The Covid-19 pandemic has forced theatre-makers to produce work online. In distinction from streaming live and recorded shows, theatre and performance produced for the internet represents a new frontier for artists.

Shows such as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All frame the grid of screens on Zoom as a collage of encounters between six connected yet distant bodies, each one inhabiting a reality that never fully converges into a communal experience, whilst Dead Centre’s To Be A Machine turns the audience into data subjects by having them present as recorded video footage and as viewers watching the performance as a live stream on Vimeo. Other examples of internet theatre include Gob Squad’s Show Me A Good Time, New Diorama and Nathan Ellis’s work_txt_home, Coney’s Telephone, and Dante Or Die’s USER NOT FOUND.

This webinar has been organised to begin developing new discourses of ‘the digital’ beyond questions of liveness and ephemerality to explore how the internet has become a performance medium in its own right. The panel will explore ideas relating to the spectator as a data subject, digital intimacy, and writing plays and devising shows for performance in cyberspace with reference to pieces produced during the lockdown.

DocPerform is an interdisciplinary project based in the Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London. DocPerform investigates new and emerging documentation technologies used in the performing arts, the performativity of digital information, and concepts of theatricality and unreality as they relate to the contemporary information environment.