How digital technology reshapes our relationship to the performing arts

On Wednesday 6 May 2026, I was invited to speak at the round table “Audiences: how is digital technology reshaping our relationship to the performing arts?”, as part of the Chaillot Augmenté × Rencontre TMNlab events. I argued that digital technology has turned mainstream cultural practices into practices in which everyone can be both spectator and producer. This shift profoundly changes the place of audiences and the function of cultural institutions; it forces us to revisit the underlying political questions of public funding, of who is being addressed, and of the democratic mission of these places. I set out here a synthesis of that contribution, situated within the dialogue that gave rise to it.

The setting

The “Live Art and Digital Environments 2026” events, co-organised by Chaillot - National Dance Theatre and TMNlab, took place on 5 and 6 May 2026 at Chaillot. The round table I took part in was chaired by Anne Le Gall, Managing Director and co-founder of TMNlab. The other speakers were Rachid Ouramdane, President-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 session opened with a presentation by Maud Clavier, Director of Innovation Projects at Zorba, of the ARTE Riff Mountain project (an immersive Hellfest island on Fortnite, co-produced by ARTE).

For the broader context of these two days, see my article Chaillot Augmenté × Rencontre TMNlab, Live Art and Digital Environments.

The setting of the round table

Anne Le Gall opened the round table in continuity with the equivalent session held the previous year (with Isabelle Puta, Marie Ballarini and Cécilia Grange), which had been devoted to the way audiences experience works in digital environments. This year, the angle was shifted to ask how digital technology reshapes the relationship of audiences to the forms of the performing arts, to institutions, and to the place they hold within them. Before turning to what I argued myself, I summarise the contributions of the three other voices at the round table.

Maud Clavier presented ARTE Riff Mountain, the immersive Hellfest island on Fortnite co-produced by ARTE and the Sohen studio. What struck me in her presentation was the insistence that each platform has its own codes: a work conceived for the stage cannot simply be duplicated there. The work involves re-adapting, much as a book is re-adapted for cinema. Maud also recalled the importance of human curation in the algorithmic age: the identity of a venue and the eye of a programmer are what makes the difference with what a machine would produce.

Nicolas Ligeon presented the Playformance concept developed by the Sous les Néons collective over the past five years. A Playformance consists in performing an existing video game on stage, as raw material for theatrical writing. The concept is documented in an open-source manifesto. What struck me in his words was the way Playformances enact what cultural rights theory describes: bringing on stage people who are not performing arts professionals, who play a video game that has moved them, is in itself an act of cultural democracy. Nicolas held a clear position: these forms do not compete with the work of professional artists, and asking whether a Playformance “is worth as much as” a Forsythe piece is a false question. What is at stake is the sharing of public tools, which is what these institutions are.

Rachid Ouramdane raised a question that should be at the heart of every cultural institution’s work: who is not here, which bodies and which cultures are not in the theatre? He recalled that our first digital environment is that of our daily lives, and that digital practices give rise to dance counter-cultures (the jumpstyle worked on by the Ballet de Marseille, Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Minute de danse par jour, choreographed content on TikTok, the practices of K-pop fans in front of iconic landmarks) which a cultural institution must accompany if it is to fulfil a public service mission. He also spoke of the digital as an “antidote” to invisibilisation: today, one can no longer pretend not to know what is happening in an African village, in the Amazon, or in any community that is forming elsewhere.

Anne Le Gall recalled a remark by Simon Fleury, director of the Scène nationale de Thiers: before asking people to democratise themselves culturally, institutions should begin by democratising themselves, by also going to see things they do not naturally go to see. I think this is a very accurate observation.

It is within this dialogue that the ideas I defended took shape, and which I now set out.

From the Pocket Films Festival to TikTok: an anthropological shift

I began by going back to the Pocket Films Festival, which I had founded twenty-one years ago with the Forum des images in Paris. We had created it at the very moment when cameras were arriving in mobile phones, alongside 3G. At the time, making a film with a mobile phone seemed absurd. I knew, however, that ten years later everyone would have a camera permanently in their pocket. It was an anthropological change: the place of the image in everyday life, its reception, its production, its transmission, all of it transforms.

