Page 194 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet194models; the Process Lab, a lab room devoted to practical experimentation with design thinking and design solving methods; and the Pen, created in the early months of 2015, that makes it possible to store each visitor’s whole visit and experience on a unique web address so that it can be kept, shared and worked on.This is also a rapidly evolving world that is attempting to harness the full potential of technology to create a relationship and rapport between people and artworks. It is only a question of time and budget: but museums will become places where the distance between people and works will be considered a very negative boundary.TheatreThere is also a space for theatre where, among other things, specific marketplaces have been designed, such as the Digital Theatre.50In parallel with the development and spreadof the Internet, a type of playwriting has been developed that takes into account new languages and the impact of the Internet on personal relationships. Whereas the cinema has exten- sively explored the near future of an increasingly connected and technology-dependent mankind – even telling the love story between a man and an operating system in Spike Jonze’s Her – the theatre has analysed much more our “darkside” that resides in the Internet, almost to the point of considering it the parallel world where we harbour our obsessions, our anxieties, but also our criminal instincts under the guise of anonymity.It is impossible to provide a complete surveyin this article. We will merely point out the existence of an active theatre art that is exploring tricky issues such as the pornography, paedophilia and cyberbullying that are foundin chatrooms: The Sugar Syndrome,51 by Lucy Prebble (2003); Chatroom,52 by Enda Walsh (2005), the basis for Hideo Nakata’s film with the same name made in 2010; and The Nether53 – which, among other things, is the name of a parallel dimension similar to hell in the popular game Minecraft – by Dominic Cavendish (2014). But there are also those which use a comedy format to speak of complex worldsof existential anguish such as the Hikikomori syndrome, that is, people who go into isolation and withdraw from social life: Rooms 2.0,54 by Lisa Moras (2014).The theatre analyses the dark side that resides in the Internet as a parallel world where we harbour obsessions, anxieties and criminal instincts under the guise of anonymity.In all these cases, the most interesting quest consists in introducing the language of the Internet into the theatre. An even more extreme and cutting-edge example is the Internet Theatre:55 a Lebanese actor and script- writer, Lucien Bourjelly, in collaboration with Elastic Future, an experimental theatre of San Francisco, has staged Peek A Boo,56 a comedy in which five actors in New York, London and Beirut, after preparing and defining a script, improvise a dialogue by interacting on video through streaming. The audience, scattered allThe digital age is transforming storytelling