Call for Papers Special Issue: Technologies in Performance: Acting Amongst Algorithms
| Type of post: | Association news item |
| Sub-type: | No sub-type |
| Posted By: | Abbie Trott |
| Status: | Current |
| Date Posted: | Tue, 3 Mar 2026 |
Australasian Drama Studies
Call for Papers
Special Issue: Technologies in Performance: Acting Amongst Algorithms
Edited by Robert Ellis Walton and Abbie Victoria Trott
Special Issue: Technologies in Performance: Acting Amongst Algorithms
Edited by Robert Ellis Walton and Abbie Victoria Trott
Proposals due Monday 30 March 2026
In 2014, Australasian Drama Studies published a special issue examining digital performance futures in Australasia. A decade later, the terrain demands renewed attention. Generative AI has erupted into creative discourse. Virtual and augmented realities have matured from novelty to a legitimate aesthetic medium. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a global experiment in telematic and networked performance, pushing practices that had occupied experimental margins into mainstream necessity. Meanwhile, algorithmic systems have become ambient infrastructure, coordinating human attention, labour, and increasingly, creative practice itself.
This special issue takes as its departure point the proposition that technologies and performance share what Chris Salter termed an “entangled” history (2010: xxxiii), building on Félix Guattari’s “machinic performance” as “an immanent, collective entanglement of material enunciations that operate on, shape, and transform the world in real time.” The preposition matters: technologies in performance positions them not as external tools applied to an autonomous art form, but as co-constitutive of theatrical reality—ensemble members, audiences, dramaturgical forces, participants in events that unfold live, part of the “fabric” of performance. “Acting” carries a productive double meaning: both taking action and performing. “Amongst” captures the ambient, surrounding condition of algorithmic life—we do not simply use algorithms but move within them, as they move within us. As Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer argue in New Media Dramaturgies (2017), digital technologies reshape dramaturgical processes themselves. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s “cyborg theatre” analyses performances where bodies and technologies integrate rather than merely co-exist, where “technology is our dance partner” (2011: xv). Audiences make sense of technologies in performance from their position as being immersed in digital culture, (Trott 2026), where the digital refers to a wider set of sociocultural phenomena that cannot be reduced to computer technology (Chatzichristodoulou 2017: 313). Likewise, computational systems are audience to our performances. Computation, in this framing, is not fixed but itself performed: occurring “in time (at variable frequencies and durations) and space (the dimensions of which expand and contract as the algorithm proceeds),” perpetually renewed rather than merely executed, “never the same twice, but the same enough” (Walton 2025: 152).
Yet recent scholarship has introduced necessary scepticism about the uncritical embrace of technological hype. Ulf Otto warns that frameworks like “digital performance” and “cyborg theatre” risk mimicking “the techno prophesies of Silicon Valley gurus” rather than addressing “what actually is at stake in facing the algorithm... the place of performance in the societies of control” (2019: 134). Echoing this, Doug Eacho argues that “AI-authored performance, when set out uncritically, models and promotes the political ideology that drove so much investment in computational development in the first place” (2021: 342). Sarah Bay-Cheng identifies “theatre’s computational turn” as demanding new critical approaches to algorithmic culture (2022). Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross propose “interface theatre” as work that creates “theatrical microcosms of the processes by which human life gets transformed into data,” allowing spectators to “momentarily assume the perspectives of a surveilling algorithm” (2024: 1–2).This issue seeks contributions that navigate these tensions. When computational systems increasingly mediate human attention, authorship, and labour, how do performance practices respond, resist, or reconfigure these conditions? What forms of agency persist—and what forms emerge—when our movements, words, and thoughts are increasingly coordinated by algorithmic systems? How might performance serve as a laboratory for rehearsing alternative relations with our technological collaborators, coercers, and overseers?
Yet recent scholarship has introduced necessary scepticism about the uncritical embrace of technological hype. Ulf Otto warns that frameworks like “digital performance” and “cyborg theatre” risk mimicking “the techno prophesies of Silicon Valley gurus” rather than addressing “what actually is at stake in facing the algorithm... the place of performance in the societies of control” (2019: 134). Echoing this, Doug Eacho argues that “AI-authored performance, when set out uncritically, models and promotes the political ideology that drove so much investment in computational development in the first place” (2021: 342). Sarah Bay-Cheng identifies “theatre’s computational turn” as demanding new critical approaches to algorithmic culture (2022). Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross propose “interface theatre” as work that creates “theatrical microcosms of the processes by which human life gets transformed into data,” allowing spectators to “momentarily assume the perspectives of a surveilling algorithm” (2024: 1–2).This issue seeks contributions that navigate these tensions. When computational systems increasingly mediate human attention, authorship, and labour, how do performance practices respond, resist, or reconfigure these conditions? What forms of agency persist—and what forms emerge—when our movements, words, and thoughts are increasingly coordinated by algorithmic systems? How might performance serve as a laboratory for rehearsing alternative relations with our technological collaborators, coercers, and overseers?