It is on these shifts that I have been working ever since. I often give the example of virtual reality. When VR productions are made by professionals and watched by audiences in headsets, the place of the spectator and that of the artist remain unchanged. The headset is a new screen, but the relationship is the same. The day before the round table, I was filming in VR with secondary school students in Lyon. In this device, what fascinates me is the camera. This camera that films in every direction, and that obliges us to invent the staging together in a space whose frame we do not control. I show them the rushes in stereoscopic mode, that is, the two images side by side, distorted. This diversion of the device is interesting in itself, just as the cinematograph was diverted from its initial uses to tell stories its inventors had not foreseen.

On TikTok, the situation is different. It is a distribution app, but with a single button, you switch to production. It is Godard’s dream, really. Extraordinary creative palimpsests circulate there. At that point, my place is no longer only that of a spectator. I can also be an author, a participant. This raises, in my view, anthropological questions, because this re-appropriation by audiences changes what counts as a work, as an artist, and as a spectator.

Art as experience, and institutions as marginal proposals

Today, mainstream cultural practices take place through the digital. This is very recent. The proposals we make in our cultural institutions have become marginal compared to ordinary cultural practices. This was not the case a few decades ago. As Godard used to say, it is the margins that hold the page together: we have all our legitimacy, and it is no demagogic point to say that the cultural institution is, today, marginal.

A notion I have been working on for a long time helps me to think about this displacement: the notion of cultural rights. Cultural rights are tools to respect the dignity of persons, to respect communities and identities. They allow us to draw a distinction between cultural democratisation, which is top-down and aims to make “the great works of humanity” accessible, and cultural democracy, which rests on mutual enrichment between people. This distinction is often criticised. I can be accused of cultural relativism: if everything is of equal value, what is the point of the artists’ work? That is not my point. In horizontality, each in their singularity, we enrich each other immensely. This is the very principle of collective intelligence. Giving back the power to act to other people, in the places we ourselves occupy, is a democratic question.

This opening changes the very conception of what a work of art is. In Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey asks: what is art? An object outside us? For Dewey, art is the lived experience of persons. When we speak today of immersive experience, or of UX (user experience) in digital, we are within this lineage. Putting experience at the centre, and a more equal collective experience, is easy to say but very difficult to do, because it touches on positions themselves. When I am with secondary school students, what place do I give to the ideas they propose to me?

Digital as a milieu of existence, AI as a commodity

Digital, in my view, is not a topic in itself. Whether one puts digital on stage or not is not very important. With people seated in an auditorium and artists doing things on stage, we remain within a traditional apparatus, even if there are bleeps on stage. This is a personal opinion.

Digital is the milieu in which we live. It is like air, like electricity. It produces continuous anthropological changes, and what we call artificial intelligence extends this movement by turning cognition itself into a commodity. It is not true that AI is just a tool. Just as the mobile phone has changed our relationship to space, to time, to intimacy, to the images people produce, to politics, AI is going to change our relationship to the world, and the world itself.

Hence, in my practice of supporting institutions, the importance of experimentation. Going through experience, trying things out, accepting lighter forms. This requires both better conceptualisation of these transformations in order to debate them, and acceptance of experimentation, because without practice, one does not progress on these subjects.

The democratic mission of cultural institutions

This question of institutions is central to my consultancy work. When supporting a cultural institution, one often begins with this almost trivial question: how do we get local citizens to come to the venue, when they don’t even know it exists? This question, apparently practical, opens onto a fundamental political question.

In 2023, Marjorie Glas published, on the basis of her doctoral thesis, a book entitled Quand l’art chasse le populaire (When art drives out the popular). She shows how, since the aftermath of the Second World War, the French public theatre has progressively become a place of bourgeois reproduction. Pierre Bourdieu had already analysed this in Distinction (1979): we go to certain places to belong to a certain social class. Sociologically, that is what is happening. Yet the money that funds these places is not meant for that, for a technical reason: it is the money of all taxpayers, and the working classes pay proportionally more taxes than the wealthier classes because of VAT. In concrete terms, the people who contribute the most benefit the least, and do not even know that these places exist.

This democratic mission is beginning to be acknowledged within institutions. A few years ago, the Ministry of Culture created a delegation for cultural democracy, since turned into a directorate. But in professional training, in discussions with regional cultural directorates or municipal cultural departments, things remain difficult. Teams have not been trained for this. They feel they have to defend artistic quality, and the debate on the definition of the work of art is sometimes sterile, but one does need to know within what frame one is working in order to decide what public money is for.

