Theoretical framing: In which ways has the spectacle, as a performative construct, permeated contemporary representations of expert and academic knowledge? Does this indeed signal a crisis? Is knowledge growingly reduced to a form of commodity and entertainment? Or can the use of ‘spectacular tactics’ also contribute to a discourse, for instance, if applied subversively?

Harking back on the term ‘spectacle’, it indeed seems to have served as a red flag for the academic milieu of culture and art since the 18th century (Rousseau 1758). It mainly signals moments when the artistic means of representation of a subject matter transposes active engagement into its simulation (Debord 1967). And yet, in spite of this suspicion, recent techno-economic developments are seeing a turn of academia and the arts towards spectacular means. This is more so accentuated in events focused on technology and digital culture, where academically styled lectures fuse together with multimedia, art, and entertainment. Still, some scholars make a case in defense of the spectacle, as a collective experience of knowledge which also calls attention to its own layered mediality (Fritz 2019). 

Research Design: Serving as a research object through which these tensions are explored, my PhD focuses on transmediale—a Berlin-based festival running since 1988 in the field of digital culture and art. The PhDs theoretical framework is designed around a close dialog with the festival’s participants and organizers. Together with them, multifaceted ways are brought to the fore, in which the festival “performs its critical discourse” by spectacularizing it.

These observations are then translated into modular artistic principles, which then serve as a basis for a set of performance works. These works, I argue, introduce a novelty form of ‘multimedial academic theatre’: an immersive, participatory, metatheatrical critique on the relationship between spectacle and academia in the 21st century.

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