Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field

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Introduction The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 1915 Putting things in order is not the easiest of tasks. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2004

Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field: Why Taxonomy? Since the mid-1980s, and with increasing emphasis over the past twenty years, performance practice integrating media has developed into a distinct genre that goes by a variety of names such as multimedia performance, intermedial performance, cyborg theatre, digital performance, virtual theatre, and new media dramaturgy, among others. Each of these titles reflects subtle but significant differences in how critics and practitioners delineate the parameters of the genre, which can be understood broadly as encompassing any performance with an integral reliance upon, and relationship to, forms of media that surpass traditional uses of lighting, sound, and scenic effects. If we want to understand the many dimensions of these performance practices clearly, communicate the core issues articulately, and integrate new innovations responsively, we do not require another all-encompassing term or totalizing narrative; rather, we need new tools and methods that embrace and build upon the multiplicity of issues and perspectives inherent in the field. The field, moreover, is rapidly expanding and changing, and these changes necessitate a constant renewal of techniques. As Martin Rieser and Page 2 →Andrea Zapp argue, “We are entering an age of narrative chaos, where traditional frameworks are being overthrown by emergent experimental and radical attempts to master the art of storytelling in developing technologies.”1 Although Rieser and Zapp refer specifically to film and other screen-based arts, their project—including an explicit interest in audience engagement and “new navigational concepts”—certainly applies to contemporary performance. Formal experiments that were once considered the avant-garde—the cutting edge—have now become familiar within many performance contexts, and emerging technologies have arguably accelerated formal innovation and experimentation. One response to these changes has been Hans-Theis Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater (1999, trans. 2006) among other theoretical approaches. Significantly, Lehmann and others have pursued their subjects in relatively familiar analytical modes, usually focusing on a few case studies to illustrate the larger patterns and trends suggested by the field at large and framed by individual scholars and authors. Despite these challenges, understanding the connections among media, technology, and performance has never been more vital. Individual performances in theatres, galleries, and in public spaces increasingly rely upon sophisticated media (both visible and not) for their realization. Globally, audiences are overwhelmingly conditioned by media—not just cinema and television, but also new media, mobile technologies, and the Internet. At the same time, a range of new technological developments in surveillance and what Sarah Bay-Cheng has elsewhere noted as “self-surveillance” in the form of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc., have turned previously private spaces into venues for performance (though perhaps unwittingly). New technologies both enable technologically dependent theatre and facilitate new modes of performance outside of traditional venues. Understanding these connections is thus not just a matter of theatre and performance studies, but necessary for a broader comprehension of contemporary culture. Whereas scholars usually consider individual performances and look to situate them among their respective historical, social, textual contexts, and informed by one or more prevailing theoretical approaches, in this book our

