Performance, Technology, & Science by Johannes Birringer: This ground-breaking work of scholarship explores convergences between performance and science through an investigation of new technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. In tracing the evolution of digital performance within a particular history of engineering and theatre that now expands to a wide range of practices in dance, design, architecture, fashion, games, music, robotics, telematic performance, and “post-production”-theatre, the author focuses on interactive performance, installation and Internet art.

Internationally known practitioners and their works are introduced to formulate provocative ideas on computation, complexity, emergence and self-organizing systems in contemporary performance which are inspired by biology and biotechnology. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated essays uncover shifts that have occurred globally in the aesthetic understanding of performance within computer-augmented virtual and networked environments.

The work of key artists, theatre/dance companies, and laboratories demonstrates how scientific concepts have influenced digital performance, and how performance relates to neuroscience, biology and the life sciences. Challenging common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, this study addresses how artists use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensing technologies not only to enhance the range of expression and visualization, but to bridge the gap between the work and its user.

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and media artist; he directs the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, West London. He is author of Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism; Media and Performance: along the border; Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture, and co-editor of Dance and Cognition.