Jesurun's Digitalist Firefall

Recent technological developments have led to what the American filmmaker-turnedtheatre practitioner John Jesurun once called a ‘troubled tension’ between an overall sense of greater efficiency and the confusion caused by their sophistication (Gholson 1985: 91). With his main theme of exploring the rampant technologization and its effects on our communicative consciousness, this artist himself refuses to tell unambiguous stories with clear beginnings, middles and ends, rather directing his spectators’ gaze towards the untold stories of the ‘inbetween’. After all, communication divides as much as it unites, and accordingly one could argue that ‘significant’ cultural shifts like the rise and fall of communicative ‘new media’ should be interpreted at the level of mediated consciousness in order to prove relevant beyond the statistically verifiable. At the root of this reasoning lies cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s observation that every concept we have is ‘nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies’ (Hofstadter 2001: 507). In effect, such a claim would imply that the human mind is biologically equipped to deal with the contingencies of a shifting context. Information and computing systems, on the other hand – despite their greater processual effectiveness – are far less capable of interpreting unscripted input. Moreover, generating an analogy does not require any specific expertise, but only a context that highlights structural relations (Dunbar 2001: 330). A uniquely well-suited referential framework to study these mechanisms, then, is provided by the performing arts on behalf of the performer’s functioning as a communicative vessel mediating between convention (text/ script), context (performative space) and invention (creation/interpretation). Take, for example, ‘theatre/movie installations’, ‘telematic theatre’ and, most recently, with Firefall (Phase 1, 2006; Phase 2, 2009),‘webbased theatre’: All of these hybrid constellations reject ‘traditional’ medial distinctions in their joint pursuit of a heightened media awareness by dramatizing what could be termed a ‘battle of perception’. On top of that, any stage production by its very nature is simultaneously present and absent, recognizable and elusive, transparent and opaque. In the ‘mediatized’ environment of John Jesurun’s 1986-production Deep Sleep, for example, the character Smith warns us that we all ‘have to realize that [we are] chained into that machine’ (Jesurun 1986: 268, my emphasis). Indeed, with its capacity for incorporating a virtually limitless number of perspectives, signifiers and signifying systems in a temporally and spatially ritualized event whereby performers and spectators are physically present at the same time in the same place, the theatre, even in its most ‘traditional’ format, can be regarded as a hypermedium that iconizes an elusive content. Jesurun’s media-saturated compositions thereby mark a particular case in point, as they all integrate video projections, mainstream filmic montage techniques and narrative strategies from different genres in a stage performance, and thereby upset any sense of linear logic. Simultaneously accessible and confusing, Jesurun’s self-styled ‘pieces in spaces’ in this way