focus is not on specific performances (although individually we discuss quite a few), but rather on developing ways to understand performances within a system; that is, our focus is on taxonomic structures and, more importantly, methodologies for generating fluid and dynamic structures, capable of responding effectively not only to the current examples of performancePage 3 → and media intersections, but also incorporating new forms as they emerge. To this end, we introduce the outlines of three distinct taxonomies that map the intersections of media and performance, each one addressing a separate set of questions and opening up a distinct field of critical inquiry. Our hope is that each of these taxonomies, or more specific taxonomic methods, considered independently, will provide a useful critical tool for scholars and practitioners, provoking, informing, and lending precision to future discussions and analyses of media-enhanced performance practices. We also explore the ways these three analytical approaches complement, intersect, and enrich one another, so that they function together like the three blind men in the famous Indian parable who each touch a different part of an elephant to draw radically different conclusions about the nature of the beast they are investigating. Most important, our hope is that these three taxonomies will serve as points of departure for future research, inspiring others to revise and adapt them, and to create new methodologies in response to new works, changing contexts, and evolving ideas. Of course, one might rightly question the purpose of taxonomies. Can such systems of classification really tell us anything about the performances we see, the artists who create them, or the context in which audiences attend and participate in those performances? More pointedly, why should we focus on categories—the metadata of performance—rather than on the work itself? These are questions we address in part in our next chapter, which broadly traces the histories of taxonomies, but also questions we each struggle with as we develop our working models for analysis. The dynamic nature of the evolving field of theatre, performance, and technology has produced a body of scholarly work that while excellent in many ways, can never capture more than a fragment of an evolving landscape. This is not to suggest that such studies lack value. On the contrary, existing books and projects (such as those outlined in this volume) address many of the ongoing questions of the field and their analyses of specific works, companies, and artists give critical examples of new work as it emerges, providing both historical context and theoretical acumen. At the same time, the desire for surveys and overviews of this new work recurs. New projects attempt to map and remap the shifting terrain of media and performance intersections, and this emphasis on the metaphors of space is not insignificant. Johannes Birringer’s 1998 Media and Performance, for example, defined these relations as a border and we see the metaphor everywhere among references to landscape, terrain, borders, even, the field itself. Page 4 →This was the explicit intention in Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010), a book project involving four coeditors and thirty authors representing almost a dozen different countries. Yet, for all of its breadth, one could hardly call the book exhaustive. Even Steve Dixon and Barry Smith’s monumental Digital Performance (2007) could not catalog everything in its more than 800 pages and we can point to several major works published since its publication that challenge the formations and conclusions. So it is with every publication. Almost as soon as a print publication emerges, changes in technological developments and the field threaten to at least complicate, if not sometimes invalidate, its conclusions. Of course, like any academic discipline, we expect that some ideas will hold over time, while others will shift and change in response to new discoveries, ideas, and other revelations. Distinct, though hardly unique, to media and performance is the speed of these changes and the link between the changes in media technologies and their deployment within performance contexts. The field’s conceptual breadth coupled with its technological dynamism thus requires a different approach. Just as Freud, in his 1915 essay “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” proposed a categorization and classification as the means for understanding the emerging field of psychology, so too does contemporary media-infused performance necessitate more dynamic mechanisms for analysis. Taxonomies are not merely convenient systems for intellectual bookkeeping. In every domain—biology, particle physics, political science, educational theory, art history, literary analysis, and performance studies—implicit and explicit taxonomies provide us with cognitive structures that shape the way we perceive and engage with the phenomena we investigate. As Stephen Jay Gould observes, “taxonomies are theories of knowledge, not objective pigeonholes, hatracks, or stamp albums with places preassigned.”2 Similarly, in Archive Fever,

Jacques Derrida argues that “archivization produces as much as it records the event.”3 For example, human beings are apt to regard dolphins very differently when we classify them as a type of mammal, like ourselves, rather than as a type of fish.4 Furthermore, every phenomenon and event falls under multiple taxonomies associated with different knowledge domains. For example, a U.S. one-dollar bill has a place within a taxonomy of world currencies, alongside the U.S. quarter coin and the Japanese 1000 yen note, and also within a taxonomy of U.S. presidential images, alongside Gilbert Stuart’s paintings, and within a taxonomy of prints, alongside Edvard Munch’s lithographic Page 5 →impressions of The Scream. None of these taxonomic classifications is more “correct” than the others, yet as we willfully alternate among these three different perspectives on the same object, we will find different aspects of it becoming salient, and different questions about it more pressing. Cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn observes that A theory never explains an entirely unique event, only an event viewed against a background of distinctions and equivalences defined by the vocabulary with which the events are described. That is what I mean when I say that theories address phenomena as “events under descriptions.”5 Because taxonomies structure our interpretation and even our very perception of the world around us, they are tremendously useful and powerful—but they also have the potential to become deeply coercive. They simultaneously enable and limit our capacity for analysis. The solution we propose is to develop and adopt our taxonomies self-consciously and provisionally. By presenting three different taxonomies addressing different aspects of media-enhanced performance practices, we resist an essentialist approach to taxonomic theory, and explicitly invite readers to shift between different cognitive frames and experiment with different ways of slicing the conceptual pie.

