Sarah Bay-Cheng University of Toronto, Canada
Co-authors: Angela Norwood (York University), Derek Manderson (York University), Tyler Graham (York University)
Playable Pasts: Designing Aesthetic Engagement in a Digital Heritage Project
Based on research created as part of the Museum of Toronto exhibition, “Home Game: Toronto Loves Basketball,” this paper highlights ways that digital heritage projects can facilitate inclusive participation. The co-authors approached this project at the intersection of theatre and performance studies, design, and games studies, exploring how different modes of interaction – exploration, personalization, physical expression, and oral storytelling – facilitate digital history and historiography of sports as performance. By framing participants not only as users, but also performers and co-authors of public memory, the project sought to challenge conventional distinctions between audience and archive. In this paper, we note the disciplinary challenges of the project, arguing for a model of digital historiography that is both playable and participatory, where aesthetic affordances of games, gaming, and design play can facilitate audience engagement with the past.
Roberto Basili Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
Intelligent behaviour: creativity is all you need
Modern generative AI technologies are often said to pose big challenges for their limited quality as well as for the sustainability and ethical concerns related to their large scale adoption. Research perspectives focus on more clever and ethically controlled usages of computing resources. It seems a more important issue is here neglected. Human intelligence excels not only in quality but mostly in resourcefulness, as limited resources are mare than adequate. Demand of resources in humans reasoning is extraordinarily low: intelligent people solve complex problems quickly and low resource consumption. The ability in humans to invent solution pathways that are novel, effective and cheap is guided by creativity. The transfer of human creativity in modern generative AI is an open problem, poorly unexplored. It involves methods to inject information, knowledge, culture and strategic thinking into large linguistic models. Research perspectives on this ambitious goal will be discussed in the light of modern AI technologies.
Giovanni Bergamin LOGOS Research&Innovation, Florence, Italy
Valeria Paraninfi University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy
Hyperstage ontology: design, implementation and insights
The Hyperstage project aims to semantically reconstruct Italian theatrical productions, a goal hindered by the limitations of conventional data models. This contribution addresses this challenge by presenting a new ontology that places the theatrical production at its core, enabling it to map the evolution in the staging of theatrical works and the influences between productions, augmented by a PKB taxonomy for digital resources classification. We implemented this ontology using a bottom-up approach on the Wikibase.cloud platform, which simplified development and resulted in a rich, project-aligned knowledge graph. Our experience underscores the value of leveraging an established semantic ecosystem: data is instantly accessible via API and SPARQL, and the system is poised to adopt future enhancements like Wikidata’s vector search, thereby integrating advanced AI tools to provide grounded, contextual results.
Elisabeth Borud Leinslie, Performing Arts Hub, Oslo, Norway
Methods for Collecting and Enriching Digitally Created Archival Material
PAHN is a Norwegian competence center on performing arts. PAHN owns and operates the digital archive Sceneweb which is a national historical database for professional performing arts in Norway. The database is an encyclopedia and a quantitative research tool that contains historical data from 1630 until today.
This speech will focus on PAHNs work on developing new methods to streamline the collection and enrichment of digitally born archival material from the performing arts sector. The project explores three technological solutions: digital submission with automated media conversion, metadata harvesting from Wikidata, and the use of artificial intelligence for automatic tagging, categorization, and translation. In addition, we are expanding our work with linked data, enabling direct harvesting of metadata and documentation from cultural institutions’ own databases. The goal is to reduce manual labor, safeguard private archives, and strengthen the knowledge base on Norwegian performing arts.
Cécile Chantraine Braillon La Rochelle Université, France
What digital technology can do for the editorialization of the performing arts
Since the late 1990s, digital technologies have significantly transformed critical editorial practices in the arts. The emergence of new dissemination formats, combined with encoding standards and the flexible, evolving nature of digital environments, has profoundly enriched textual editions. These developments offer scholars and readers expanded access to a wide range of information, documentation, and visualizations, enabling renewed forms of interpretation and understanding (Alessi, Vitali, 2023). But what about the performing arts? Performative by nature, they resist durable inscription, grounded as they are in ephemerality, presence, and eventhood (Dubatti, 2014). In the print era, they could only be accessed through live experience or through their “memory” (written or graphic traces tied to their creative processes). However, with the development of recording technologies in the 19th century, the rise of digital technologies, and more recently, the platformization of performance access, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic (Quillet, 2022), this memory has greatly expanded. It now includes temporal, rhythmic, and affective dimensions, as well as audience reception. How, then, can digital technologies—and, increasingly, artificial intelligence—contribute to the editorialization of these data, making them accessible, structured, searchable, and interpretable within critical frameworks adapted to the specificities of the performing arts?
