Affective Encounters: A Study of Immersive Performance and Digital Culture

Abstract

This thesis presents a study of immersive performance and digital culture. As a whole, the thesis considers the aesthetic experience offered by a certain strand of contemporary immersive theatre which I have identified and termed 'sensory spectacle performance' and investigates it within the present context of digital culture. Sensory spectacle performance (SSP) establishes an affective encounter between the performance and the spectator as its primary immersive force. It is an experiential, affective, and immersive mode of performance. It is not concerned with imparting meaning or a linear narrative. SSP is focused on the felt experience and the physical resonance from the performance that is left with the body of the spectator. Rather than placing a spectator-immersant at the centre of a fictional environment to achieve its immersive intention, as many other strands of immersive theatre do, SSP instead deploys techniques of process, presence, relation, sensation, and affect as a way to deliver its immersive experience. The thesis relates SSP and affective encounter to digital culture by emphasising the binding and dynamic relationship that exists between our bodies and our surroundings; each must continually adapt to the other in order to thrive. A case is made that as digital culture continues to engage the population, so too will it affect perception, bodies, and language requiring society to adapt to the affective rhythm of a mediatised, technology-driven environment. It is therefore the argument of the thesis that SSP engages with digital culture by employing primarily extra-discursive, asignifying communication channels to impact the spectating body affectively rather than conceptually through a highly structured narrative, at the same time imitating and challenging the immersive strategies used by new communication technologies