Documenting the Digital The changes and evolutions digital technologies wrought in performance practices have affected the criticism, historicizing, and analysis of those performances. Digital tools, such as high-definition video, motion capture, and emerging modes of data analysis impact the ways in which audiences and scholars view and interpret contemporary intersections of media and performance. Academic libraries are working to collect, expand, and protect their digital collections, and digital preservation has become a mainstream priority. The Library of Congress, for example, has devoted increasing resources to its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. At the same time that material collections are shifting to digital versions and access to print collections declines, the tools for digital historiography are rapidly expanding. The Digital Public Library project, for instance, has the goal of creating “An open, distributed network of comprehensivePage 6 → online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”6 New research tools affect not only the production of new media-performance interactions, but also how we study them. Critical theory and history throughout the latter half of the twentieth century has often argued for considerations of culture in mediated contexts, dating to Norbert Wiener’s introduction of cybernetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Marshall McLuhan founded his media analysis in evolving cultural contexts, such as “the global village” for example, and Jean-FranГ§ois Lyotard based his analysis of the postmodern condition within the language of what he called an era of “computerized societies.”7 Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari advocated for the structure of the rhizome as the fundamental structure for their influential book, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). The rhizome, they argued, best corresponded to the multiple, simultaneous, and chaotic formulations of modern culture. As a conceptual model, the rhizome privileged principles of “connection and heterogeneity,” “multiplicity,” and what they called “asignifying rupture”: the ability of the rhizome to be cut or broken at any given point, but to restore itself along those fault lines. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never

posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad.8

In many ways this description aligns with Lev Manovich’s notion of the database as a collection of “individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other.”9 Not surprisingly, one of the most well-trafficked websites to document, present, and highlight emerging arts practices in new technologies is titled rhizome.org. One effect of these changes has been a shift from the study of mediated performance as the study of singular events to the consideration of relations and connections in and among these performances. In her lecture, “After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era,” Tara McPherson suggests that we are the midst of what she calls the “post-archival moment”; a shift from the archive as a collection of objects, to the database that attends to the relations among the objects of study over the objects themselves. She argues for Page 7 →“multimodal scholarship”—work that attends to the relations among culture and the methods of analysis, and that attends to the role of presentation and publication in relation to the ideas generated.10 McPherson frames her argument, in part, as a response to Diana Taylor’s keynote lecture, “Save AsВ .В .В . Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies.” In this talk, Taylor revisits her earlier consideration of the tension between the archive and the repertoire in light of evolving digital technologies.11 Taylor here examines the ways in which the digital adopts and revises the metaphors of the archive like so many other icons of print culture that affect the digital (i.e., desktop, files, documents, folders, etc.). Considering diverse forms of digital archives, including the records of her own Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, Taylor concludes that the digital archive “can prove profoundly anti-archival.”12 This digital archive is not quite the repertoire that Taylor favors in her earlier book, but it escapes some of the historic pitfalls of the hegemonic and monolithic colonial archives. McPherson, however, positions the role of the digital somewhat differently, arguing not for an anti-archive, but a “post-archive” in which the “database overrides, supercedes, and obsolesces the archive.”13 In this sense, McPherson’s analysis corresponds to Manovich’s argument for the database as a “cultural form of its own.”14 “As a cultural form,” he wrote, it “represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list.” Juxtaposed against narrative (Manovich describes the database and narrative as “natural enemies”), the database claims “an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.”15 Rather than the archive per se, then, McPherson focuses on the logic of the database as “the normalizing process that privileges abstract relations among data while also stripping this of context. Things in a database,” she contends, “get sorted through a series of structuring relations like metadata that radically limit what can be seen.” McPherson suggests that new modes of scholarship makes visible inherent relations and connections within these works, and can be simultaneously responsive to viewers. Her online project Vectors, A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular demonstrates the possibilities for these new forms of scholarship that not only use digital tools for analysis, but also create new scholarship that explicates the dynamic connections among cultural products in digital contexts.16 These emerging methods of analysis and scholarship have clear significance for theatre and performance studies in general, and media-performance intersections in particular. Digital technologies have had a Page 8 →direct impact in theatre and performance analysis, particularly in relations to questions of presence, documentation, and spectatorship. To cite only one recent example, the introduction to Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being (2012) details the ways in which media intersections with performance have “refocused on processual understandings and practices of presence,” prompting what the editors identify as an archeological turn “evidenced in strategies for documentation which have increasingly come to emphasize the reader or viewer’s relationship with that which remains over the reconstruction of past events the transparency of one medium, context and time to another.”17 Similarly, Philip Auslander reconsiders the role of digital interactions in his essay, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective” (2012). There, Auslander rethinks the technological determinism of his earlier arguments (cf. Liveness, 1999, 2008), concluding that the effect of the liveness is not one solely determined by the technology, nor of the singular spectator, but rather, that “digital liveness emerges as a specific relation between self and other, a particular

