How Theatre came to the Internet

The German theatre website Nachtkritik.de is hosting an online series called “Performing Internet or How Theatre came to the Internet”. The series includes online presentations and discussions as well as video documentation of early works, and all of this is documented on the Nachtkritik website.

First up in the series was of course the seminal work of Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway from the 1980s. In a talk titled “Sputnik-Moments of Teleimmersive Cyberarts“, Kit Galloway gives a comprehensive overview of their work including “Hole in Space” (pictured below), the Electronic Café and other projects.

The second event featured Juli Burk’s ATHEMOO – originally created as a way for those who could not physically attend the ATHE (Association of Theater in Higher Education) conference to be included, and they quickly discovered that the text-only MOO was also an ideal space for online theatre. Documentation of the event, “The Word as Body + Stage Or How Synchronous Chat Became Theatre“, includes recordings of the original ATHEMOO performances as well as a link to LinguaMOO where you can explore the MOO environment.

Hole In Space