On Wednesday 6 May 2026, I was invited to speak at the round table “Audiences: how does digital technology reshape our relationship to the performing arts?”, part of the Chaillot Augmenté x Rencontres TMNlab days. I argued that digital technology has turned majority cultural practices into practices in which everyone can be both spectator and producer. This shift profoundly changes the place of the audience and the function of cultural institutions, and forces us to ask fundamental political questions again: who funds these venues, whom are the works addressed to, what democratic mission do they fulfil. I set out my contribution here, placing it back within the dialogue with the other speakers.
Summary of this round table on the TMNlab website (in French)
The round table of 6 May at Chaillot
The “Live Art and Digital Environments 2026” days, co-organised by Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse and the TMNlab, took place on 5 and 6 May 2026 at Chaillot. The round table I took part in was chaired by Anne Le Gall, general delegate and co-founder of the TMNlab. The other speakers were Rachid Ouramdane, president and director of Chaillot and choreographer, and Nicolas Ligeon, co-director of the Théâtre de l’Élysée and coordinator of the Sous les Néons collective. The round table opened with a presentation by Maud Clavier, head of innovative projects at Zorba, of the ARTE Riff Mountain project.
For the general framework of these two days, I refer to my article Chaillot Augmenté x TMNlab 2026 : two days on the performing arts and digital technology.
Riff Mountain, Playformance, jumpstyle: the three other contributions
Anne Le Gall opened the round table by recalling the previous year’s one (with Isabelle Puta, Marie Ballarini and Cécilia Grange), which dealt with the way audiences experience digital environments. This year, the question was rather how digital technology reshapes the relationship of audiences to the forms of the performing arts, to institutions, and to the place they occupy within them. Before coming to what I argued, I summarise the contributions of Maud Clavier, Nicolas Ligeon and Rachid Ouramdane.
Maud Clavier presented ARTE Riff Mountain, the Hellfest immersive island on Fortnite co-produced with ARTE and the SoWhen? studio. What particularly spoke to me in her contribution was her insistence on the fact that each platform has its own codes: a work designed for the stage cannot be transposed there as it is. The work consists in re-adapting, as one adapts a book for the cinema. She also reminded us that in the age of algorithms, programming remains a human job, because it is the identity of a venue and the eye of a programmer that make the difference from what a machine would produce.
Nicolas Ligeon presented the concept of Playformance, which the Sous les Néons collective has been developing for five years. It consists in playing an existing video game on stage, in front of an audience, and making it the material of a piece of theatrical writing. The collective has published its manifesto. What struck me in his talk was that Playformances put into practice a principle of cultural rights: bringing on stage people who are not performing arts professionals, to play a video game that has touched them, is an act of cultural democracy. Nicolas Ligeon was clear-cut: these forms do not compete with the work of professional artists, and the question of whether it “is worth” a Forsythe show is a false question. What is at stake is the sharing of the public tools that institutions are.
Rachid Ouramdane raised a question that every cultural institution should ask itself: who is not here, which bodies and which cultures are not in the theatre? He reminded us that the first digital environment is that of our daily lives, and that danced counter-cultures are born from digital practices (the jumpstyle worked on by the Ballet national de Marseille, Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Une minute de danse par jour, choreographies on TikTok, K-pop fans dancing in front of famous landmarks), which a cultural institution has a duty to support if it wants to fulfil its public service mission. He also spoke of digital technology as an “antidote” to invisibilisation, because today we can no longer not know what is happening in an African village, in the Amazon, or in a community forming somewhere else.
Anne Le Gall recalled a remark by Simon Fleury, director of Dieppe Scène nationale: before asking people to democratise themselves culturally, institutions should start by democratising themselves, by also going to see what they would not go to see on their own. It is a proposal I find very apt.
From the Pocket Films Festival to TikTok: an anthropological shift
I began by going back to the Pocket Films Festival, which I founded in 2005 with the Forum des images in Paris (I tell its story in the article The birth of the Pocket Films Festival (2005)). We created it at the moment when the camera was arriving in mobile phones, at the same time as 3G. At the time, making a film with a mobile phone was seen as absurd. I was nevertheless convinced that ten years later, everyone would permanently have a camera in their pocket. It is an anthropological change: the place of images in everyday life, how they are received, produced and passed on, all of that is transformed.