way of вЂbeing involved with something.’”18 Scholars engaging with this media and performance thus confront three critical issues. First, how can new scholarship keep up with a dynamic, growing, and globally dispersed field of media and performance intersections? Second, how can theatre and performance studies attend to the dynamic connections without reifying certain connections at the expense of others? Finally, if the digital is a condition not just of technological devices but also a specific relation between an engaged participant and the effects of that technology distributed throughout culture, how might new research account for these spectatorial interactions? Though challenging, the questions posed within theatre and performance studies are directly and perhaps uniquely related to the emergence of networks in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Geert Lovnik describes in Networks without a Cause (2011), “Network culture can be understood as social-technical formations under construction. They rapidly assemble, and can just as quickly disappear, creating a sense of spontaneity, transience, even uncertainlyВ .В .В . collaboration is the foundation of networked cultures.”19 Criticism of performances across digital domains and subsumed within media networks require new forms of criticism and modes of scholarship that can account for a dynamic, changing, and increasingly collaborative field. Because of its emphasis on gesture, time-based work, and documentationPage 9 → of the seemingly ephemeral, performance studies offers the richest and potentially most fruitful environment for these debates. Such considerations necessitate a multidimensional approach to the field of media-performance intersections that can attend not only to the individual instances of performance, but also respond to the changing dynamics of media, technology, and performance. As we see in the examples of current scholarship, there has emerged a tension between a scholarly desire to affirm certain terminology, methodologies, and representative cases in a field that is inherently dynamic, contradictory, and fluid. This is evident in nearly all prior attempts to write an overview for this field, including Dixon and Smith’s Digital Performance, Sarah Bay-Cheng et al.’s Mapping Intermediality, and Rosemary Klich and Edward Sheer’s Multimedia Performance, among others. For an emerging field that is both geographically diffused and conceptually diverse, including both experimental work and commercial products, no one publication or single approach can comprehensively outline the field for more than a brief period of time. The solution, then, is not to publish more books that focus on individual objects of study, but to develop, as Tara McPherson and Matthew Fuller argue, methods of scholarship and publication that attend to the relations among objects of study. To do this requires two coordinated elements: (1) a publication system that is flexible and responsive to the rapid changes, evolutions, and developments in the field; and (2) a system that includes a diversity of perspectives and engagements in real time. That is, to approach a field such as this, we must integrate both the rigor of traditional methodologies with the responsiveness of new digital systems. This book, then, is just the beginning. Rather than attempting a final (or even “timeless”) categorization of media-performance intersections, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field offers a new research methodology that engages the notion of taxonomies as the means to trace, record, and analyze the diverse and fluid connections among different forms of media and performance. The goal here is not to present a single or final system or organization, but to suggest three distinct examples that may serve as templates for future taxonomies created by readers, scholars, students, artists, and any other interested participants. The next stage for this project is to expand from a print publication to an online interface, where users can input data on performances in real time, observe the responses of other users, and dynamically track the evolution of media and performance intersections.Page 10 → The online environment will include not only all three taxonomies outlined here, but also will provide the opportunity for users to propose and position their own taxonomies. In this way, we emphasize not only the individual works that make up our current networks of contemporary performance, but also shift our critical emphasis to the wider relations among these. It is through these connections between art and technology that we can then understand the dimensions of digital culture more broadly. Or, as Matthew Fuller writes in his influential Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005), “It is one of the powers of art or of invention more generally to cross the planned relations of dimensionality—the modes or dynamics that properly form or make sensible an object of process. As it does so, other worlds gently slip into, swell across, or mutate those we are apparently content that we live in.”20

