Digital performance as Gesamtkunstwerk

Wagner and the Total Artwork - Steve Dixon

'While writers such as Grau have traced precedents to digital arts stretching back through antiquity, we will begin our own analysis of the ancestry of digital performance in the nineteenth century, with Richard Wagner and his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork). Wagner's vision, expressed in writings such as The Artwork of the Future (1849), was the creative unification of multiple artforms: theater, music, singing, dance, dramatic poetry, design, lighting, and visual art. Wagner's conception is central to the lineage of digital performance both in its advocacy for grand theatrical spectacle and in the paradigm of "convergence" that unites the Gesamtkunstwerk with contemporary understandings of the modern computer as a "meta-medium" that unifies all media (text, image, sound, video, and so on) within a single interface.

Wagner's own version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as expressed in his epic "music-dramas" (he disdained those who described his work as "opera") sought not only a synthesis of artforms but also the Holy Grail of many multimedia endeavors: user immersion. Wagner attempted to engineer a wholly immersive audience experience through a variety of technical and artistic strategies, from hiding the orchestra out of view to negate any "alienation effect" to his use of hypnotically repetitive musical leitmotifs and sonorous, elongated chords.' (pp41-42)