Luca Cipriani, Filippo Fantini Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy
A method for reconstructing lost spaces: Quarto Camerino, Villa d’Este
This paper focuses on the digital reconstruction method developed for the camerini, private rooms for study and contemplation found in the grand palaces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These spaces, often dimly lit and filled with artworks and precious objects, can be seen as precursors to the modern museum. Their analysis not only sheds light on a specific architectural typology but also offers a critical lens through which to reassess the historical evolution of the museum and its current forms. Focusing on the case of the Quarto Camerino in Villa d’Este, Tivoli, this study outlines a methodology for the digital reconstruction and high-quality visualization of such environments. The workflow integrates digital surveying with advanced techniques for reproducing the optical properties of surfaces, alongside semantic modeling tools, to create a digital artifact that is both perceptually and analytically robust. Notably, the research benefits from an interdisciplinary approach that combines architectural history, digital humanities, and computer graphics, leading to new insights into the spatial, material, and symbolic dimensions of the camerini. These findings not only enhance our understanding of early modern interior spaces but also contribute to broader discussions on the role of digital technologies in cultural heritage interpretation.
Nina Marie Evensen Center for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Norway
Behind the Scenes: Metadata Management via the IbsenStage Admin Platform
Theater performances leave behind fragmented traces—programs, reviews, photographs, cast lists—making their long-term documentation and analysis a complex task. Digital infrastructures for the performing arts must grapple with messy, multilingual, and historically variable data, while striving to document global performances in a structured, sustainable way.
IbsenStage addresses these challenges through a large-scale relational database that documents more than 26,000 performances of Henrik Ibsen’s plays across six continents, with structured metadata on over 100,000 contributors and 11,000 venues. It remains unmatched worldwide in its coverage of a single playwright’s production history.
This presentation offers a behind-the-scenes look at how performance metadata is entered, structured, and maintained in IbsenStage. We will demonstrate recent enhancements to the administrative interface, which now provides a more efficient and user-friendly environment for entering and editing complex performance data.
We will also show how the interface connects to authority files like VIAF and Wikidata, which supports deeper contextualization and interoperability with broader cultural heritage infrastructures. This combination of hands-on data entry and Linked Open Data integration ensures that IbsenStage not only serves as a vital tool for Ibsen scholarship, but also contributes to sustainable, semantically enriched documentation of global theatre history.
Jenny Fewster, HASS and Indigenous RDC | Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) — Monash University of Melbourne, Australia
From AusStage to ACHF: Advancing Australian Creative Arts Research Infrastructure
Australia’s approach to creative arts research infrastructure offers unique insights for the global community. This keynote examines over two decades of innovation, from the groundbreaking AusStage database to the newly established Australian Creative Histories and Futures project.
AusStage, initiated in 2000 and recently included in UNESCO’s Australian Memory of the World register, has pioneered comprehensive documentation of live performance in Australia. This foundational infrastructure has enabled new methodologies for understanding artistic networks, regional variations, and historical continuities across Australia’s vast geographical and cultural landscape.
The current Australian Creative Histories and Futures project is a four-year, $5.8 million (AUD) investment in future-focused national infrastructure. It will link and enhance major cultural datasets—including AusStage, Design & Art Australia Online (DAAO), ACMI (formerly the Australian Centre for the Moving Image), and Creative Australia’s archives—enabling researchers, policymakers, arts organisations, and communities to better understand and support the Australian creative sector.
This presentation will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of building a shared research infrastructure for the creative arts, and its relevance to international cultural and digital research ecosystems.
