DATA OCEAN THEATRE (D.O.T.)
POST-DOCTORAL ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECT
By Vincent ROUMAGNAC
The five-year-long project DATA OCEAN THEATRE (D.O.T.) tangles myths, western theatre memory, new media, digital animism, climate emergency, seas and oceans transformations, queer subcultures, and technological mutations in relation to diverse aspects of «submersion» as a contemporary living condition. D.O.T. appears, disappears, and reappears through a series of polymorphic works based on the dramaturgical 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.
DATA OCEAN THEATRE consists of three parts:
D.O.T. / Launching (In the Time of a Pandemic) (2020)
PART 1. D.O.T. / Tragedy & the Goddexxes (2021 – 2022)
PART 2. D.O.T. / Oceanȹunk working title (2023 – 2025)
Based on the claim of the unsustainability of fundamental anthropocentrism (considered as toxically) embedded in the very mechanisms of western theatre, the DATA OCEAN THEATRE (D.O.T.) project expands my artistic implementations on how the notion and the practice of the “stage” evolve through contemporary climate-morphing, technological conditioning, and transdisciplinary hybridizing. The project pushes the artistic and epistemic challenges further based on the transformations of my scenographic practice as a theatre director from a multi-environmental perspective that takes in, as a double milieu and a double condition, the biospheric mutations and the acceleration of information. While theatrically testing the qualities and quantities of the growing tech-environments, the research is looking at how the data swell potentially, and poetically, meets the biospheric transformations of the Earth, and especially the alarming rising of seas and oceans. In this sense, and building on my previous experiments, that drew, from the perspective of “redirecting/reacclimating” the stage and “re-ecologizing” theatre, on theoretical resources such as Actor-Network-Theory, Posthumanism, Ecodramaturgy, Queer theory, or Techno-eco-feminism, the D.O.T. project aesthetically pursues the artistic research from the metaphor of submersion. In this direction, the project explores inherited seas-and-oceans oriented myths, simultaneously revisiting a series of theatre plays with a marine backdrop (1) and looking at the metaphorical use of nautical vocabulary, sea imagery, and meteorological analogies as a dramatic illustration of computational realities. Drawing on a cross-disciplinary methodology, based on environmental and media hybridity, the whole project seeks to contribute to changing human-inhuman political ecologies through triggering affective formations and opening imaginaries on the heterogeneous contemporary condition. It aims at generating art and research pieces within a new temporal ecology of the stage by examining how the very infrastructures of “theatre-making”, might shake, possibly collapse, and then transition and reform within such a multi-agential dynamic of emergence. It proposes to revisit and reset western theatre mythological foundations by forming an alternative pantheon for a queer, aquafeminist and technoanimist reset of the “tragic”, at the intersection of a syncretic (Greek/Scandinavian/Basque/Japanese) marine mythology (2) and the ambiguities of “technology-as-monster” narratives. In the project, the simultaneous forces, and fragilities, of the transforming marine ecosystems meet the growing algorithmic-conditioned life and the crossbreeding of diverse art disciplines and research fields in order to make appear, and disappear, and reappear, fluent and nebular scenographies, maybe seanographies, as imaginary prototypes for the societal constructions to come.
(1) REFERENCE PLAYS: Philoctetes, SOPHOCLES, 409 BC / Iphigenia in Aulis, EURIPIDES, 405 BC / The Tempest, William SHAKESPEARE, 1610 / Phèdre (Phaedra), Jean RACINE, 1677 / L'île des esclaves (Slave Island), Pierre de MARIVAUX a.k.a. MARIVAUX, 1725 / Fruen fra havet (The Lady from the Sea), Henrik IBSEN, 1888/ Le soulier de satin (The Satin Sleeper), Paul CLAUDEL, 1929 / Embers, Samuel BECKETT, 1957 / The Sea, Edward BOND, 1973 / L’Eden Cinéma, Marguerite DURAS, 1977 / Une Tempête (A Tempest), Aimé Césaire, 1979 I Am The Wind, Jon Fosse, 2007
(2) REFERENCE SEA MYTHS/MONSTERS: Amphitrite (Greece) / The Oceanides/Aallottaret (Greece/Finland) / Iku-Turso (Finland) / The Kraken (Scandinavia) / Itxaslaminak (Basque Country) / Hanzaki Daimyōjin (Japan)