Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"Now that the shock of the virtual has subsided toward a 'new-normal' of computational interference in all areas of life, it is an advantageous moment to reflect on the passage through the virtual and back to the real. Digital culture has developed into a bio-virtual environment in which the categories of the biological and the virtual no longer stand as separate. The contributors to this volume respond to the questions raised by the 'after-event' of the digital through practice-led research analyses of performance processes, philosophical readings of the work of art and technology, and performance studies investigations of the subject in the spaces of technology. The volume examines a wide range of activities, from bio-art to internet child pornography, gaming and social networking technologies to the use of motion-tracking in developing choreography and documentation. The authors draw from diverse perspectives in dance, theatre, performance, film and music studies, digital arts and culture. \"-- Provided by publisher.

Theatre Journal's 1999 special issue on \"Theatre and Technology\" serves as a useful starting point for a consideration of the significant changes taking place in theatre and performance of current postdigital culture. This essay briefly considers the ontological questions and identity issues that arose during the introduction of media and digital studies in the fields of theatre and performance. The original ontological questions regarding media and performance and the strategies of identity formation and subject positions within electronic communications have been significantly altered regarding the hegemony and ubiquitous affects of the digital in contemporary life. A zone of indistinction marks the ontological structures of media and performance while the issues regarding identity and subjectivity in the spaces of technology are challenged in electronic communications, commerce, and capitalism. The essay defines the affects of the postdigital condition while exploring the developing aesthetics and politics of a \"postdigital performance.\" Examples of such performance include the installation and video work of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, immersive theatre company ANU Productions, and hybrid performance works by Blast Theory and the National Theatre of Wales. These works are argued as processes of \"thinking digitally,\" which is a means to engage and resist current electronic cultures of control, be they social, economic, or technological.

This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come 'after' identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions.

Now that the affects of the technologies of the virtual have spilled out across the topography of the real to such an impossible degree one can safely argue that the age of the virtual is now past, and that presently contemporary technologized and digital cultures are post-virtual (i.e. supersaturated with virtuality). Further, now that the biological is intimately folded within the technologies of the virtual in manners haptic, somatic and psychic, these contemporary technologized cultures can be modelled as bio-virtual, which means that life itself, through a strategy of bio-power, is contained and distributed through the ubiquitous digital modes of communication.

Sugggests that the ontology of performance, which exists before and after mediatization, has been altered within the space of technology. Informs that the developing art forms of web-based performance, interactive installations, and virtual environments are extending the boundaries of the theater and notions of what constitutes a performance. Argues that the inclusion of the televisual screen in performance, and the practice of performance in the screen world of virtual environments, constitutes the staging of the privileged object of the split subject. Offers a psychoanalytic reading, part textual analysis, focusing on the material object where performance phenomena take place. Demonstrates how questions of virtuality and the real are being played out in both live and mediated performative work and across a variety of historical contexts.

My sketchbooks are chock full of drawings, compiling observations, encounters and inspirations culled from my interactions with the world. Looking at over a decade's worth of sketchbooks, it is revealed that I have spent a lot of time drinking, more time being frustrated, and even more time playing with goofy ideas as if they were toys. How would a face look on a bottle? When would a bird need a beer? Where am I? I wanted to create a space that could foster for a group these same feelings that my sketchbooks illicit for me. In Some Fun, You Bet, my MFA thesis show, I tried to create a series of individual, large scale, sculptural pieces that would, in conjunction, simulate the collections that populate the pages of my sketchbooks. In collaboration with friends I feel I did just that.

The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems. (2013, 89)The project and biopolitics of the becoming-technology and the bio-virtual status of the posthuman subject is the topic of this chapter, with particular focus located in the charged and often sexual and erotic involvements of human and machine. It is the love between the organic and inorganic, the artificial and the real, the human and the machine, which has so often been represented in science fiction films from the robot Maria’s dance at the Yoshiwara Club in Metropolis (Lang 1927) to the computer operating system’s disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson in Her (Jonze 2013). There are, of course, a multitude of similar films approaching this topic of affective and sentient machines; these are too many to mention, but include 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968), Creation of the Humanoids (Barry 1962), and Blade Runner (Scott 1982). I will question the model of the posthuman and its biopolitical situation, and its representations, through a close reading of Her and its narrative of bio-virtuality. Using Alain Badiou’s model of the truth-event of love, I will explore the catalyst of the rise of the posthuman and the manners in which this affective process takes place in the films noted and within digital culture at large. The theories I call upon to make my argument are rooted in a Deleuzian model of the Anti-Oedipal operations of desiring-machines, joined against Marshall McLuhan’s reflections on the attraction between the human and the machine. At root in these theories is the production of desire. Laing, Reich, and Deleuze and Guattari, in attempting to correct Freud, sought to engage the radicaltransgressive nature of desire. In Deleuze and Guattari’s model, the human as a desiring-machine is the locus of production linked to a matrix of other machines which interrupt, alter, and feed the flow of desire:Everywhere it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. (1984, 1)The couplings and connections of interest within this chapter are those between the organic and the inorganic, in general, and the human and the computer, specifically. The argument of this chapter more specifically draws on contemporary posthuman theory, as articulated in the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Katherine Hayles, and Patricia MacCormack. The question at hand is: how do we understand the role of biopolitics in the rise of the bio-virtual and the posthuman’s condition (or predicament, as Braidotti names it) and its desire/love between the human and the machine?

The recent performance work, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, directed by Romeo Castellucci for his company, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, explores the ‘crisis of creation’, brought on by the scientific revolutions of genetics and nuclear physics and the cultural atrocity of the Holocaust. Genesi is analysed against Eduardo Kac's art installation, Genesis, which combines advanced media for telepresent interactivity and genetic engineering. Genesi and Genesis relate not only in the cultural concerns of science and technology studies, but in their interdisciplinary strategies, which include combining aspects of theatre, visual art, sculpture, and technology. Castellucci and Kac engage the risks inherent in the destruction possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and isolate manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged. The works signal an awareness of the constantly shifting boundaries and borders of aesthetic genres and the developing convergence of the disciplines of science and art.