Mediating the Live: Making and Documenting Performance Art

This course focuses on performance art and how artists use recording technologies to document their acts. We will look at key examples of performance art from the past five decades to understand how artists have explored gesture, movement, conduct, speech, embodiment. Documentation is especially important to performance because of the ephemeral nature of the art form. While the performance document is not the same as the performance, it is central to our understanding of the medium and often intrinsic to the works themselves. Students will experiment with various presentation platforms and recording technologies to understand their relationship to performance art.