Scope and Provocations
We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following territories:
Infrastructures of Performance: The most pervasive technologies in performance are often invisible in critical discourse. Lighting systems, sound design, control networks, automation, clicktrack synchronisation—these constitute the computational infrastructure of contemporary theatre. What happens when we theorise them as performative agents rather than transparent support? Where do the people that have historically undertaken these acts of control now fit?
Emerging Technological Actors: AI, robotics, and generative systems as dramaturgical agents. From Oriza Hirata’s android theatre to Alisdair Macindoe’s Plagiary employing AI as “a speaking choreographer and playwright” and Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre, how do non-human performers redistribute creative agency? What does Marc-André Cossette and Salter’s examination of “performing AI” (2024) reveal about labour and complexity on the contemporary stage?
Extended Realities: VR, AR, MR, XR—immersive, locative, and hybrid spaces. Understanding “how the virtual comes to matter” requires attention to the specific modifications of “reality” these technologies produce (Walton 2024). How are practitioners like Jason Maling (Diagrammatica) or David Pledger (2025 AD) creating work that exploits or critiques these realities? What happens when we remember that this technology is “an instrument of creativity” (Pike 2026: 7)?
Pandemic Legacies: The COVID-19 pandemic produced a dramatic surge in telematic and networked performance practice. Digital performance moved from experimental margins to mainstream necessity. What persists? What was lost? What hybrid environments emerge that move beyond “old oppositional dialectics between physical and digital”? (Chatzichristodolou et al 2022: 5).
Labour, Training, Obsolescence: Technological shifts fundamentally reshape professional roles, training pathways, and labour conditions. Who is the generative video designer? The meta-human actor? The systems programmer? The robot wrangler? What expertise becomes “legacy knowledge”? How do institutions prepare students for practices that did not exist five years ago?
Historiography and Archives: How do we document technologically mediated performance when the technology itself becomes obsolete? What persists when interactive systems, proprietary software, and custom hardware disappear? How do we trace genealogies of technological experimentation rather than treating each innovation as unprecedented?
Ethics, Ecology, Political Economy: The critical turn—algorithmic bias, data extraction, environmental cost, surveillance capitalism. How do we develop frameworks attentive to care, justice, and ecological responsibility? What does it mean to attune machines to “the affective atmospheres” of performance (Balkin and Walton 2025)?
Regional Specificities: How do regional contexts—including First Nations protocols around technology, knowledge transmission, and representation—shape technological performance distinctively? How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander understandings of Deep Time change the way we think about networked and computational time in performance? How does the virtuality of bodies in performance, such as Nicola Hyland’s understanding of Tōku Tinana-ā-Mariko: “myself in virtual” or “virtual embodiment” (2025:18) change the way we think about story and the virtual. What does decolonisation mean for thinking about technologies in performance?
Intersectional approaches: How do intersectional lenses fundamentally reframe our understanding of technology’s role in performance? Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism proposes error and malfunction as sites of liberation for Black, queer, and gender non-conforming bodies navigating digital space (2020), while Petra Kuppers’ disability culture work—including her “Planting Disabled Futures” VR/XR project—demonstrates crip methodologies for reimagining technological interfaces (2003; 2011; 2022). How do works like Back to Back Theatre’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) or Vulcana Circus’s Body Shows mobilise technology to address disability, algorithmic bias, and bodied futures? How does Kim Vincs’ VR work Falling Worlds (2025) reimagine the aging body’s performance through normative technologies like motion capture? How do Indigenous protocols around knowledge transmission and digital sovereignty—as articulated by scholars and practitioners including Terri Janke (2007) and Margo Neale (Neale and Kelly 2020)—reshape technological performance in Australasian contexts? Who are the hidden pioneers—particularly First Nations, disabled, and queer practitioners—whose contributions to technologies in performance remain underdocumented in our regional histories?
Representations and Speculations: Theatre has long been a site for imagining technological futures—from Karel Čapek’s coining of “robot” in R.U.R. (1920) to Antonin Artaud’s coining of “virtual reality” in The Theatre and Its Double (1958). How do contemporary performances represent, speculate about, or critically recreate the conditions of our technological present? How might Gemeinboeck and Saunders’ “alloyed bodies” offer “embodied prototyping of human-robot relationships” (2025)?