These shifts are what I have been working on ever since. I often give the example of virtual reality. When films are produced in virtual reality and watched by the audience in a headset, the place of the spectator and that of the artist have not moved. The headset is a new screen, the relationship remains the same. The day before the round table, I was shooting in virtual reality with secondary school pupils in Lyon. In that set-up, what fascinates me is the camera, which films all around and forces us to invent together a staging in a space whose frame we do not control. I show them the rushes in binocular view, that is, the two images side by side, distorted. This hijacking of the device is interesting in itself, just as the cinematograph was diverted from its original uses to tell stories its inventors had not foreseen.
On TikTok, the situation is different. It is a distribution app, and one button is enough to switch to production. It is Godard’s dream, really. Palimpsest creations circulate there, made of reworkings and détournements, of incredible inventiveness. There, my place is no longer only that of the spectator, I can also be author, participant. To my mind this raises anthropological questions, because when audiences reappropriate the tools in this way, it changes the very definition of the work, of the artist and of the spectator.
It is the margins that hold the pages together
Today, majority cultural practices go through digital technology. This is very recent, a few decades ago it was not the case, and what we offer in our cultural institutions has become marginal compared with these practices. As Godard said when he was called a marginal, the margin is what holds the pages together: saying that the cultural institution is marginal today is in no way demagogic, we keep all our legitimacy.
To think about this shift, I rely on a notion I have been working on for a long time, cultural rights. Cultural rights are tools for respecting the dignity of persons, for respecting communities and identities. They make it possible to distinguish cultural democratisation, which comes from above and makes the “great works of humanity” accessible, from cultural democracy, which rests on mutual enrichment between people. This distinction is often criticised. I may be accused of cultural relativism: if everything is of equal value, what is the point of artists’ work? That is not my point. When relationships are horizontal, each person bringing their singularity, we are enormously enriched. That is the very principle of collective intelligence. Sharing power with other people, from the place one occupies, is a matter of democracy.
This opening changes the very conception of the work of art. John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), asks the question: what is art? An object external to us? For Dewey, art is the experience lived by people. When we speak today of immersive experience, or of UX (user experience) in digital technology, we are in that lineage. Putting experience at the centre, and collective experience with more equality, is easy to say but very complicated to do, because it touches everyone’s posture. When I am with secondary school pupils, what place do I give to the ideas they suggest to me?
Digital technology is our environment, like air and electricity
Digital technology, to my mind, is not a subject in itself. Whether or not digital technology is put on stage does not matter much: with people sitting in a hall and artists performing in front of them, we remain within a traditional set-up, even if there are beeps.
Digital technology is our environment, like air, like electricity. It produces continuous anthropological changes, and what we call artificial intelligence extends this movement, by turning cognition itself into an everyday consumer product. It is wrong to say that AI is just a tool. Just as the mobile phone has changed our relationship to space, to time, to intimacy, to the images each of us produces, to politics, AI will profoundly change our relationship to the world, and the world itself.
Hence the importance I give to experimentation when I support institutions: going through experience, trying things, accepting lighter forms. This requires both thinking these transformations through better in order to debate them, and agreeing to take the plunge, because without practice we do not move forward on these subjects.
Those who pay the most benefit the least
When I support a cultural institution, we often start with this almost trivial question: how do we get the people of the neighbourhood to come to the venue, when they do not even know it exists? This question, practical in appearance, raises another, political one.
In 2023, Marjorie Glas published, based on her doctoral thesis, a book entitled Quand l’art chasse le populaire. Socio-histoire du théâtre public en France depuis 1945 (Agone, 2023). She shows how, since 1945, French public theatre has gradually become a place of bourgeois self-segregation. Pierre Bourdieu had analysed this in Distinction (1979): people go to certain places to mark their belonging to a certain social class. Sociologically, that is what happens. Except that the money funding these venues is not meant for that, for a technical reason: it is the money of all taxpayers, and the working classes pay, in proportion to their income, more tax than the well-off classes, because of VAT. In concrete terms, the people who contribute the most benefit the least, and do not even know these venues exist.
This democratic mission of cultural venues is beginning to be recognised by the State. The French Ministry of Culture created in 2021 a general delegation for cultural democracy, which became a general directorate in 2025. But in the training courses I run, in discussions with the regional cultural affairs directorates or the cultural departments of cities, it remains complicated. Teams have not been trained for this; they feel they have to defend artistic quality, and the debate about what a work is sometimes runs on empty, whereas one does need to know within which framework one stands in order to decide what public money will be used for.