Marco Gaiani Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy
A journey through images to understand and communicate Heritage
Nowadays, visual knowledge is probably the main instrument for acquiring new information, given the extraordinary ease with which images can be acquired, generated, reproduced, and communicated using digital tools. This allows us to overcome the typical limitations of imaging as a documentation tool prior to the analog era, well framed in a famous paper by Richard Krautheimer: “Forty-odd years ago, I placed the ‘Ideal City’ panels in Urbino and Baltimore in the context of Renaissance stage design, as codified by Serlio. I am deeply ashamed, in retrospect, of the method by which I built toward that thesis—or rather, the lack of method. The Urbino panel, I fear, I had not seen since the late 1920s. Thus, for Urbino, I relied on an old Alinari photograph.”
My team and I have spent the last 20 years developing IT-based techniques to overcome these limitations and generate new visual knowledge and insight in the field of heritage conservation, analysis, and communication. The developed solutions allow professionals to share the results of their analyses, research, and conservation operations with a large audience, providing new opportunities for researchers, professionals, and city users to acquire knowledge.
In this presentation, I will focus on problems related to disseminating visual knowledge through exhibitions and museum layout. I will show digital artifacts related to the artworks of Leonardo da Vinci, Guercino, and Andrea Palladio as a case study.
Donatella Gavrilovich Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
Hyperstage to the future. The Italian Theatre Archives Network and Automated Data
The Hyperstage project, which was supported by a first network of Italian digital theatre archives, tested the validity of the new methodology and PKB taxonomy on a limited number of theatre productions. What future scenarios will open up if we expand the number of online Italian archives, bearing in mind the enormous amount of data that will need to be collected, organised, monitored and implemented? The number of human resources needed should increase. This is for tasks that can now be automated. For this reason, future work must include artificial intelligence, data entry control mechanisms and mapping enhancements, among other things.
One final point to consider regarding our knowledge base model is its potential application in other cultural fields. The ontology is flexible enough to be used to organise cultural heritage materials and data, which I define as ‘complex’, such as archaeological sites or fresco cycles.
Gianluca Guarini, Maurizio Rossi Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy
Digital recreation of light for the Quarto Camerino of Villa d’Este in Tivoli
The present study aims to digitally recreate the ancestral appearance of the Quarto Camerino of Villa d’Este in Tivoli from the point of view of the lighting in space. The goal is to virtually prototype light coming from sources that were supposedly present in these spaces, by recreating the aspect of the luminaires (oil lanterns and candles) not only by their visual aspect but also by their lighting emission, with data that is plausible from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. The parameters that describe light sources come from the measurement of prototypes that have been created as reference; luminous intensities are used to describe the shape of the emission in space, and Red, Green and Blue coordinates (coming from spectral measurements) describe the correct shade of white (colour temperature) of the flame. Other than the properties of the emitted light, the shape of the sources, four candle holders and an oil lantern have been recreated using pictures or drawings, thanks to classic 3D modelling and AI-generated geometry. The appearance of the flame has been recreated by using the video of a real flame, from which the background was removed, mounted on a flat geometry that keeps the orientation towards the observer. The flicker of fire has been implemented with an algorithm that randomly introduces variation on the luminous flux over a period of time. The techniques used include a certain degree of simplification of the emission, but due to the randomness of light emitted by the flame, the results remain plausible and realistic.
Mariel Marshall Artist and technology entrepreneur, Bluemouth inc., Toronto, Canada
Can Machines Create Belonging? Chatbots, Cybrothels and the Crisis of Connection
In an age where chatbots are the new “dear diary” confidants, and anyone can build their own AI girlfriend with the click of a button, we must ask: Are we creating connection, or simulating it? This talk explores the loneliness epidemic through the lens of emerging trends in human-machine companionship. Drawing on research from Sherry Turkle, Byung-Chul Han, and Robert Putnam, and grounded in immersive performance and lived experience, the artist explores what machines can, (and can’t) offer in place of community. She asks how artists might create new forms of gathering and connection, becoming architects of belonging in an increasingly digitized world.
From Berlin Cybrothels to ChatGPT, from running clubs to faith-based organizations, she maps the emotional topography of contemporary yearning for belonging. She asks: What new cultural architectures might artists create to foster genuine connection? This talk navigates the promises and perils of human-machine intimacy while considering how the performance landscape can become a laboratory for reimagining belonging in an age of digital dislocation.
