Digital Landscapes

Theatre that incorporates other media into its performance space is as old as Greek tragedy. The integration of word, music, image and gesture in one frame presupposes theatre as the intermedial art practice par excellence. That is at least the basic argument of the Theatre and Intermediality Research Working Group, substantiated in their first publication (Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006). Theatre, in Kattenbelt's formulation, has a distinctive capacity to be a ‘hypermedium’ that is able to ‘stage’ other mediums (ibid. 37). As the ‘stage of intermediality’, theatre mutates media into mixed forms that both thematize and question the role of media in our contemporary mediatized culture (ibid. 38). However, the mutating paradigm of the present issue of Theater Topics works in two directions and can be understood as the mutual interference and contamination of different media into ‘new’ or hybrid forms that are hard to categorize. In a text on hybrid art, Elke Van Campenhout, a Belgium-based freelance dramaturge and researcher, distinguishes ‘mutants’ and ‘monsters’ as two variations of a contemporary artistic practice operating in the grey zone between performance and visual arts, between science and the gallery. ‘Mutants’ are types of work that abandon their disciplinary frames, but at the same time (and by doing this) they inquire, question and reinforce the existing disciplines. The second category she characterizes as ‘monsters’: artworks as a hotchpotch of elements that by no means refer to a particular discipline or identity (Van Campenhout 2008).

The versatile artistic practice of Kurt d’Haeseleer (1974) exemplifies the difficulty, even the impossibility, of cataloguing this kind of hybrid work into one particular discipline, resulting in both mutants and monsters. With a background as a video artist, d’Haeseleer designs visual machineries by combining elements of painting, video clips, cinema, performance and installation art. After his studies at Sint-Lukas (Brussels), he was invited by Peter Missotten to join the collective De Filmfabriek. Recently this collective mutated into DE WERKTANK, a factory for new and old media art, which is coordinated by d’Haeseleer and Ief Spincemaille.