Understanding Practice: Imanuel Schipper Event

Understanding Practice (UP) with Imanuel Schipper
FORENSIC THEATRE LAB
Zentrum Fokus Forschung

With the various Cultural Turns of the second half of the 20th century (Bachmann-Medick 2018), research-based art productions have gained increasing popularity. The “explosion of knowledge” (Burke 2014) through the internet and other digitalization tendencies promoted this trend and created a cultural practice of research as an essential part of the production process of theatre and other artistic works. This practice is often ephemeral or leads only very limitedly to results that can be recognized in the final artifact. This paper is dedicated to this phenomenon, the research process, which is little studied in cultural (and art, theatre, and humanities) studies.
In the center is the idea of a Forensic Theater Lab (FTL) that poses the question to Digital Humanities and Interface Design, how a workspace could look like, which
a) similar to a ‘digital twin’ reproduces the search process in time and space
b) not only archives and categorizes documents of all kinds, but also allows their statements to be meaningfully linked to each other,
c) transcribing and keywording AV media by various means of automation (machine learning),
(d) leaves the archival documents in their original state and place, but allows them to be linked in various ways (Linked Data),
e) offers and enables different applications and accesses (cockpits, dashboards) for different user groups,
f) Open Source is based on Open Source and offers itself for use, adaptation and further work for various groups, institutions in and outside the scientific community.
In my presentatio I will present the ongoing conceptual status and reflect on the problems and ideas, which I would like to discuss then in the workshop. I will open these concepts to the broader field of art works and also include the question of Artistic Research into the discussion.

Imanuel Schipper is a senior lecturer for Contemporary Performance & Dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy/Uniarts Helsinki and at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. His research covers contemporary concepts of dramaturgy, performance studies and digital cultures, socially relevant functions of art and concepts of spectatorships. In his career as a Dramaturg (Theatre, Dance, Opera) he collaborated with William Forsythe, Jérome Bel, Luk Perceval and others. He has a long-term working relationship with Rimini Protokoll.

Publications include: - Rimini Protokoll 2000-2010 (2021, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König) - Rimini Protokoll: Staat 1-4: Phänomene der Postdemokratie (2018, Theater der Zeit)- Performing the Digital. Performance Studies and Performances in Digital Cultures (2017, in collaboration with Timon Beyes and Martina Leeker, transcript).