Alejandra Medellín De La Piedra Centro Nacional de Investigación de Danza “José Limón”, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City (México)
Activating Dance Heritage: Cenidi Danza’s Data Model & Inclusive Tech Framework
The documentation of performing arts faces a persistent challenge: how to represent ephemeral, multidimensional events through static records. This presentation introduces the data model developed for the Cenidi Danza Digital Repository—Mexico’s most extensive dance archive—designed to activate and contextualize its holdings beyond conventional cataloging. Drawing on the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) framework, the model establishes meaningful relationships among choreographic works, their representations, and related documents.
Its implementation through Tainacan—an open-source system for cultural collections built on WordPress—embodies principles of “appropriate technology” suited to Latin American contexts, where economic constraints often limit digital initiatives. For this reason, selecting flexible and user-manageable software is vital to long-term sustainability and institutional autonomy.
Ultimately, this presentation proposes data modeling as a creative and critical practice, and underscores how such modeling—when paired with conscious technological choices—can foster inclusive, resilient platforms for cultural memory. It invites a reflection on digital documentation as both a technical and ethical practice—one rooted in community knowledge, resource awareness, and commitment to accessible heritage.
Esther Merino Peral Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Giuseppe Adami Assoc. Archivio Compagnoni Floriani di Villamagna, Macerata, Italy
Between war and theater. Spectacle and military science in Ancien Régime Europe with Meta
The aim of this lecture is to presents an investigation of the relationship between the legacy of ancient military culture and the evolution of Italian theatre, in its dissemination throughout early modern Europe. This issue is exemplified in both the themes of theatrical representation and also the military training of the artificers who devised their display and whose ethos can be summed up in the motto “Armed in Letters, Lettered in Arms”,originating in the classical tradition. While the cultural reach of baroque theatre into all aspects of secular and religious life is now a topos of early modern historiography, this new perspective will reframe the question by focusing on the development of spectacle in the light of military innovation, using one of the most innovative tools of new technologies for its presentation, META.
Florinda Nardi, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
Silvia Manciati, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
Edipo tiranno at the Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza: a case of data processing in Hyperstage
This presentation focuses on a specific case study within the Hyperstage project: Edipo tiranno, the inaugural performance at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 1585. This production was remarkable not only for its prestigious origins—stemming from the collaboration between distinguished scholars and theatre practitioners—but also for the richness and diversity of the traces it has left behind. The performance of 3 March 1585 is documented through a unique and heterogeneous corpus of detailed sources, now dispersed across various archives in Italy and abroad. The presentation will illustrate the processes and methodologies adopted to catalogue these materials within Hyperstage, emphasizing the distinctive features of both literary and iconographic documents, as well as the project’s contribution to reconstructing and preserving the memory of this landmark production.
Carmelo Occhipinti Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
The first experiments with reflector-type floodlights in museums and art academies
The research activities of the Dark Vision Experience project aim to indicate a fundamentally innovative approach to the history of art, understood no longer only as the history of visual values, but as the history of objects and bodies interacting in every age in the spaces of human society. The philological examination of ancient sources will be used to develop a number of technological devices (LED lighting, projectors for videomapping, 3D virtual reconstructions) to create specific immersive environments in museums, churches and theatres, for educational or cultural entertainment purposes.
The DVE project stems from the need to rethink the methods and techniques of teaching and enjoying art history. The widespread use of digital images leads the modern observer to uncritically “replace” the actual reality of an art object with its digital reality, to the point of eclipsing the object behind its immaterial virtual image. The result is that not only young people but also scholars and teachers lose the correct historical perspective on our heritage, regardless of the physicality of the artwork, its functions, the conditions of visibility and light for which it was created. Today’s viewer is addicted to digital reproductions and artificial lights projected onto the works, which distort the perception of materials and colours, flattening them abstractly.
Elisa Passone Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
The ArTChat portal: experimenting RAG to automatically query ArTBase about Theatre
Generative AI and Intelligent Agents are a promise resource for Performing Arts, because these instruments can improve the usability of archives and platforms, enabling an interactive relationship between the user and the artistic materials. ArTChat is an interactive portal that, via LLMs, will allow different types of users to dialogue about italian theatres and theatre archives, asking question to the portal both about the material heritage preserved in the archives and the historical buildings and about theatre as a complex cultural phenomenon.
