation. This is an outcome of EDT’s insistence that what we do is a type of performance that is similar to the agitprop theatre of the last century. The strange attractor for each of these academic groups is that EDT is not only using the latest technology, i.e., the Internet, but that our work negates the dominant ideologies that surround this technology’s politics, distribution, and “commodification.” EDT’s gestures offer a different form of social embodiment for the networks. We have also argued that we do not have to accept “communication and documentation” as the only options open to nonspecialists for interaction with the networks. We proposed that the Internet can become a “decisive” zone to articulate