The Next Stage: Performance and Technology at the Crossroads
Saturday, December 14 – 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Franklin Furnace, 112 Franklin St., New York City
A symposium held in conjunction with the 'blast5drama' exhibition at
Sandra Gering Gallery.
(Special thanks to Martha Wilson and Franklin Furnace, Sandra Gering
Gallery and the X-Art Foundation.)
As technology-based art expands and realizes itself as more than the
point and click desktop interactivity of CD-ROMs and video games, many
artists, writers and performers are looking to the Internet as a new
arena for performance and performativity. With the advent of new
theatrical forms – multimedia operas, live, networked video
performances, and online, solely text-based MOO theater – comes a new
set of criteria and new understandings of the so-called virtual realm as
a stage. As a result, the very definition of "performance" is thrown
into question.
What is it about live streaming video that allows us to accept it as
performance, and not documentation of another, more "real" event? How
are the public and private spheres thrust into each others' realms with
art on the Internet? Often online performers – and audience members –
are sitting in front of computers in the intimacy of their own homes. An
audience's role is traditionally a public one: to bear witness to a
performance. Is an audience even necessary now and why? Do we
immediately consider what happens on the monitor's screen or what is
projected on the wall inherently tenuous – a documentation of something
else – or are we creating false distinctions when we speak of "digital"
vs. "analog" art? Are we trying to impose irrelevant models of space and
trying in vain to force Benjaminian auras onto these digital forms that
actively resist such mappings? Or is there really something solid and
visceral to live performance and art that no online experience can ever
mimic or transcend?
_The Next_Stage: Performance and Technology at the Crossroads_ will
address these questions and others, on the occasion of 'blast5drama', an
exhibition which features both digital and analog performances and
artworks.
Speakers:
Marlena Corcoran is the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at The
University of Iowa. She spent last year at the Institut des Textes et
Manuscrits Modernes/CNRS, Paris, working on a genetic hypertext of James
Joyce's _Ulysses_. […]
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a Brooklyn-based writer who has published
essays and interviews on art and culture in _Artforum_, _Parkett_, _The
Village Voice_, among other publications. She will be teaching "Popular
Performance and the Fine Arts: From Vaudeville to Matthew Barney" in the
Performance Studies Department at NYU this Spring and a course on The
Cultural Study of Fashion at Pratt. Forthcoming essays are, "Fade to
Blue: Artists Make Movies," _The Guggenheim Magazine_ (January 1996),
"You sober people.." an essay on emotions, technoculture and Prozac in
_When Pain Strikes_, ed. Cathy Busby et al (University of Minnesota
Press, Fall 1997). […]
Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer. She is the founder and
director of the Plaintext Players, an online performance troupe most
recently seen at Postmasters Gallery, New York, and the founder of the
Museum of Forgery (located online at www.sva.edu/alumni/forger/MOF).
[…]
Mark Nunes teaches in the Humanities Department at DeKalb College, where
he writes on the emergence of online culture and the production of
virtual "space". His recent articles include: "Baudrillard in
Cyberspace," (_Style_ 29 [1995]); "What Space is Cyberspace," (_Politics
and Social Theory in Cyberspace_, [Sage, 1997]); and "Virtual
Topographies" (_The Texts of Cyberspace_ [Indiana, forthcoming]). […]
Adrianne Wortzel is an artist and the author of The Electronic
Chronicles at http://artnetweb.com/projects/ahneed/first.html and is the
creator of Theoricon, an online amphitheatre for artists. […]
Moderated by Heather Wagner, an artist and online performer currently
working on a multimedia opera called "Angels in Ethernity".
