Leggere la recitazione nella ecologia della performance digitale

This article examines acting within the ecology of digital performance, arguing that contemporary performers work in an environment where bodily presence, media technologies, and artificial systems continuously interact. Rather than marking a total break with twentieth-century theatre, digital performance reactivates long-standing questions about representation, spatial arrangement, narration, and the performer’s relation to the audience. The article identifies three main thematic areas. First, the dislocation of presence: with screens, projections, and live video, the actor’s presence is no longer stable or central but distributed across physical and mediated dimensions. Second, the manipulation of technologies: performers increasingly do not merely appear alongside devices, but actively control sensors, interfaces, and digital systems, turning technology into both a scenic tool and a dramaturgical partner. Third, the emergence of synthetic agency: robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence introduce autonomous or semi-autonomous forms of action that reshape the performer’s role and challenge traditional ideas of authorship and liveness. From these dynamics, the article derives a broader redefinition of acting as a practice of negotiation between control and unpredictability, embodiment and virtuality, human intentionality and machinic response. The performer becomes an interface within a hybrid system, co-creating meaning in real time with technological agents. The essay concludes that theatre studies and criticism must develop new analytical categories to address these transformations, including attention to interactivity, adaptability, technical mediation, and the ethics of artificial presence. Digital acting, therefore, is not the end of theatrical tradition, but the opening of a new chapter in performance history.