The Metaverse and Its Double: Expanded Reality and Theatre via a neurocultural perspective

The essay proposes a mediological analysis of Theatre and Expanded Reality, a confluence between performativity and immersiveness in the elaboration of communicative, representative and meaning forms. XR as a performative – not only visual – form of social (re-)elaboration can revamp Greek theatre as a personal information processing (de Kerckhove 1982) and the first medium (Deriu 2013), that does not, though, weaken the physical experience and intellectual ability of the audience: the théatron, ancestor of performance (Fischer-Lichte 2014) and of contemporary visual media, exists through bodily fruition, soliciting the hybridisation of memory forms. The arche-screenic (Carbone 2019) and dividual (Carbone 2019; Carbone and Lingua 2023), gestural (Grespi 2019) and embodied (Gallese and Guerra 2015) experience, open to theatre as a neurocultural (de Kerckhove 2008) quasi-prosthesis (Carbone and Lingua 2023), reuniting the ideas of screen (Streuven 2021) and ritual (Artaud 2000) in the body.