Introduction

This paper addresses the histories of liveness and performance and the life of machines by articulating theoretical positions on Samuel Beckett's prose work The Lost Ones in relation to a recent new media work UNMAKEABLELOVE (Kenderdine & Shaw 2008). UNMAKEABLELOVE is a revisioning of Beckett's initial investigation, which focuses and makes interactively tangible a state of confrontation and interpolation between ourselves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. This interactive theatre advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human-computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality and multimedia performance to engage ‘the body's primordial inscriptions’ (Schwab 2000: 73). Its mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation intricately engage the presence and agency of the viewers and impel them to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that directly implicates them in an alienated and claustrophobic situation. Beckett's prose has been interpreted by a number of leading scholars, including Lyotard in The Inhuman who speaks of ‘systematic madness’ (Lyotard 1991: 186), Porush who describes Beckett's ‘cybernetic machine’ and Schwab who interprets The Lost Ones as a kind of ‘soul-making’ (Schwab 2000: 73) and envisions the texts’ narrative agency as ‘a disembodied artificial intelligence’ (ibid. 64) exploring the boundaries between the human and posthuman.

As such, UNMAKEABLELOVE calls upon a long history of fascination with automatic theatre. This essay touches on automaton history and looks to key transformations in more recent times using new technologies. We also look at the ‘computer as performer’ and the notions of the human embodiment in relation to machines to make more explicit the entanglement in the theatre of the human-computer interface. Embedded within contemporary artistic practice, the role of the viewers and the theatrical concept of the spectacle are central concerns. Jonathan Crary in Suspension of Perception describes the spectacle as a set of techniques for the management of bodies and the regulation of attention (Crary 1999: 9).