The Fifth Wall. Digital Performance and the Metaverse

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, the Internet has fostered the emergence of virtual communities and participatory cultures, inviting users to become co-authors of collective creative experiences (Jenkins, 2006). As an evolution of the Web, the metaverse (Ball, 2022) has emerged as a performative, interactive, and community-based ecosystem that redefines current notions of “being online,” reshaping the boundaries between physical and virtual, private and collective, human and more-than-human (Barad, 2013; Braidotti, 2013). Before and after the pandemic, metaversal environments have served as public spaces, hosting social interactions, artistic experimentation, and collaborative creative processes. This paper investigates whether the metaverse can be understood as a fifth wall (Steyerl, 2021) or a digital théatron (Del Gaudio, 2020): a Future Screen, where performance is staged through experiential, relational, and participatory interfaces. Through the analysis of selected case studies—from Giacomo Verde’s early telematic experiments (Monteverdi, 2023) and the online happenings of Second Front, to more recent productions supported by the Residenze Digitali project—this article explores how chat systems, avatar embodiment, and UX design operate as dramaturgical vectors that structure participation, relational presence, and distributed authorship (Norman, 2013; Dixon, 2007). These performative affordances configure what Floridi (2022) defines as extended experience, wherein interaction unfolds through embodied relationality, sensory immersion, and affective responsiveness, exceeding the bidimensional logic of traditional screen interfaces. In this framework, metaverses emerge as performative environments rather than mere representational spaces—sites of post-screen performativity and metaversal dramaturgy, where liveness, presence, and co-authorship are collectively negotiated in real time. These so-called OTONI (Boccia Artieri, 2023) reveal a new empathic pact between performer and viewer, shaped by real-time interaction, digital presence, and affective interfaces. Finally, the paper reflects on whether these metaversal performances may represent, as Youngblood (2020) suggests, new “gymnasia” for the collective construction of critical and conscious digital communities.