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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Koizumi Meirō’s VR theatre Prometheus Bound (2019) through Susan Sontag’s reading of Artaud as “absolutely carnal” and theories of embodied spectatorship. Created with ALS activist Mutō Masatane, the work exposes the rift between technological velocity and corporeal limits, asking how VR makes the body painfully return.

Paper long abstract

Virtual reality promises perceptual liberation from the physical constraints of the here and now. Yet anyone who has remained inside a VR headset long enough knows that the body eventually returns as interruption: heavy, aching, nauseated, and insistently carnal. This paper examines this tension between technological transcendence and corporeal limitation through Koizumi Meirō’s Prometheus Bound (2019), a VR theatre work created in collaboration with Mutō Masatane, an activist and performer living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Drawing on Maaike Bleeker’s theorization of embodied spectatorship, Laura Cull’s writing on Artaud and the “theatre without organs,” and Susan Sontag’s observation that, for Artaud, “the absolute mind is also absolutely carnal,” I argue that Koizumi transforms VR from an apparatus of disembodiment into an Artaudian technology of the flesh. The performance unfolds in two parts. First, spectators move through a virtual environment of accelerating light and informational velocity, accompanied by Mutō’s disembodied voice. Only afterwards do they encounter the body from which that voice emerged: Mutō seated in his motorized wheelchair, laboriously articulating the same narrative on video. This dramaturgical reversal transforms the seemingly bodiless freedom of the virtual into a cruel counterpoint to a body progressively losing its capacity to move.

Rather than positioning Mutō’s disabled body as an object of spectacle or victimhood, however, Prometheus Bound redirects corporeal vulnerability toward the spectator. As the VR environment intensifies, spectators stumble, lose balance, become nauseated, and confront the limits of their own proprioception. Koizumi thereby throws technological velocity and corporeal capacity deliberately out of sync. Reading this disjunction through Artaudian tragedy and contemporary theories of embodied spectatorship, I propose that Prometheus Bound asks not how technology might free consciousness from the body, but what happens when the flesh refuses to follow.