Today, more than ever before, the availability of recorded images and the interactive opportunities they provide have made it possible for theatre professionals to focus on form and aesthetic approach. Such artistic work with recorded images still essentially relies on the use of digital, video or film images on stage. Theatre stages are full of screens and offer countless visual experiences that may be fascinating or even aggravating. Among members of the artistic team, there are now a number of comparatively new functions such as ‘video artists’ or ‘image directors’.

This might lead us to the hasty conclusion that form takes pride of place, in some new updated version of art for art's sake. It should be recalled, though, that technical devices have always been used on stage. In the twentieth century, however, they acquired a higher degree of autonomy; they were freed from a purely functional dimension (such as lighting the actors) to achieve an artistic function of their own. They became free-standing elements of the language of theatre. In this development, recorded images powerfully contributed to the transgression of boundaries between the arts at the end of the twentieth century. This kind of transgression had actually already been experimented with by the avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1970s. No theoretical consideration on the use of media on stage can ignore the fact that as a living art, theatre is a hybrid that has always incorporated other arts and new techniques.

That said, technologies developed so fast during the twentieth century that their use on the stage resulted in the blurring of commonly recognized landmarks. When faced with performances where no actor is present, many spectators will wonder whether it is actually ‘theatre’ they are witnessing. With Stifters Dinge by Heiner Goebbels (2007) or Les Aveugles in Denis Marleau's version (2002) – to mention two examples that led to heated debate – it is difficult to determine which standards of reception should be used. Indeed, in both examples there is no actor on the stage. In Goebbels’ play, human presence is limited to that of technicians who at the start set up the device through which pianos will play on their own, shift on the stage and produce all sorts of visual and sound effects.