FILM, VIDEO, DIGITAL AND AI IN THEATER STAGES
October 10 – 12, 2025
Organizers: International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) — Doctoral School of the Faculty of Theater and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
The contribution of technology to theater has always surprised audiences over the centuries, contributing to the construction of fictional worlds in the most diverse ways, grafting novelty and cutting-edge inventions on that savoir-faire or craft acquired through traditions handed down from generation to generation. In contemporary theater, the presence of technology, be it cinematographic, video, digital or AI-generated, is increasingly felt, and the questions are all the more numerous and fearful as the speed of technological change and evolution increases every day, without us being able to keep up, not so much in terms of consumption as in terms of fully understanding the phenomenon. We cannot avoid technology unless we withdraw from society, and theater cannot do that as a product of the society we live in. It must therefore confront and collaborate with new contemporary technologies…
Let us think together about the challenges that these technological changes bring to the artistic field of theatre and performing arts: at the level of stage production, at the level of the actor’s art and stage performativity when the human being is confronted with other three-dimensional presences that can compete with him, at the level of audience reception, of face-to-face or internet consumers of culture, and, last but not least, at the level of the relationship between producers and existing or potential audiences.
This raises some questions to which we are looking for answers: What are the big technological changes that surprise, delight or affect us in relation to the performing arts? How do they act and what is their contribution? Do they disrupt theater and its reception or not? Should we be afraid of new technologies and the digital age we have entered? What are the directions that contemporary stage and technology are taking in the various genres of performance, from drama and comedy, to dance-theater, concert-theater, documentary theater and other types of stage performance.
