Postdigital Performances Of Care

This is a timely examination of the survival instinct of practitioners and audiences engaged in theatre-making and theatre-going – a cultural activity that has been deemed among the riskiest in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis has brought issues of care and public safety to the foreground, which in turn has seen theatre practice necessarily adapt into a variety of remote forms of engagement. Postdigital Performances of Care explores care as a relational concept that is defined by either action or disruption. It considers how the notion of performative acts of care can be seen to include and impact us all. Rethinking the focus on care as an interpersonal and Levinasian face-to-face dynamic, this study takes as its central area of investigation a paradoxical tension that has emerged between a growing 'postdigital attitude' of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on online modes of practice at a time when physical distancing is vital. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and repurposing of theatre spaces have been enabling as well as controversial. A series of case studies assess performances from emerging theatre-makers and participatory online theatre productions; performances discussed include Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Handle with Care by Central School of Speech and Drama students and Tania El Khoury's As Far As Isolation Goes.

Covid-19 has been described as a 'digital pandemic'. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as 'digital' leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as 'postdigital', examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare. What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of 'covid-safe' remote forms of engagement, from 'Zoom plays' to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Coney's Telephone and Nightcap's Handle with Care.

"A timely examination of the survival instinct of practitioners and audiences engaged in theatre-making and theatre-going in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book explores the paradoxical tension that has emerged between a disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on online modes of practice. It identifies blindspots and ethical dilemmas that the shift to online and technologized practices may be engendering by assessing performances from emerging theatre-makers and participatory online theatre productions. Performances discussed include Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Handle with Care and Tania El Khoury's As Far As Isolation Goes"--

In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering. This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked 'informational selves' in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron's Avatar, Blast Theory's Karen, Ontroerend Goed's A Game of You, Randy Rainbow's online videos, Sisters Grimm's Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre's Lippy and Chekhov's First Play and Jo Scott's practice-as-research in 'place-mixing'. This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

This collection examines how the networked image establishes new social practices for the user and presents new challenges for cultural practitioners engaged in making, curating, teaching, exhibiting, archiving and preserving born-digital objects. The mode of vision and imaging, established through photography over the previous two centuries, has and continues to be radically reconfigured by a hybrid of algorithms, computing, programmed capture and display devices, and an array of online platforms. The image under these new conditions is filtered, fluid, fleeting, permeable, mobile and distributed and is changing our ways of seeing. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of research conducted at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) and its collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery over the last ten years. The book's contributors investigate radical changes in the meanings and values of hybridised media in socio-technical networks and speak to the creeping automation of culture through applications of AI, social media platforms and the financialisation of data. This interdisciplinary collection draws upon media and cultural studies, art history, art practice, photographic theory, user design, animation, museology and computer science as a way of making sense of the specific cultural consequences of the rapid succession of changes in image technologies and to bring the story up to date. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of visual culture, media studies and photography.

The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage’s (’silent’ piece) 4’33 . But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos, collectively known as 'sound art', has displayed a postmodern need to ’load’ modernism’s ’degree zero’. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century, Dr Linda Kouvaras’s Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local, national, gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus, the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement, but also engages with aesthetic standpoints, through numerous interviews, theoretical developments, analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian, and wider postmodern, context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies, the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory, which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music, providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform, music critics, scholars and educators.

Intermediality: the incorporation of digital technology into theatre practice, and the presence of film, television and digital media in contemporary theatre is a significant feature of twentieth-century performance. Presented here for the first time is a major collection of essays, written by the Theatre and Intermediality Research Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research, which assesses intermediality in theatre and performance. The book draws on the history of ideas to present a concept of intermediality as an integration of thoughts and medial processes, and it locates intermediality at the inter-sections situated in-between the performers, the observers and the confluence of media, medial spaces and art forms involved in performance at a particular moment in time. Referencing examples from contemporary theatre, cinema, television, opera, dance and puppet theatre, the book puts forward a thesis that the intermedial is a space where the boundaries soften and we are in-between and within a mixing of space, media and realities, with theatre providing the staging space for intermediality. The book places theatre and performance at the heart of the 'new media' debate and will be of keen interest to students, with clear relevance to undergraduates and post-graduates in Theatre Studies and Film and Media Studies, as well as the theatre research community.

How might spoken words be translated into choreography? This book addresses the field of verbatim dance-theatre, around which there is currently limited existing scholarly writing. Grounded in extensive research, the project combines dance studies and performance studies theory, detailed analysis of professional choreographic work and examples of experimental practice to then employ the framework of translation studies in order to consider what a focus on movement and an attempt to dance/move other people’s words can offer to the field of verbatim theatre. It investigates ways to understand, articulate and engage in the process of choreographing movement as a response to verbatim spoken language. It is directed at an international audience of dance studies scholars, theatre and performance studies scholars and dance-theatre practitioners, and it would be appropriate reading material for undergraduate students seeking to develop their understanding of choreographic processes that use written/spoken text as a starting point and graduate students working in the area of adaptation, verbatim theatre, physical theatre or devised theatre.