This project is designed not only for researchers but also for tourists and students, to enhance the performing arts cultural heritage and spread knowledge between a larger audience. The ArTChat portal will enable the automatic querying of the ArTBase Database, the first Italian National Database for Theatres and Theatre Archives. Currently, the project is focusing on training a model to automatically query ArTBase. This speech will discuss the results of the experiments conducted to adapt LLaMA to the DB, testing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented-Generation) to generate SQL queries, starting from natural language questions.
Paola Ranzini IUF, Avignon Université, France
Interrogating archives. The creative process between tradition and creative originality
The theatre’s archives documents are some fragments of an original unit : the ephemeral creation on stage. The challenge of using specific ontologies for a cataloging that allows a specific approach to these fragments for an appropriate consultation leads to conceive further possibilities of reading them and their relations. Starting from the specific case of conduites and relevés de mise en scène within the tradition of the staging of classics Authors at the Comédie-Française in Paris, this study aims to open tracks on the possibility of reading, interpreting and reconstituting the creative process before direction age, a complex network of variations on a traditional model, different of a director’s original creation. We will try to indicate concretely how the TEI and a hypothesis of reconstitution in 3D, conducted on the basis of the TEI tags, can provide the appropriate tools.
Riku Roihankorpi Tampere University and University of Helsinki, Finland
Performing Prompted Realities: An Ethics of Co-creativity for Generative AI
The era of generative AI invests heavily in prompted reality or realities; the recurrence and accumulation of the representational reality, along with the conceptual norms it (thus) imparts and reforms (Shumailov et al. 2024; Gibney 2024). Strongly present in Phillip Toledano’s AI-assisted recreation of Robert Capa’s lost D-day photos in his work We Are At War (2024), the problem of accumulating reimagined representations of contingent, agential realities (Barad) in the ever-expanding digital universe takes part in renewing our conception of how contemporary lifeworld is perceived and performed – how the prompted ’what if’ affects the (similarly prompted) ’what is’ (Taylor).
The paper discusses an attempt to sketch out an ethical approach to this co-creative reality of AI-assisted meaning-making. Examining the performative potentials of Titus Lucretius Carus’ (c. 1st century BCE) Epicurean discussion of clinamen, the indeterminacy and unpredictability that enables volition and the crafting of new meaning (Celis Bueno, Chow and Popowicz 2025), it suggests ways to conceive and employ a reactive ethics (of the Trumpian reality) through activating clinamen as well asan anarchic ethics (an ethics of the dead and the not-yet-born) through the teachings of clinamen.
The discussion bears implications of how collaborating with and relying on generative AI affects our understanding of contingency (corporeal performing of reality); multimodal / multispecies meaning-making; functional diversity (Where is humanity within humanity?) and cultural evolution / heritage (the blind spots & shades of AI).
Remi Ronfard INRIA, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
What is Computer Theater?
In this communication, I will propose a dual inquiry into the new discipline of computer theater.
First, I will examine computer theater as a new genre of theater that uses computers either in dramatic writing or theatrical performance, through numerous examples ranging from algorithmic theater to theater in the metaverse, including virtual and augmented reality theater. Then, I will approach computer theater as a new discipline of computer science dedicated to theater, through the lens of four fundamental concepts of computer science: algorithms, machines, languages, and information. Finally, I will attempt some comparisons between theater and music, which highlight the similarities and differences between the two disciplines of computer music and computer theater.
Andrea Siniscalco Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy
Reconstruction and measurement of pre-industrial sources for cultural heritage
The digital reconstruction of a space can be achieved through various techniques, ranging from traditional three-dimensional modelling to laser scanning and photogrammetry. When aiming for an accurate lighting simulation, it is essential to include photometric data detailed in files that are obtained through laboratory measurements of lighting devices. These data are typically acquired using instruments such as a goniophotometer. As part of an ongoing research project focused on the digital reconstruction of the “Quarto Camerino” in Villa d’Este, Tivoli, a key challenge was to reproduce the original lighting conditions of the space. Historical sources suggest that the lighting consisted of four mobile candelabra, approximately one and a half meters tall, and a portable oil lantern. However, the digital reconstruction of these elements presents several challenges. Beyond the absence of the original objects, it was necessary to replicate the combustible materials as closely as possible to the originals and to measure specially manufactured physical prototypes using modern photometric instruments, which are not designed to assess pre-industrial light sources. This contribution outlines the process through which flame-based light sources were measured in a laboratory, yielding both photometric and spectral power data that were subsequently used to digitally simulate the original lighting conditions of the space.
