In recent years, due mainly to technological and digital advancement, there has been a revolution in representational practices that is pushing towards the merging of different media into one another. Nowadays, one can watch TV shows on the internet, enact movie characters in 3D game environments and even enjoy an opera performance from another continent in the movie theatre via live internet streaming technology.

The introduction of new media in the theatre is in itself nothing new – it happened during the historical avant-garde (e.g. Erwin Piscator's experiments with documentary footage or the futurist multimedia happenings), in the 1960s with mixed-media performances and since the 1990s with experiments to connect the digital to the theatrical (Dixon 2007: 87). This evolution has been the direct cause of hybrid forms of theatre and performance that combine many different artistic disciplines, media and visual codes.

In this regard, I would like to propose the baroque as a productive interpretative tool to approach this multimedia richness. The current neo-baroque discourse and vocabulary focus mainly on general formal analogies between seventeenth-century representational practices and contemporary visual culture, favouring concepts like seriality, polycentrism, eclecticism, instability, virtuosity and illusionism. A fundamental critique on this account of the baroque is that the detected analogies of forms do not pay respect to the diverse cultural and artistic manifestations of the baroque throughout Europe, with outreaches from Italy (Caravaggio and Bernini) and Spain (Velázquez) to the Northern and Southern Netherlands (Jan Vermeer and Peter Paul Rubens, respectively). In this respect, the baroque has been imbued with a remarkable undefinability and unlocalizability, illustrated by Gilles Deleuze's notion of the baroque as a pure concept that exists through no other means than its expression. Therefore, ‘it is easy to render the Baroque non-existent; one only has to stop proposing its concept’ (Deleuze 1993: 33).

One could even extend this critique by asking why historicizing contemporary art through the baroque can be helpful, as it involves old theories that at first glance do not seem to be relevant to analysing the contemporary revolution in representational practices.