As the 21st century progresses our lives are becoming more and more technologised and it
seems that our body, our sensibility and our emotions are at risk of being numbed by the
stimulus of the digital and its dazzling frenzy. The life-in-front-of-the-screen is already
reshaping our brain’s chemistry and thus our way of thinking. In parallel, artificial intelligence
has become one of the great ethical dilemmas we will face, as we witness the emergence of
machines capable of learning and thinking (but strikingly not of feeling... at least so far).
In the not too distant future we will live in a world that will be both digital and real; the screen
will generate hybrid spaces where we can be in a physical here and now and at the same
time in a parallel somewhere and somewhen. This virtual coexistence will modify our bodies,
which will be able to inhabit simultaneous spaces, leaving behind our skins as the frontier
with the outside world and the other bodies.
So in a future world where our intellectual capacities will compete with those performed by
machines and our bodies will be interwoven with the binary language we will retain our
emotionality as our unique and most cherished feature. Just as when the food industry
managed to produce anything at sidereal scales the response was the return to the organic
and later veganism movement, I believe that faced with the digitalisation of our existences
the same will happen: the more homo digitalis (sic) we become, the more we will need
spaces where we can experience our emotions and physicalities and to connect with that
which lies beneath the cerebral cortex, like theatre.