At bottom, the resistance of teams comes down to a question of identity: one feels threatened when one has to open up to the other, to that other who is frightening, whereas it is precisely this opening that makes democracy, and one comes out of it enriched every time.
Showing the audience the whole process of the workshop
I often take the example of cultural action. In artistic practice, there are the works we see on stage or in cinemas, and there is all of cultural action, which is now an integral part of it, fortunately. Running a workshop is in itself an artistic practice, not a public-interest job on the side of “real” creation. But when a workshop leads to an end-of-year show, a film, an exhibition, we want it to be “good”, because the funders are there, because the parents are there. This distorts everything. If the result does not match the expected aesthetic criteria, the artist ends up in an odd position and starts doing more of the work. I once saw a photographer who had young people take photographs, then retook the photographs herself so that they would be “good”. It is terribly violent.
The essential thing, to my mind, is to present the whole process to the audience: how we met, what we did, what happened. The result is only one stage among others. To be able to tell the story, you have to document it, and I often give young people the role of journalists of their own project. This requires tools, but above all it changes the approach: we do, and at the same time we look at what we are doing. The moment of presentation to the audience itself becomes a stage in the process, and the spectators take a full part in it. For the participants themselves, this shift matters: they understand better the path they have travelled, and what they have produced appears legitimate to them.
Cultural venues are no longer places of power
It may be necessary to recall, because it is no longer so obvious, what political institutions are for: making connections, existing together. Cultural venues share in this institutional role, and it is not only the big institutions that are institutions: as soon as a small group starts discussing and organising itself, that is already an institution.
The French history of State-subsidised art begins with Louis XIV. The aim was the magnificence of France, that French be spoken throughout the world. It was a political tool. Today, that is over: politicians do not care about theatre and dance, and even in cities, mayors no longer go to shows. These venues are no longer places of power as they once were; they have become democratic places, funded by democracy, hence the importance of putting democracy into practice there, failing which they will no longer have any reason to be funded. Since these venues no longer serve to establish symbolic power, elected officials no longer have any interest, for their own power, in funding them.
When the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, today’s Ministry of Culture, was created in 1959, nobody wanted it, there was political opposition on all sides. To obtain resources, since there was no borrowing at the time, money was taken from national education and from popular education. And to have this new cultural policy accepted in the regions, Malraux recruited administrators from the French overseas territories, who had experience of colonisation. Marie-Ange Rauch tells this very well in Le Bonheur d’entreprendre. Les administrateurs de la France d’outre-mer et la création du ministère des Affaires culturelles (1998). For these civil servants, the French regions were like the bush to be colonised: high culture had to be imposed there. We are the heirs of this history. Today, cultural rights and cultural democracy are in part the return of popular education within official culture. This is good news, because all of this can hybridise and give birth to new, very diverse forms.
A work must be addressed to someone
One last notion comes up often in my work, that of address. When I sat on grant committees for creative projects, for film projects or digital contemporary art projects, I always asked this question: whom is this addressed to? Even if we keep repeating that art must address everyone, a work that is funded does have to be addressed to someone, otherwise it stays alone on a shelf.
Rachid Ouramdane put the same thing another way during the round table: when he receives a project and cannot understand whom it is addressed to, that is a bad sign. Each artistic process has its own mode of support, but knowing whom the work is addressed to remains a compass. What is heartening is the new ways of addressing the audience that artists invent, which cannot be foreseen, and that is precisely why it is interesting.
Beyond the “how”, the “why” and the “for whom”
What I liked about this round table was that it dealt with the why and the for whom, rather than the how. When you are invited to talk about digital technology in the performing arts, people expect answers about the how from you: how to work with digital technology, how to integrate AI, how to programme a hybrid work. These questions matter, but they only make sense if we first ask ourselves these: for whom do we fund theatres, art centres, cinemas? Whom are the works we co-produce and distribute addressed to? What power to act do we give to the people we welcome, and to those we do not yet welcome? Digital technology, because it has already transformed majority cultural practices, forces institutions to ask themselves these questions again.
To go further, see my book Defending culture differently : methods for tomorrow.
