To Be A Machine and the Liveness Debate Revisited
To Be A Machine (Version 1.0), premiered in October 2020 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, is a stage play adapted by Dead Centre and Mark O’Connell from the latter’s 2017 non-fiction book on transhumanism. By ‘stage play’, I actually mean a show performed in theatre and streamed live on Vimeo. And by ‘live’, of course I do not mean that the audience are in the same physical space where the performance takes place, but that they are able to watch it in real time as it is happening. But the fact that the term ‘live theatre’ now needs a lot of explanation epitomises the new normal of theatre during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the beginning of the show, we see the face of Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson, who plays the writer Mark O’Connell. As he is saying to us 'try to forget the screen you are staring into’, the camera zooms out to reveal the frame of a tablet. So this is not the ‘actual’ Gleeson that we are seeing, but instead, a double-mediatised image of him. And he goes
