Course Description


What does it mean to perform through/with/in digital media? How can artists harness new media and available technology for performance work? Further, how do we perform the daily use of technology? To investigate these questions we will begin by examining avant-garde practices in theater and literature during the 50s, 60s and 70s together with media art of the 80s and 90s. We will then trace these foundations within contemporary approaches to performance work. While pursuing the practice, history, and theory of performing in and through media, students develop a final project that responds to class themes. An emphasis on concept ensures that students of all technical levels are welcome to engage in theater workshops, class writing exercises, and technical labs Short curated readings will augment our creative practice and fall within broad categories: theoretical texts in performance and media, scripts, interventions in online communities, screenings of installation and performance documentation, video art, games, digital literature, sound recordings, project pamphlets, and reviews. To inspire our work in emerging genres we will consider a variety of artists that perform with media beyond the confines of a computer screen including : The Wooster Group, Alan Sondheim, Laurie Anderson, Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery, Nico Muhly, Lynn Hershman, Brian Eno, Janet Cardiff, and George Higgs.


Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Day 2 Fluxus and Composition 1/4/11

Administrative:
  1. Portfolio of process and artist documentation

  2. Attendance Policy

  3. reminder to email me saying you have read the syllabus.


Exercise from 1/3/11

before we begin
  1. Impressions from the exercise, what was instructive, what was destructive?

  2. What can we learn from the original fluxus movement and why is it still relevant today? Especially for artists incorporating media?

The script I gave you was to expand your notion of performance and score as well as address the key concepts of interval, time and space. Since our resources are limited in this class, the the hope is that you will be able to treat accessible aspects of digital culture/digital media you encounter “in the wild” as you did this score and consider ways of interpreting them for performance. Also, on a practicle level we will consider the fluxus paradigm of what is simple and does not need to reply on complex technical apparatus.


Key Concepts: Fluxus to Digital Media
  • Fluidity-Flux-Improv that is situationally determined.
  • Democratization of the production and consumption of art.
  • Chance methods that contribute to the democratization and the real or supposed reduced influence of the author..
  • Letting the work of art make itself.
  • Ephemerality of art object and process.
  • Loosening of conventional boundaries between=intermedia John Cage Theater Piece #1


John Cage

b
Cage organized the performance in line with his recent study of Huang Po's Doctrine of Universal Mind, a key Zen text which explained that nature as a complex of non-hierarchical events where everything has equal value.

George Maciunas-”concretism”: “engages with the world of concrete reality rather than artificial abstraction of illusion.” In theater: “replacement of artificial plots and predetermined acts on stage with unrehearsed and undetermined events resulting from spontaneous and improvised actions of a group of people who have been given by the author only specific tasks or a general outline of actions. - in Avant-garde performance: live events and electronic technologies.



“theater is something which engages the eye and the ear. The two public senses are seeing and hearing; the senses of taste, touch, and odor are more proper to intimate, nonpublic, situations. The reason I want to make my definition of theatre that simple is so one could view everyday life itself as theatre.
-"Interview with John Cage" in the Drama Review: Thirty Years of Commentary on the Avant-Garde.
John Cage, “Freeman-etudes” score, 1952-53 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Freeman-etudes-18.gif
Freeman Etude #23, 1990 with notation example based on star chart
Williams Mix info
Great Syllabus with music

Merce Cunningham: http://www.merce.org/about/mondays-with-merce.php

http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/hand-drawn-spaces-1998/

http://www.merce.org/company/biped.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-QMlTsNtxM

http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/loops-2001-present/open-acess-data/

http://vimeo.com/4298574


Artists of Interest based-on surveys.

Nam June Paik With Charlotte Moorman: TV Cello, 1984. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9hTdaFz36c

Eduardo Kac: http://www.ekac.org/, http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html,

Tiffany Holmes: http://tiffanyholmes.com/

Video Game Performance Art: http://illusion.scene360.com/video/11772/video-game-performance-art-pacman-tetris/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Scene360Illusion+%28Illusion+360%29

Brody Condon, “Worship Online Game Performance”: http://tmpspace.com/worship.html and “Death Animations” http://www.tmpspace.com/deathanims.html

Video Games at Brick: http://www.bricktheater.com/gameplay


Assignment:

Talk more about assignment and bring up site pal. http://www.sitepal.com/

type of body art that deals with questions of authenticity, identity and self-hood in digital age.


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