Critical Studies: Media Performance - History, Theory, and Contemporary Practice

9 units · Undergraduate

Intermittent: 9 units During the last decade of the twentieth century, new technologies have transformed the way we think about live performance. By examining the use of media (analog and digital) across the areas of sound/music, dance, theater, performance art, gaming, and installation, this course will traverse multiple theories and practices of performance history. With an eye to how changing theories of performativity have influenced how artists think about what it means to "perform," this seminar, in a sense, will be engaged in both philosophical and aesthetic research about how technology has changed the conventions of performative artistic practice. What was the role of technology in the dematerialization of the object of art? How have ideas about virtual, parallel worlds changed the way artists think about the "performing body?" If technology once acted as a prosthetic device, increasing an artist's sensual and perceptual world, what happens to the role and impact of an artist's work in the seemingly inert realms of programming or the increasingly autonomous areas of Robotic Intelligence? What does art look like in a post-internet age?