Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation

The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period ofexperimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital mediahas been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms ofinteractive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, andon the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution

The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period ofexperimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital mediahas been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms ofinteractive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, andon the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of thesepractices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, andanalyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of newmedia art.Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms oftheatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek dramato Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallelsbetween contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentiethcentury. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on thework of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, andothers.To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixonconsiders changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considersvirtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artistsincluding Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatricalspectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematicperformances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and onlinedrama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by sometechnological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, fromnavigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominanttheoretical approaches to digital performance--including what he callspostmodernism's denial of the new--and offers a series of boldly original argumentsin their place.