An Expansive Invitation
We welcome analysis and critique of the full breadth of performance practice: large-scale international touring productions and intimate experimental works; locative and site-responsive performances; dance, circus, opera, and hybrid forms including gaming, mobile computing, head-mounted displays, live art, interactive, and immersive performance. We invite traditional scholarly articles alongside practice-as-research submissions, creative works documentation, artist reflections, and short provocations. In its remit, Australasian Drama Studies focuses on Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Southeast Asia. As such, we welcome perspectives on works made or performed in Australasia, and international works discussed by scholars with a deep connection to Australasia / Oceania.
This issue emerges alongside the newly formed Technologies in Performance Working Group of the Australasian Association of Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA). It represents a timely moment to collectively examine how performance practices are navigating—and might yet transform—our technologically saturated present in our places and practices.
Emerging Technological Actors: AI, robotics, and generative systems as dramaturgical agents. From Oriza Hirata’s android theatre to Alisdair Macindoe’s Plagiary employing AI as “a speaking choreographer and playwright” and Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre, how do non-human performers redistribute creative agency? What does Marc-André Cossette and Salter’s examination of “performing AI” (2024) reveal about labour and complexity on the contemporary stage?
Extended Realities: VR, AR, MR, XR—immersive, locative, and hybrid spaces. Understanding “how the virtual comes to matter” requires attention to the specific modifications of “reality” these technologies produce (Walton 2024). How are practitioners like Jason Maling (Diagrammatica) or David Pledger (2025 AD) creating work that exploits or critiques these realities? What happens when we remember that this technology is “an instrument of creativity” (Pike 2026: 7)?
Pandemic Legacies: The COVID-19 pandemic produced a dramatic surge in telematic and networked performance practice. Digital performance moved from experimental margins to mainstream necessity. What persists? What was lost? What hybrid environments emerge that move beyond “old oppositional dialectics between physical and digital”? (Chatzichristodolou et al 2022: 5).
Labour, Training, Obsolescence: Technological shifts fundamentally reshape professional roles, training pathways, and labour conditions. Who is the generative video designer? The meta-human actor? The systems programmer? The robot wrangler? What expertise becomes “legacy knowledge”? How do institutions prepare students for practices that did not exist five years ago?
Historiography and Archives: How do we document technologically mediated performance when the technology itself becomes obsolete? What persists when interactive systems, proprietary software, and custom hardware disappear? How do we trace genealogies of technological experimentation rather than treating each innovation as unprecedented?
Ethics, Ecology, Political Economy: The critical turn—algorithmic bias, data extraction, environmental cost, surveillance capitalism. How do we develop frameworks attentive to care, justice, and ecological responsibility? What does it mean to attune machines to “the affective atmospheres” of performance (Balkin and Walton 2025)?
Regional Specificities: How do regional contexts—including First Nations protocols around technology, knowledge transmission, and representation—shape technological performance distinctively? How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander understandings of Deep Time change the way we think about networked and computational time in performance? How does the virtuality of bodies in performance, such as Nicola Hyland’s understanding of Tōku Tinana-ā-Mariko: “myself in virtual” or “virtual embodiment” (2025:18) change the way we think about story and the virtual. What does decolonisation mean for thinking about technologies in performance?
Intersectional approaches: How do intersectional lenses fundamentally reframe our understanding of technology’s role in performance? Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism proposes error and malfunction as sites of liberation for Black, queer, and gender non-conforming bodies navigating digital space (2020), while Petra Kuppers’ disability culture work—including her “Planting Disabled Futures” VR/XR project—demonstrates crip methodologies for reimagining technological interfaces (2003; 2011; 2022). How do works like Back to Back Theatre’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) or Vulcana Circus’s Body Shows mobilise technology to address disability, algorithmic bias, and bodied futures? How does Kim Vincs’ VR work Falling Worlds (2025) reimagine the aging body’s performance through normative technologies like motion capture? How do Indigenous protocols around knowledge transmission and digital sovereignty—as articulated by scholars and practitioners including Terri Janke (2007) and Margo Neale (Neale and Kelly 2020)—reshape technological performance in Australasian contexts? Who are the hidden pioneers—particularly First Nations, disabled, and queer practitioners—whose contributions to technologies in performance remain underdocumented in our regional histories?
Representations and Speculations: Theatre has long been a site for imagining technological futures—from Karel Čapek’s coining of “robot” in R.U.R. (1920) to Antonin Artaud’s coining of “virtual reality” in The Theatre and Its Double (1958). How do contemporary performances represent, speculate about, or critically recreate the conditions of our technological present? How might Gemeinboeck and Saunders’ “alloyed bodies” offer “embodied prototyping of human-robot relationships” (2025)?
