Theater has always been an art form that merges and incorporates different media and artistic disciplines. From the outset, digital forms of expression have found their way into experimental stage works and, in recent years, have become increasingly prominent and widely adopted in theater productions. This development has accelerated significantly during and since the Covid pandemic. Digital tools have become more present not only in the artistic elements of theater—from stage design to dramaturgical development to audience engagement—but digital technologies themselves have also increasingly become central to what is presented on stage. In addition, digital approaches have become an essential element in the practical production process, though they often remain invisible to audiences.
Over the past three years, Ars Electronica has explored these digital currents in theater-making together with a network of partners across Europe as part of the ACuTe project. Together, we developed testbeds for interactivity, performance, and technology, resulting in nine productions staged in European theaters and generating a wealth of new methods and artistic approaches that we are now sharing with the broader theater community. In addition to ACuTe, Ars Electronica has engaged in long-standing partnerships in this field, collaborating with theaters, festivals, and production labs to foster exchange between artists, technologists, and institutions in order to explore new performative languages for the digital age.
Some of the most compelling examples can be experienced in this year’s festival program, showcasing the current state of (digital) play on European stages. Together they reflect a field in transformation—where digitality is not simply a medium of enhancement but a structural principle that informs how we rehearse futures, negotiate agency, and stage the political. The relationship between human and non-human actors is central to many of the works.
In The Trial Against Humanity by Det Norske Teatret (NO), an omniscient AI named Omnitron calls humanity itself into question, confronting the audience with the ethical logic of digital systems and their cold rationality masked as care. A similarly critical gaze on techno-solutionism underpins Ekklesia, a VR-based immersive experience developed by Staatstheater Augsburg (DE) and artists Benjamin Seuffert and Lukas Joshua Baueregger: here, participants collaboratively build a new civilization from scratch—only to face the consequences of their design choices.
Elsewhere, digitality becomes the very grammar of storytelling. In White Hunger, brought to Linz by Oulu Theatre (FI), projected illusions, game aesthetics, and historical trauma interweave into a performative reflection on fragility and survival. The Butterfly Project by the Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Modena (IT)—a co-creation between students from Helsinki, Gdańsk, and Modena—rethinks operatic production processes through sustainable digital infrastructures and AI-enhanced audience interaction. What emerges is a new mode of collective authorship shaped by climate consciousness and remote collaboration. Digital theater in this context is not merely about immersion—but about entanglement.
The Oracle by Victorine van Alphen | Brave New Human (NL) and the Netherlands Film Academy (NL) envelops participants in a ritual space where screens act both as mirrors and agents. The performance draws from Indigenous philosophies and asks how human subjectivity is continually reconfigured by image culture and algorithmic structures. This dissolution of the autonomous self resonates with AREYOUARE, a hybrid performance by Silke Grabinger (AT), where the only human on stage interacts with domestic robots and AI projections—a feminist reinterpretation of presence and control. Perception itself becomes a dramaturgical concern in the site-specific installation Parallels (Linz) by Marc Da Costa (US/PT) and Matthew Niederhauser (US). It uses machine learning and a responsive LED wall to reflect the environment back through the lens of a neural network—transforming real-time vision into a continuous act of reinterpretation.
Just as Parallels (Linz) embeds artificial seeing into public space, the exhibition by the Spiel und Objekt cohort from the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts (DE) explores identity formation and memory through speculative toys, performative archiving, and sonic architectures. This performative framework challenges not just how we tell stories, but how we relate to each other across space, time, and code.
Together, these works mark a shift from digital as device to digital as dramaturgy—where networks, simulations, rituals, and sensors become part of theatre’s evolving vocabulary. What emerges is a stage that is no longer fixed in place but distributed, reactive, and deeply political.
