Performance on the Edge takes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiment of erotic fantasies.Performance on the Edge addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes and bodily identities and virtual communities.
This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging, and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer’s writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination. If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a "forest knowledge," where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments requires a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic – the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance, and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide. This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.
The author discusses the performance aspects of such political events as the breaching of the Berlin wall and the destruction of Sarajevo, and examines the use of video and agitprop performance in political activity, including protests by the gay activist group ACT UP and the disquieting performances of the former pornography actress and sex worker Annie Sprinkle. Birringer ends with a discussion of the continuing incursions of business into digital media, including the "imperialism of technological enhancements" as experienced in the culture of constant "upgrades" and the omnipresence of Bill Gates.
This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging, and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer’s writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination. If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a "forest knowledge," where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments requires a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic – the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance, and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide. This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.
Performance on the Edge takes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiment of erotic fantasies.Performance on the Edge addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes and bodily identities and virtual communities.
The author discusses the performance aspects of such political events as the breaching of the Berlin wall and the destruction of Sarajevo, and examines the use of video and agitprop performance in political activity, including protests by the gay activist group ACT UP and the disquieting performances of the former pornography actress and sex worker Annie Sprinkle. Birringer ends with a discussion of the continuing incursions of business into digital media, including the "imperialism of technological enhancements" as experienced in the culture of constant "upgrades" and the omnipresence of Bill Gates.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.