Grief Machines: Transhumanist Theatre, Digital Performance, Pandemic Time

Abstract

movement of those who desire to flee a faltering human body in favor of technologically enhanced or recalibrated form. In this iteration, Mark is played by actor Jack Gleeson, of Game of Thrones fame, who occasionally speaks as himself too. Gleeson delivers his performance live but effectively alone (except for some obscured crew) in a black box theatre, surrounded by the brief video recordings the audience have submitted in advance, that show our heads laughing, sleeping, at rest. [Fig. 1] Like the transhumanists of O'Connell's book, we too have uploaded our data, as we increasingly do in everyday life, so that we might extend the boundaries of our own bodies, and of what is possible for theatre "in these strange times," as the performer's refrain puts it. 2 We join in real and virtual ways to remember something of what theatre was, and to catch a glimpse of what it might next become. Within this temporal fissure, of what was and what might be, we are also here to process what has been lost, to grieve with the machines.This production, I argue in this article, presents a rich meditation on grief that endeavours to process the death of theatre and mass human death during the pandemic. 3 Transhumanism is the unifying object, which is depicted as a desperately optimistic discourse of life extension, weighed down by an underlying burden of unresolved grief for the inevitability of death. In the tradition of transhumanist thought presented here, grief is denied and deferred, transposed and rewired, forever ricocheting between the virtual and the real, subject and object, digital and material theatres.Using this production as my starting point and central guide, this article examines some of the ways in which mediatized theatre has grieved for live performance during the pandemic, with the mourning of live arts, shared physical experience, and human life intertwined. It considers the relationship between theatrical performance mediatized to

Chatting with the dead: The hermeneutics of thanabots

“…Yet the networked nature of the Internet has facilitated new kinds of public mourning (Walter, 2015b; Widmaier, 2020), and digital resurrection – also referred to as digital immortality, digital endurance, digital persistence, and the digital afterlife (Bassett, 2021: 814) – raises myriad questions about religion, morality, ethics, and general respect for the dead. Walsh (2021), for one, reflects on confronting personal losses with ‘grief machines’: mechanized and theatrical – and, in some ways, transhuman – representations of bodies with which we can process difficult feelings. In another article, Savin-Baden and Burden (2019) review common ways in which people are already digitally memorialized, and outline their own development efforts to create a thanabot system that continues to learn so that, put crassly, the deceased stays relevant.…”