In the metamorphous cosmos of the media arts, cinema has taken antecedence in the alchemical melding of artistic disciplines. Actor, welder, woodcarver, lawyer, doctor, editor, designer - and a hundred more roles come together in the composition of a narrative film. Infectious and enduring in its spidery reach, film has tainted media that existed before it, like black ink spilled on watercolor. (I continue to admire fine art students - the aspiring painters and sculptors - for choosing the road less traveled in this electronic age). When talking to a close friend about what he believed the next great artistic medium would be, he answered: “video games”. If film is the medium of the times, and the net is to be used as lubricant between the present and next big medium, the ability to “walk into” a movie should be no surprise. Yet while virtual reality may now sound like a dated (and never quite realized) concept, it is the antique artistic form - such as theater, that appears to be evolving into a strange crossbreed of past and future. Take the trailer for Grzegorz Jarzyna’s imperial stage production of MACBETH for St. Ann’s Warehouse this summer. The very fact that a stage production of Shakespeare’s darkest play is promoted with a trailer that plays (aptly) like a David Lynch film, may just be a sign of the times. Dizzying with blood, subtitled and onyx-quick, the promo adopts the lexicon not of the theater, but of the moving image; I’d be hard-pressed to distinguish it stylistically from a preview for SAW, or any number of worms oozing out of the current horror movie bag. Indeed, the production itself is stained with the beauties of multimedia; a blurb on St. Ann’s website proclaims “A dramatic two-story set, video walls, special effects, an extraordinary, layered soundscape, and a deep well of acting tradition transform Shakespeare’s web of intimacy, politics and the supernatural into a contemporary living film“. It’s Jarzyna’s brilliance as a director that will allow him to rule over the blood and drama, but I wonder, then, if The New Audience, programmed with efficient new eyes (designed by the times!)- will expect to see a “filmic play”? What will they demand to see, then, with these eyes, and what will theater, or painting, or sculpture, become in the next ten years for it? Or twenty? Or thirty…? Or…