Theatre Symptoms (Practices)—Between Avant-Garde and VR/AI

Dear Colleagues,

Where the avant-garde addressed the future in the present, what can we learn about (or, indeed, from) its past in the time of virtual reality/ generative AI? What echoes of that (past) future remain theatrically present? Regarding the past century, Alain Badiou observed: “More or less the whole of C20th art has laid claim to an avant-garde function. Yet today [i.e. at the beginning of the C21st], the term is viewed as obsolete or even derogatory. This suggests we are in the presence of a major symptom.” (2007 [2005]:132) How might we understand this symptom today, as it transforms erstwhile claims of and for the “post-modern”? Indeed, even as its advocates adhere strenuously to the modernist paradigm of the “new”, is VR—and perhaps AI more widely—another symptom of that “amodernism” previously diagnosed by Bruno Latour (Latour 1993 [1991]: 47)?

Beyond “the” avant-garde—or, indeed, “the” neo-avant-garde (as, for instance, with Michael Kirby’s “new theatre” [1974])—are there motives that remain, perhaps symptomatically, “avant-garde” in theatre practices today? Might this even be identifiable with (or through) VR/ AI (Manovich, 1999, 2018)? Or does the latter effect an erasure of the cultural particularities of which the “avant garde” is (or was) a memory? In what respect can the uses of VR and AI (at least, in theatre) still be thought of as “transgressive”? Do they constitute a “new frontier” or a “last gasp” in appeals to a “progressive” cultural politics?

With the avant-garde conviction of “in art as in politics”—each field of practice motivating meaning in the other—how do claims of and for the “revolutionary” sound in any contemporary sense of theatre? How might the cautionary tale of “the dark forest of the internet” (Konior, 2026) shift our understanding of “actors” in theatrical symptoms of the virtual? How, for example, might Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018) resignify the masks of “identity” at play in virtual performance as much as in staged drama? 

Both “avant-garde” and “AI” are historically periodising terms (Osborne, 1995), where theatre is a technology for producing signs—the diverse practices of which (from machines to audiences, actions to avatars, authors to algorithms) are being constantly reconceived. One could say, then, that the very title of this Special Issue is a “sign of the times” theatrically, in which each term becomes symptomatically questionable through its relations to the others.

Regarding Badiou’s reading of the diverse classical avant-garde “isms” (from Dadaism to Suprematism, Futurism to Situationism), what remains now of what he identified as “the passion for the real”? (2007 [2005]: 131) How might “the return of the real” (1996), in Hal Foster’s exploration of art practices at the end of the last century, remain significant in a time of GenAI applications in creative work?

Although the “new” may prove reactionary as much as revolutionary—if, indeed, there is still any meaning in the appeal of and to the “revolutionary”—how does a critical framing of the “contemporary” render theatre practices significant beyond simply their own historically (and technically) particular semiotics? What is at stake theatrically in the culturally periodising sense of both the avant-garde and the age of GenAI for conceiving relations between the virtual and reality?

The question of “what remains?”—eloquently explored, for example, in performance practices by Rebecca Schneider (2011)—is addressed in Georgi Gospodinov’s satire of European cultural politics in Time Shelter, with its appeal of and to a “clinic of the past”. How might theatre offer a laboratory (a favoured term of the avant-garde) for such cultural symptoms (or, indeed, those addressed in the clinical reflections of Douwe Draaisma [2013])?

Is there, perhaps, an avant-gardist nostalgia in some theatre making (in the site-specific, perhaps?) as a symptomatic reaction to the claims of VR and AI? How does the idea of a “stage” return in the diversity of screen-based (or “screen inter-facing”) action? What happens to metaphors of human agency through “puppetry”, for instance, in the appeal of and to VR? How might the one appear as a form of anachronism in the other? But then is not “avant-garde” the epitome of anachronism—reframing its own time as if outside of, or beyond, it?

What happens to the “avant-garde” in times of an “algorithmic imaginary” (Bucher, 2017)? Or in times of an “intention economy” superseding an “attention economy” (Chaudhary and Penn, 2024)? Opposed to— even as often co-opted by—the culture industry (as well as being opposed to kitsch), what theatrical meaning is left to the idea of “avant-garde” in the present(ism) of AI?

As already noted with Badiou, the future that the avant-garde once celebrated seems very much in and of the past. Although the appeal to “experiment” and to “innovate” —not so much descriptive verbs as artistic imperatives—still resonates, the transvaluation of what is “original” from the culture of tradition into that of “originality” seems to be erased by GenAI. The “new”—and its “shock”—is not what it was. In an age of “participation” through pre-formatted “options”, applied in drop-down menus (or disseminated in the form of “likes”), what remains of the “new” in theatre? Are these “options” just another instance of the technological reproducibility of a practice; or do they manifest possibilities that could be conceptually (or, indeed, symptomatically) “new”?

Always open to experiment with “new media” (over and beyond the technologies associated with the avant-garde), theatre is also one of the longest lasting of the “legacy media”—its own (“multi-media”) technology remains effective despite belonging to a “past” supposedly “overtaken” by alternatives, especially in the digital idiom of the “virtual”. But how might we engage with these technologies in both their periodising semiotics and ethical implications if we understand them as ecologies (Lavery, 2026) —in the understanding of both practices and (or as) symptoms?

Fundamentally, how is the technology of theatre—itself a poetics of the virtual—re-conceived between the motives of avant-garde and AI? What becomes of its historical understanding in the age of AI when no longer that of the avant-garde? How does an appeal of and to the “cutting edge” sound today? From Adolph Appia to Annie Dorsen, what becomes symptomatically questionable (and how?) between avant-garde and VR/AI in and for theatre today? How creative can “destruction” still be in cultural production, where the hype of AI claims that its possibilities are defining of its actualities, as if the future was already present? What becomes of theatre if the promise of cultural–political transformation is simply an extension of the present, through technologies that empty out the creative thought of futures, as limit cases (“symptoms”) of the present?

This Special Issue welcomes critical examples and reflections from many different practices—whether from artists, scholars, activists, or theatre makers. Contributions could address suggestions in the outline or propose alternative approaches, introducing theoretical reflection, practice-based work, analysis of case studies, or speculative considerations. 

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–400 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor (m.twitchin@gold.ac.uk) or to /Arts/ editorial office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

List of references:

Badiou, Alain. 2007. Our Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity. 

Bucher, Tania. 2017. “The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” In Information, Communication & Society, 20:1, 30-44.

Chaudhary, Yaqub and Penn, Jonnie. 2024. “Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models.” In Special Issue 5, “Grappling with the Generative AI Revolution”, Harvard Data Science Review.

Cuboniks, Laboria. 2018. The Xenofeminist Manifesto. London: Verso.

Draaisma, Douwe. 2013. The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Forgetting. Trans. Liz Waters. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real – the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

Gospodinov, Georgi. 2022. Time Shelter. Trans. Angela Rodell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Kirby, Michael. 1974. The New Theatre: Performance Documentation. New York: New York University Press.

Konior, Bognar. 2026. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Cambridge: Polity. 

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Lavery, Carl. 2026. An Idea for a Theatre Ecology: Methods, theories, histories, and practices. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Manovich, Lev. 1999. “Avant-Garde as Software”. In All Articles, 1992-2007, Lev Manovich - Lev Manovich: all articles 1991-2007 [accessed 11.5.26].

Manovich, Lev. 2018. AI Aesthetics. Moscow: Strelka Press.

Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge.

Dr. Mischa Twitchin
Guest Editor

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• theatre
• avant-garde
• virtual reality
• GenAI
• performance