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SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE o> NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’ DWYER, AND ENDA BATES ABSTRACT This essay discusses recent practice-as-research from Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for Beckett Studies, where new media and new theatre technologies are being used to investigate how Samuel Beckett’s work is altering, and being altered by, digital culture. The three collaborators who created the 2017 project Intermedial Play, a version of Samuel Beckett’s 1963 Play that used a Pan-TiltZoom (PTZ) robotic camera instead of the “interrogator” light of Beckett’s script, write here about the directorial, scenographic/videographic, and sonic worlds of this performance, including how it led toward the later Virtual Play (about which more has been published to date). The electronic transmission of this performance, for surveillance by an audience in a different room, raises conceptual questions of simultaneity and “live risk” that are generally absent from digital and film adaptations. The possibility that technology itself can condition and influence performance emerges from this discourse as a key area for further exploration.’ Samuel Beckett’s 1963 Play clearly responds to the condition of the medium of theatre, but what “theatre” means has continued to change since 1963: how does this cultural shift alter how we work with, or think about, Beckett’s own text over time? This chapter explores the 2017 Intermedial Play/Virtual Play practice-as-research project at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), which is partly an exploration of how the Beckett text responds to new media within ! "This publication is a single work of co-equal three-person authorship, arising from the collaboration between the V-SENSE project and the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. This publication has emanated from research supported in part by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under the Grant Number 15/RP/2776, as well as from creative funding from the Trinity Long Room Hub (Interdisciplinary Seed Funding, 2017-18) and the Provost’s Fund for the Visual and Performing Arts at Trinity College Dublin. The authors acknowledge the collaboration of Rafael Pages, Jan Ondiej, Konstantinos Ampliantitis, David Monaghan, Aljosa Smolic, Maeve O’Mahony, Colm Gleeson, Caitlin Scott, John Belling, and Colm Mc Nally. The researchers are grateful for the support of Edward Beckett and the Estate of Samuel Beckett.
