The Digital Enchantment of Drottningholm

How can we relate to a historical playing culture? In this essay, a counter-factual visit to thepalaces and parks of Drottningholm outside Stockholm is presented. By means of digitaltechnologies, this World Heritage Site could be animated with historical figures from theeighteenth century, thus giving a living picture of past playing. Even though such an encounterwith the past is fully possible from a technical point of view, the realization of this projectposes a number of practical and theoretical questions: How can the picture ofeighteenth-century court life be broadened to include social perspectives of class, gender andethnicity? What artistic decisions have to be taken to visualize the activities around the parkand in the palace? What forms of interactions provided by the technology are suitable forvarious groups of visitors? Some answers to these questions are hinted at in this essay, but thegeneral question of a poetics of playing remains in the abyss between the historical period andthe contemporary access to it. Neither Friedrich von Schiller's treatise on the aestheticeducation of man nor Emanuel Kant's rational view of judgment bridge the gap of historicaldistance. Could Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of the melting of historical horizons ever becomea reality in the experiences of future visitors? Eventually, this project might only provide somepleasures of a poetry of playing

The Magic of Presence: Moments, Memories, Methods

Every habitual visitor remembers some magic moments of theatrical events: a striking feeling of immediate presence. What are these experiences of presence about? What triggers them, under which circumstances do they take place? This text is an attempt to point out some decisive parameters that facilitate strong experiences of performative situations. On the basis of a new rhombic model, I will show how these parameters coordinate the senses of the beholder and create magic moments of presence. Then, presence remains as future memories of the past

Deconstructing Turning Points. A postscript on the canonization of the avant-garde 1900

Deconstructing Turning Points is an attempt to understand why and how the period around the turn of the nineteenth century has been described as a “breakthrough of modern theatre”. Texts by Gösta M. Bergman, Christopher Innes and Erika Fischer-Lichte about this period are examined in order to see how these authors construct periodization. Leaning towards Thomas Postlewait’s concept of periods and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive approach to discourse, the article points out some paradigmatic assumptions in the discussed texts. The three authors are not compared – writing in different languages and for different purposes – but some of the underlying paradigms become visible, namely their relation to historical development and their view of theatre as the work of the director. As an alternative, the article turns to archival possibilities. New concepts of what an archive is and can do, as Derrida sees them, open up for a living and challenging relation to archival sources, not just as evidence of prefabricated hypotheses, but as inspiring traces of the past

Antigone’s Diary – Young Audiences as Co-creators of GPS-guided Radio Drama

The play, Antigone’s Diary, is a re-written version of Sophocles’ classical play, developed with teenage schoolchildren in the riot-ridden suburb Husby, a 30-minute subway ride away from the centre of Stockholm. Rebecca Forsberg of RATS Theatre adapted the plot into an interactive radio performance with a mobile audience, walking through the suburb and responding via text messages to Antigone’s questions after each of the twelve scenes. Young audiences were of especial interest for this project. Therefore, school performances for teenagers are the focus of this survey. The responses of pupils were studied during and after performances by means of observations, qualitative interviews and quantitative analysis of the text messages that the participants sent in response to Antigone’s questions. The seriousness and enthusiasm of young audiences were one of the stunning outcomes of this survey and a number of quotations illustrate the immersive power of this production. Furthermore, this experiment also served as a test bed for the Department of Computer and System Science, to which Rats Theatre is closely tied. The multimedia performance, combining radio drama, mobile audiences in a local environment and the options of interactive participation, demonstrated the potential of participatory experiences to engage audiences in democratic processes that can be applied to issues of political interest and decision making in the public sphere

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.