Collaborative Ph.D. project on “Digital Dramaturgy”, University of Tuebingen (Institute for Media Studies, Prof. Dr. Susanne Marschall) and Zurich University of the Arts (Institute for Performing Arts, Prof. Dr. Jochen Kiefer).

This doctoral project investigates how digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping dramaturgical practices within institutional theatre. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of language as a mediating principle, the research explores how AI-generated speech, algorithmic systems, and digital media challenge traditional notions of presence, authorship, and embodiment on stage.
Focusing on the transformation of dramaturgy from a text-centered interpretive practice to a dynamic, media-reflexive process, the project examines how digital systems alter narrative construction, performative agency, and audience reception. The central question is how theatre adapts when language and performance are no longer exclusively human, but shared with or generated by technical agents.

In contrast to models like New Media Dramaturgy, this research emphasizes the procedural and conceptual impact of digital systems themselves—how interfaces, code, and real-time generation redefine dramaturgical thinking. Digital Dramaturgy is thus approached as an expanded, hybrid practice at the intersection of theatre, media art, and algorithmic logic, engaging critically with the aesthetic, technological, and institutional shifts of contemporary performance.

Ilja Mirsky studied Cognitive Science at the University of Tübingen, as well as politics, literature, and psychology at the University of Haifa (Israel). He holds a Master's degree in Performance Studies from the University of Hamburg. His master’s thesis, which examined choreography at the intersection of physical and virtual realities, was awarded the 2020 Research Prize by the Society for Dance Research (Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung).

Since the 2022/2023 season, Ilja has worked as a dramaturg and digital dramaturg at the Residenztheater in Munich (Bavarian State Theater), serving as the artistic lead for digital art at the theater. From 2019 to 2022, he was part of the Institute for Theatrical Future Research at the Zimmertheater Tübingen, working as a dramaturg and occasionally as a creative coder, where he engaged with interdisciplinary approaches to theatre and technology.

Ilja is currently pursuing a Ph.D. on the subject of “Digital Dramaturgy", a collaborative project between the University of Tübingen (Institute for Media Studies, Prof. Dr. Susanne Marschall) and the Zurich University of the Arts (Institute for Performing Arts, Prof. Dr. Jochen Kiefer). He is also an associate doctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary program Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich.