Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear

Abstract

We propose, in this essay, a new theatrical genre we term interface theatre and examine three theatrical works from the past ten years that exemplify the form: Big Art Group’s Opacity (2017), 31Down’s DataPurge (2015/2016), and Marike Splint’s You Are Here (2020). These pieces, and others like them, depict, and critically reflect upon, a world pervasively mediated by interfaces: the apps, social media platforms, and device operating systems that screen so much of our everyday experience and personal communication and distil them to data, both for our own self-tracking and for the scrutiny of corporations and state surveillance. All three works act as transducers: they create theatrical microcosms of the processes by which human life gets transformed into data, allowing spectators to momentarily assume the perspectives of a surveilling algorithm. We offer the term interface theatre as a means of adding nuance and texture to current discourses about theatre in the digital world, which can encompass so many different forms, practices, and politics that greater specificity is required. Equally importantly, we argue, works of interface theatre make a strong case for the necessity for the theatrical form itself as a medium through which to grapple with the role of interfaces in social and political life writ large.