An Expansive Invitation
We welcome analysis and critique of the full breadth of performance practice: large-scale international touring productions and intimate experimental works; locative and site-responsive performances; dance, circus, opera, and hybrid forms including gaming, mobile computing, head-mounted displays, live art, interactive, and immersive performance. We invite traditional scholarly articles alongside practice-as-research submissions, creative works documentation, artist reflections, and short provocations. In its remit, Australasian Drama Studies focuses on Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Southeast Asia. As such, we welcome perspectives on works made or performed in Australasia, and international works discussed by scholars with a deep connection to Australasia / Oceania.
This issue emerges alongside the newly formed Technologies in Performance Working Group of the Australasian Association of Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA). It represents a timely moment to collectively examine how performance practices are navigating—and might yet transform—our technologically saturated present in our places and practices.
Submission Instructions
Submissions may be in the form of a full draft (including an abstract of 100-150 words) or a detailed proposal (up to 400 words).
Due to limited timeframes and turnover of peer reviews, editorial priority will be given to fully drafted submissions that are well-developed and rigorously considered.
A full draft or substantial example of academic writing is preferred from doctoral candidates, emerging, or previously unpublished researchers.
Proposals should be no more than 400 words, stating the title and author/s (with affiliations), and should give a clear sense of the proposed argument or investigation.
We invite proposals for papers of:
Due to limited timeframes and turnover of peer reviews, editorial priority will be given to fully drafted submissions that are well-developed and rigorously considered.
A full draft or substantial example of academic writing is preferred from doctoral candidates, emerging, or previously unpublished researchers.
Proposals should be no more than 400 words, stating the title and author/s (with affiliations), and should give a clear sense of the proposed argument or investigation.
We invite proposals for papers of:
- maximum 6,000 words.
Or:
- short provocations or reflections of maximum 1,500 words.
- a review of a live performance work in our region of maximum 1,500 words.
Please also submit a brief biography (50 words max) and set of up to five key words.
Please note that the journal is published online, so we welcome the integration of rich digital format such as images, video footage, sound files etc. Please also note that all submissions must adhere to the journal style guide here.
Timeline
- Proposals due Monday 30 March 2026
- Notification of acceptance beginning 13 April 2026
- Drafts due 22 June 2026
- Peer Review July/August
- Final draft end September 2026
- Copy edit/design through early October 2026
- Publish by mid-late October 2026
Works Referenced
Balkin, Sarah and Robert Walton. “Can AI read the room?: Attuning machines to the affective atmospheres of stand-up comedy performance.” Comedy Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2025, p. 314–332.
Chatzichristodoulou, Maria. “Introduction to Encountering the Digital in Performance: Deployment | Engagement | Trace.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 2017, pp. 311-323.
Chatzichristodoulou, Maria, Kevin Brown, Nick Hunt, Peter Kuling and Toni Sant. “Covid-19: theatre goes digital – provocations.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 18, no. 1, 2022, p. 1–6.
Cossette, Marc-André and Chris Salter. “Performing AI: Labor and Complexity on the Contemporary Stage.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 68 no. 1, 2024, p. 70-86.
Eacho, Doug. 2021. “Scripting control: Computer choreography and Neoliberal Performance.” Theatre Journal, vol. 73, no. 3, 2021, p. 339-357.
Eckersall, Peter, Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer. New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New-Materialism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Felton-Dansky, Miriam and Jacob Gallagher-Ross. “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear.” Modern Drama, vol. 67 no. 1, 2024, p. 1-24.
Gemeinboeck, Petra and Rob Saunders. “The Performance of Creative Machines.” 2016.
Hyland, Nicola. “Say Your Right Words: The Extrasensory Experiences of Māori Storytelling and ‘Re-storying’ Contemporary Performance Methodologies.” Performance Paradigm, vol. 20, 2025.
Otto, Ulf, 2019. Theatres of Control: The Performance of Algorithms and the Question of Governance. The MIT Press.
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Pike, Shane. AI, AR, and VR in Theatre and Performance: Technology in the Present and Future of Live Creative Arts. Routledge, 2026.
Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, The MIT Press, 2010.
Trott, Abbie Victoria. “‘Being with’: Audiences Making Sense of the Posthuman in Postdigital Performance.” In Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance, edited by Stefano Boselli and Sarah Lucie, Routledge, forthcoming 2026.
Walton, Robert Ellis. “Computer Science and Performance: A Reintrodiction” The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science, Routledge, 2025.
Walton, Robert Ellis. “Modifications of R: how the virtual comes to matter in VR, XR and MR art and performance.” Continuum 38 (6): 797–816. 2024.
