Women Protagonists of the Revolution (Also Digital)

Abstract

Brande Laurel’s first edition of Computers as Theatre is considered by many experts and critics to be a breakthrough and a surprising contribution not only to the world of computer practitioners and scientists. Through her choice to analyze computers and theater together, the author opens the door to new, unprecedented perspectives. They concern the nature of the machine and the possibility of deconstructing it in absolutely innovative ways. They also invest those who were considered and saw themselves as the protagonists: first and foremost the engineers, and then the computer engineers. The theater and its fundamental characteristics and its audience and the ways that they offer themselves to a new design of interfaces are the protagonists of this essay.
Brenda Laurel’s language not only does not follow hand in hand with the habits of the recent past, but her sympathetic, direct, colloquial, non-academic style introduces what we might call the ‘lived experience’. That which other of her colleagues in this “revolution” redefine not only in behavior and rules but in the depths of the self and of one’s own life. In the end all together, the voices of expert women in the field of media studies participate in the game, in a new game in which women are protagonists: those women who enter the game of interactivity.