This subject is not secondary. It is a political subject of the deepest kind. As soon as we open ourselves to the other, to the other who frightens us, we come out enriched. The resistance is a question of identity: one feels threatened in one’s identity when one has to open up to the other, whereas it is precisely this opening that founds democratic experience.

I often take the example of cultural action. In artistic practice, there are works seen on stage or in cinemas, and there is the whole field of cultural action, which is now an integral part of it, fortunately. Running a workshop is itself an artistic practice, not “community service” alongside “real” creation. But when a workshop ends with a year-end show, a film, an exhibition, we want it to be “good”, because the funders are there, because the parents are there. This biases everything. If the result does not meet expected aesthetic criteria, the artist finds themselves in an awkward position, having to do more. I once saw a photographer who had young people take photographs, and who then redid the photographs herself so that they would be “good”. The violence of this is terrible.

What is essential, in my view, is to present, in public moments, the whole process: how we met, what we did, what happened. The result is only one stage among others. To be able to tell the story, one must document, and I often give young people the role of journalists of their own project. This requires tools, but above all it transforms the working method: one is doing, and at the same time one is looking at what one is doing. The moment of public presentation itself becomes a stage of the process, and the audience members fully take part in it, as participants in an ongoing dynamic. It is real documentation work, and it engages new working dynamics. For the participants themselves, this shift matters: it anchors them in the understanding of their own path, and in the legitimacy of what they have produced.

Why cultural institutions, today

It is perhaps worth recalling, since it is no longer self-evident, what political institutions are for. They serve to bind us together, to exist together. Cultural venues are part of this institutional role, and it is not only large institutions that are institutions: as soon as a small group starts to talk and organise itself, an institution is already there.

The French history of state-subsidised art begins with Louis XIV. The aim was the magnificence of France, the spread of the French language across the world, and so on. It was a political tool. Today, that is over. Politicians do not really care about theatre and dance. Even in a city, the mayor no longer goes to the show. These places 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 within them. Without this, these places will no longer have any reason to be funded. Since they no longer serve to underpin a symbolic power, elected officials have no real interest in funding them for their own power.

When the Ministry of Culture was created in 1959, no one wanted it. There was political opposition everywhere. To get resources, since loans were not yet how things were done at the time, money was taken from the Ministry of Education and from popular education (éducation populaire, the French tradition of grassroots cultural education). And to make this new cultural policy accepted in the regions, Malraux brought in civil servants from Africa, senior officials with experience of colonisation. Marie-Ange Rauch tells this story very well in her work on the “hussars” of the Ministry of Culture. For these officials, the French regions were like the bush to be colonised: high culture had to be imposed there. We are the inheritors of this history. Today, cultural rights and everything happening around cultural democracy represent, in part, the return of popular education within official culture. This is good news, because all of this can hybridise and produce wonderful and diverse things.

Address as a compass

One last notion, which often returns in my work. When I sat on funding committees for film projects or contemporary digital art projects, I always asked the same question: who is this addressed to? If we are funding things, even if we maintain the discourse that art should address everyone, it still has to be addressed to someone, otherwise it just stays alone on a shelf.

Rachid Ouramdane formulated the same point differently in the round table: when he receives a project whose address he does not understand, that is a signal. Each artistic process calls for its own mode of support, but the identification of the address remains a compass. What is encouraging is the new forms of address that artists invent: we do not know how to do these in advance, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.

Beyond the “how”, the “why” and the “for whom”

What seemed to me valuable in this round table is that it held its course on the why and the for whom, rather than on the how. When one is invited to talk about digital in the performing arts, the expectation is to talk about the how: how to work with digital, how to integrate AI, how to programme a hybrid work. These questions matter. But they only have meaning if they remain articulated to a prior question. For whom do we fund theatres, art centres, cinemas? Who are the works we co-produce and distribute addressed to? What capacity to act do we give to the people we welcome, and to those we do not yet welcome? Without these questions of the why and the for whom, the how loses its meaning. Digital, insofar as it has already reconfigured mainstream cultural practices, obliges institutions to ask them again.

It is on this displacement that I continue to work.

To go further, see my book Defending Culture Differently : Methods for Tomorrow.