This weekend, Wirtz Center Chicago transformed into an immersive laboratory where theater and technology converged in a series of immersive digital art installations.
The three-day “Finding New Forms: Technology and Live Performance” symposium invited artists, academics and audiences to rethink how digital tools — virtual and augmented reality, AI and projection mapping — can expand live storytelling.
Communication Assistant Dean and Executive Artistic Director Tanya Palmer and American playwright-director Seth Bockley co-curated the event, which combined open gallery pieces with conversation panels from artists working at the frontier of mixed-reality art.
Palmer said the symposium grew out of cross-disciplinary conversations among colleagues in the School of Communication. For Bockley, the event’s central theme was equally collaborative.
“It’s designed as a meeting place … bringing together thinkers and makers who are interested in how performance and technology are affecting one another in fields of theater, gaming, art (and) installation,” Bockley said.
Bockley said the symposium explored questions of how new technologies inform performance practices and how theater artists feel challenged or empowered by them.
Across the Wirtz Center’s multi-floored galleries, visitors encountered a range of works. “Particle Ink” by Jo Cattell revealed a hidden realm that surrounds the viewer in a projection mapping augmented reality. “Virtual Parkway Forest Park” by Toaster Lab exhibited a web app gallery of a community space.
In “My Data Body,” a collaboration between sound artist Stephan Moore and Canadian artist Marilène Oliver, participants wore a virtual reality headset and used controls to interact in a digital body built from Oliver’s MRI scans, social media, biometric, banking and health data, with passwords flowing through arteries and Google data composing the muscle.
Suspended in midair within the virtual space, participants heard a cacophony of human and mechanical sounds as they dissected the digital corpus.
“In addition to our physical bodies, we have this world of data that kind of flows around, follows us around through our internet lives. And I think that the brilliance of this piece is that it tries to make that more tangible,” Moore said.
“Sweet Dreams: Delicious Lies Within,” which is by the London-based collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, transformed a gallery room into the fictional Real Good Chicken Company, where a cheerful mascot named Chicky Ricky presides over golden sculptures and nostalgic paintings. The atmosphere was playful and sugary yet unsettling, as it was a satirical take on how advertising manufactures appetite while concealing disturbing aspects of consumption.
Participants sat in beanbag chairs before a floor-to-ceiling projection as they followed Chicky Ricky into a journey through trypophobia-inducing bread and grotesquely surreal mukbang imagery.
Nearby, Özge Samanci’s “You Are the Ocean” invited participants to control a simulated seascape with their own brainwaves tracked from an EEG headset. Through concentration and relaxation, the subject could control the water, sky and weather conditions. The piece acted as a reminder that humanity’s existence and ways of thinking directly shape the interconnected planet.
For Bockley, such pieces exemplify theater’s instinct to experiment.
“We’re sort of eternally curious, kind of like Magpie artists,” Bockley said. “Early adopters of technologies of all kinds, including lighting (and) architectural practices … (gather) all the shiny objects to make our nests.”
Finally, Ian Garrett’s “AI Campfire” used artificial intelligence to reimagine Scottish storytelling through the voice of an AI narrator, Symbiolene, to channel stories of Selkies, Kelpies and other shapeshifting spirits rooted in Scottish culture.
Garrett, who directs Toronto’s Toasterlab collective, said his work is about building relationships with AI rather than resisting it.
Both organizers and artists also acknowledged the tensions that come with these tools in terms of their cost and accessibility, dystopian surveillance, environmental concerns and hidden biases.
Garrett explained that data infrastructure covers specific areas, creating barriers to access. Rural regions and sovereign land outside of jurisdiction often have fewer levels of participation, leaving these communities behind in an increasingly virtual world. Additionally, he noted that AI’s objectivity is a myth.
“People think that it’s neutral, but it is biased by its creators and its training,” Garrett said.
Bockley also reminded viewers that there is a delineation between human creativity and AI output. He said that artwork is about expression — a computer thinking in response to a question, no matter how much thinking is happening, it’s not part of an exchange with an audience in an authentic way.
Ultimately, “Finding New Forms” truly found fresh forms. Photographer Justin Barbin (Communication ’11) said he was struck by the engagement of the pieces.
“You’re not just a bystander in the art that surrounds you, but you’re actively engaged in what’s happening,” Barbin said. “It’s what the next step in art looks like.”
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