CfP Theatrum Machinarium
guest editors Yerevand Margaryan and Lucien von Schomberg
Deadline: October 5 for issue 7:4 of Technology and Language (December 2026)
The technologies of the theatre begin with the buildings themselves and how they organize the spectators' orientation towards a performance. They go on with curtains and fly-systems, lighting and sound, with make-up and video projection, with fabrics and props. All of these disclose a space for action of a certain type, they organize perception and the creation of meaning. Theatre, in this sense, does not just operate with technologies but functions as a technology of its own. And so, role-playing is a theatrical technique as are reenactments — and then there is dramaturgy itself and the mechanisms it proposes for the proper incitement of passion. It offers prototypes of relentless machinery that takes the audience to heights and depths of feeling, yet it also proposes counter-strategies to subvert stereotyped plot-lines and cliched emotions.
All of this provides the background to fundamental questions about theatrical technologies. For a long time, the theatre was contrasted to the cinema and the staged drama to a movie. Nowadays, we need to also consider performance art as well as the many types of generative storytelling. We are therefore looking to discuss
- theatrical structures for controlling attention and emotion
- the stage as a site for excess and failure, of technology breaking down
- «deus ex machina» and theatrical devices for revealing truth
- technical affordances of subjectivity and agency
- the varieties of spectatorship between absorption and theatricality
- theatrum machinarium — temporal and spatial organization of experience
- dramaturgy and norms for the composition of theatrical elements
- text and props as generative material
This range of topics highlights the theatre as a laboratory in which narrative devices are developed, critiqued, and refined. Experimentally it produces social constellations that refract the social world in highly idiosyncratic ways. Its controlled experiments are observed for their uncertain outcomes, allowing the audience to witness a spontaneous recreation night after night.
We are inviting papers from dramaturgy and cultural studies, philosophy and history of technology, literary theory and media studies, STS and design theory. Transdisciplinary reflections are welcome, as is the appreciation of literary devices, or empirical participant-observation of theatrical experiments. Inquiries, abstracts, or manuscripts can be addressed to soctech@spbstu.ru or nordmann@phil.tu-darmstadt.de.