Artem Smolin St. Petersburg State ITMO University, Russia
ITMO University’s Interdisciplinary Projects in the Field of Cultural Heritage Preservation
As a rule, projects in the field of cultural heritage preservation involve interdisciplinarity. Using the examples of ITMO University projects (the opening of a new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, multimedia reconstruction of a theatrical event, bachelor’s theses etc.) the experience of interaction between specialists in the field of information technology and humanitarian competencies will be demonstrated.
Chris Van Goethem Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) Erasmushogeschool Brussel, Belgium
Canonbase, a collaborative linked open data platform for performing arts
Canonbase is a thematic, collaborative, open data platform, focused on the “invisible” part of performing arts and events. The database focusses on technical, architectural and design fields. It links existing information from different sources, and describes and annotates the information for improved usability for a specific group of users: artists, professionals, researchers, and interested audience. By doing so we valorize the (often hidden) treasures of other collections and create a sector specific entry to their information. During the first Canon Erasmus plus project we developed not only the database, but also different harvesting and visalisation techniques to make the information more visual readable. In our second Canon project we will focus on documenting lighting and set design. In this presentation we will give a short overview of the ideas and concepts behind our work.
Sarah Whatley Coventry University, United Kingdom
Reactivating digital dance archives: what role responsible AI?
AI is opening up new opportunities for conserving, accessing, sharing and reactivating archival content. In dance, the archives often include content that features, or is drawn from, dancing bodies. This raises important and interesting ethical questions about how the content may be reactivated, either for using as source data to generate data visualisations or to create new kinds of dance content for real or digital bodies. This presentation will draw on research that is exploring the responsible role of AI in working with a range of dance archives, some of which focus on disabled dancers, to ask questions about how we can develop processes that are ethical, resilient and inform preservation policies for securing the future of cultural heritage.
Leila Zammar, Loyola University of Chicago JFRC
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s intermedio La fiera di Farfa (Rome, Carnival 1639): A Case Study
My paper proposes a case study based on the archival documents held in the Barberini Archives of the Vatican Library related to the intermedio La fiera di Farfa, written by Giulio Rospigliosi, composed by Marco Marazzoli and staged in the Teatro Barberini by Gian Lorenzo Bernini as second intermedio of the opera Chi soffre, speri. For this intermedio the artist employed, among the other devices, the so-called “Machine of the Rising Sun” to represent the passage of time. Since there are no visual documents of the entire performance, but the archival sources offer interesting and detailed clues about the set design, I propose that all the data would be processed to reconstruct the theatrical event thanks to the technical competencies offered by the experts of the Hyperstage Project.
Anamarija Žugić Borić, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Sonic Traces in the Digital Afterlife of Theatre
This presentation explores the neglected status of music and sound in the digital archiving of theatre, with a focus on productions outside the realm of traditional music theatre – particularly in the Croatian context, but with transnational relevance. While digital humanities infrastructures have advanced in describing the textual, visual, and increasingly spatial dimensions of performance, sonic aspects often remain secondary – both materially and conceptually.
In contemporary dramatic and postdramatic theatre, music and sound often appear in forms that evade traditional genre classifications and are not fixed by scores or scripts. The absence of formal notation reinforces their marginalization: what cannot be easily described or encoded is often not preserved. Furthermore, being temporal and spatially unfixed, sound leaves fragile traces. As Michel Chion observes (2016), “The issue of traditional notation – for the purposes of study, archiving, access, and, of course, composition – comes up whenever constructing a sound is at stake… notation aims to solve via spatial symbolization the vexing problem of studying an object that is tied to time.”
This absence is not merely technical but rooted in long-standing ontological and cultural perceptions of theatre music as functional, ephemeral or secondary. The presentation reflects on what it means to archive a performance through sound: how sonic material might be preserved and interpreted beyond visual context, and how its affective and political potential can be reactivated through digital means. Thus, sound is considered not as mere documentation but as a generative site of meaning-making, requiring new curatorial and infrastructural approaches within digital humanities.