DATA OCEAN THEATRE (OUT OF THE BLUE); A Discipline-Fluid Postdoctoral Artistic Research Project Exposition

vincent roumagnac

Data Ocean Theatre (D.O.T.) is a four-year artistic research project that explores the intersection of myths, Western theatre memory, new media, digital animism, climate emergency, sea and ocean transformations, queer subcultures, and technological mutations in relation to aspects of “submersion” as a contemporary living condition. Expanding on the claimed unsustainability of Western theatre’s anthropocentric foundations, D.O.T. examines how the notion and practice of the stage transform amidst climate urgency, technological hypergrowth, and discipline-fluid hybridization. It seeks to generate experiments on a new temporal ecology of the stage, examining how theatre-making infrastructures might transition within a multi-agential dynamic of emergence. D.O.T. appears, disappears, and reappears through a series of polymorphic artworks and research affordances based on the ecodramaturgical consideration of the simultaneous phenomenon of 1. the rising sea and ocean levels, 2. the exponential growth of big data in our informational age, and 3. the emotional overload caused by the latter two happening, projection, and prophecy. D.O.T. explores inherited sea-and-ocean-oriented myths and revisits theatre plays with a marine backdrop, looking simultaneously into contemporary nautical vocabulary and sea imagery used as metaphors for computational realities. D.O.T. proposes to re-mythologise Western theatre foundations by forming an alternative pantheon for a queer, hydrofeminist, and technoanimist reset of the “tragic,” at the interplay between a syncretic marine mythology and the ambiguities of “technology-as-monster” narratives. In D.O.T. project, the forces and fragilities of transforming marine ecosystems intersect with algorithmic-conditioned life and crossbreeding of diverse art disciplines and research fields based on collaborations, generating imaginary prototypes for future societal constructions in the floods. D.O.T. is structured around several key components: the prologue Simultaneous Environments, featuring a series of experimental works; the central project Tragedy and the Goddexxes, which culminates in three public exhibitions; and a series of workshops, residencies, and a final publication in the form of an exposition on the Research Catalogue. This final publication of the DATA OCEAN THEATRE postdoctoral artistic research project (2021–2024) titled 'DATA OCEAN THEATRE (OUT OF THE BLUE); A Discipline-Fluid Postdoctoral Artistic Research Project Exposition' performs on the Research Catalogue as both an aesthetico-epistemic object in its own right and as an a posteriori account, or catalogue raisonné, of the project. It also acts as a supplement to the author's doctoral publication, Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses), completing the latter to form a diptych on the Research Catalogue. Similar to the doctoral publication, the non-linear, non-hierarchical, and non-chronological reading, or hyper-reading, of Data Ocean Theatre (Out of the Blue) invites its visitors to navigate freely and compose their own fluid, archipelagic, and tidal experience to make sense of the project as a whole.

DATA OCEAN THEATRE

Prologue/Simultaneous Environments

III. GOBO

Customised gobo/Projection on the Baltic Sea surface and on the surfaces of the exhibition space

Group Show MATTER/Sites, Senses and Sensibilities

Curated by Tanja Kiiveri and Pia Euro

Peripheries in parallax: BRAVE NEW PERIPHERIES

Artists: Niran Baibulat, Euro & Kiiveri, Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir, Miina Hujala, Inka Nieminen, Marika Orenius, Sari Palosaari, Bojan Sarcevic, Vincent Roumagnac, Denise Ziegler

Aalto Campus, Espoo, 2021

In the middle of the covid pandemics, I order a light design company online to produce a customised gobo (1) for me representing a computer isohedral tiling pattern (2), visually close to the kind of sea or wave gobos traditionally used on theatre and opera stages. One evening in March, from the balcony of my apartment, I project the pattern on the surface of the Baltic Sea in the melting, with a profile projector equipped with the gobo (left image), as a remote performance for the site-sensitive show which takes place approximately 11 kilometers away from my place, and where the gobo pattern is projected, randomly and in a small scale, by the works of the other artists (e.g. on the image on the right, by Sari Palosaari's take off).

(1) A gobo, whose abbreviation derives from the English goes before optics, is a metal plate placed in front of a projector, on which a pattern is cut, most often with laser ablation techniques. It is used to give a shape to a light that is cast over a space or an object, for example, to produce a pattern of clouds on a theatre stage.

(2) Isohedral tiling is a category of computational tiling used in computer graphics in the contexts of texture generation, remeshing, and the generation of decorative patterns.

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