Interactive Media and the Construction of Dramatic Narrative: becoming and identity in contemporary American drama, Rhona Justic-Malloy (P.74-78)

• P.75 States (1985) explain that when we experience a performance the actors and audience are transported to somewhere else than we usually tend to be. This somewhere else is not a sacial elsewhere -we remain in the auditorium or on the stage. We are elsewhere in the sense that what is before us offers a different kind of here than we usually tend to be in. Like cyberspace the theatre is a place of disclosure, of event and energy. And what is disclosed in such events cannot be found elsewhere because it does not exist outside of the encounter. [States, B.O. 1985. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: O the Phenomenology of Theatre. California: University of California Press.]

• P.77 As Vogel describes it, 'You remember the play differently in the middle than you do in the beginning or at the end, and of course you remember the play differently the morning after' (1997). Vogel's play achieves rescisely what Ascott describes as the function of digital media when it involves 'human intelligence in a non-linear emergence, construction and transformation' (1998).[Vogel,P.1997 [Interview with Steven Drukman]. The Dramatist Guild Quarterly.] [Ascott. R. 1998. Mass '98 Keynote: Strategies of Media Art. L.E.A., 7 http://mitpress. mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/sample/masskey.html]

• P.77 It must be remembered that theatre is the one place where society collects in order to look in upon itself publicly. The theatre is teh place where we gather to confirm or reject a given civic interlligence. As Vogel recognizes, 'There is a point in time where the playwright and culture meet, and that is called "mainstream"' (1997). The fact that these plays in particular have received national recognition means that the enthymeme of the cyberworld is no longer virtual. It is real and it will be with us for a long time.

Rhona Justic-Malloy (2000) "Interactive Media and the Construction of Dramatic Narrative: becoming and identity in contemporary American drama"Art, Technology, Consciousness: mind@large, Ed. Roy Ascott. Exeter: Intellect Ltd.