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Entr’acte. Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture

In April, 2016, the ‘Design & The City’ Conference proposed to explore: ‘citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city, addressing how social media, big data and other digital technologies may contribute to more sustainable, liveable and sociable urban communities. Specific focus of the conference is on the expanding role of designers as initiators, innovators, campaigners, connectors, organizers, critics and imagineers of alternative urban futures.’ Organised by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences at the Knowledge Mile Amsterdam—a ‘living lab’ at the centre of the city —the Conference invited ‘proposals from designers, activists, researchers, media labs, and others... in a productive discussion [to] connect urban spaces to design, research, education, art, playfulness and activism’. Prescient, then, this new publication from the Avant-gardes in Performance book series. Entr’acte, edited by Jordan Geiger, proposes the figure of the ‘interval’ as an interstitial field of encounter in which different disciplines and practices infect and inflect each other to produce new insights, critical perspectives and original propositions for civic engagement. Mobilised through new digital technologies, these practices stand to contest, disrupt or reframe normative conditions of socio-spatial production, or, as the series editors write, ‘renovate our conception of space and time as performances altered through computational technologies’. As a transactional field, this interval, or entr’acte, constitutes a ‘model public space... for imagining a broad range of public formations’. [pages xi, 1] The model citizen of this entr’acte is the entracteur: ‘imagineer’ and entrepreneur of a novel urbanism. ‘We are, it seems, perpetually invested in the new’, write the editors for the series which includes this book: opening this survey that maps the interstices between digital technologies, architecture and performance studies. The collection of essays looks at avant-garde, experimental, innovative and politically radical performances that exploit contemporary forms of trans-disciplinarity enabled by digital media in order to recast the agencies and affordances of civic engagement and urban space. Unsurprisingly, theatrical metaphors abound: miseen-scène, entr’acte, interval, scenography, actor, spectator, audience, stage, proscenium, scripted and unscripted events. Whilst theatrical models of audience engagement—such as the Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal’s ‘collaborative spectatorship’—are prioritised and well instantiated throughout the book, their theoretical implications are not always made explicit. What eventuates when architecture is read in terms of theatron, of skenographia? What do we make of consequent slippages between author, actor and audience; between street, foyer, hall, stage, backstage and front of house; between script, scenario, action and spectatorship; between ‘private’ and ‘public’? 474