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Texts and Contexts Digital Culture, Performance, and Media Live performance’s entanglement with media extends back, at least, to the advent of cinema at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Among myriad examples are Winsor McCay’s live vaudeville performances with a projected image of his animated dinosaur Gertie in the 1910s, director Erwin Piscator’s experiments with newsreel footage onstage in the 1920s, the intermedial art events at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, Josef Svoboda’s polyscreen system of projections from the 1950s through the 1980s, and the mixed-media explorations of Billy KlГјver’s E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) and Allan Kaprow’s happenings in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, the integration of media—including video, digital technologies, and film, among others—into performance might be described as having moved from the background to the foreground, as exemplified in the ongoing explorations of theatrical companies such as the Wooster Group or the Builders Association and directors such as Robert LePage. Multimedia performance also has a foundation in artinstallation practices (e.g., Bill Viola and Nam June Paik, to name only two), and dance (from the light dances of LoГЇe Fuller and the interactive dance performances of Troika Ranch to Merce Cunningham’s motioncapture choreography). Performance in this context applies to a range of experimental music techniques and has recently been extended to bio-art practices (Eduardo Kac, Critical Arts Ensemble). The field has increased and diversified across a broad spectrum of academic and aesthetic disciplines, including art history, media studies, visual studies, computer science, musicology, and others. The diversity of this work and the array of critical responses from the humanities and arts have engenderedPage 12 → a proliferation of new definitions and terminologies amid a growing library of critical texts. What follows is a broad outline, not intended to be comprehensive, of scholarly approaches that have emerged over the past few decades to address performance’s intersection with media in general, and digital media in particular. Among the first books to engage seriously with performance in digital contexts were the product of early media and film theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Gene Youngblood. Both McLuhan and Youngblood draw on popular performance genres (cinema, television, and theatre) to demonstrate the changing relations of media, representation, and audience. Although neither specifically refers to media, computers, and performance as we think of them today, McLuhan and Youngblood’s early theories and arguments are startlingly relevant to contemporary analyses of digital performance. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) argues for a redefinition of cinema according to the principles of cybernetics. Drawing on the pioneering work of computer scientist Norbert Wiener and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, with an emphasis on Eastern philosophy and religion popular in the 1960s, Youngblood articulates a redefinition of cinema and media practices that remains remarkably contemporary, even prescient, in the age of digital culture. Arguing against media specificity, Youngblood notes that, “The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the messages of the social organism.” Citing John McHale, he writes, “The term вЂarts’ requires expansion to include those advanced technological media which are neither fine nor folk” and elsewhere argued for a “synaesthetic cinema,” as “the only aesthetic language suited to the postindustrial, post-literate, man-made environment with this multidimensional simulsensory network of information sources” that would represent “the end of drama.”2 That same year, 1970, Marshall McLuhan expanded his earlier theories from The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), to his stunning, though often overlooked, book From ClichГ© to Archetype (1970). There, he suggests that with the advent of the satellite, the division between a “natural” world and an “artificial” one has eroded. “Since Sputnik and the satellites,” he writes The planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends вЂNature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning вЂAll the world’s a

stage, and all the men and women merely Page 13 →players’ (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to вЂdo their thing’ everywhere.3

Both Youngblood and McLuhan point to a critical demarcation in the relations among theatre, performance, and different forms of media. Although both focus on the televisual as a point of transition, their arguments seemingly predict the advent of what we now call “digital culture,” which Charlie Gere suggests, “defines and encompasses the ways of thinking and doing that are embodied within that technology, and which make its development possible. These include abstraction, codification, self-regulation, virtualization and programming.”4 Or, as Andy Lavender points out in his essay, “Digital Culture,” contemporary performances may be best understood within a digital paradigm that relies upon ubiquitous computing and digital devices, even when these technologies are not the dominant aspects of an individual performance.5 In 1999, just in time for the end-of-the-millennium anxieties and celebrations, four critical books arrived to comment on the intersection of digital media and culture: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles; Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin; Liveness: Performance in Mediatized Culture by Philip Auslander; and Postdramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann (translated into English, 2006). These authors all position their work at a kind of a break or shift in their respective fields: literary studies, media studies, performance studies, and theatre studies. For example, Hayles’s very title suggests the end of an era (and the potentially ominous beginning of another), though she ultimately reassures readers that “the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity.”6 She does, however, conclude that the posthuman perspective has fundamentally altered “the relation of human subjectivity to its environment,” noting that this transition appears distinctive within the context of narrative.7 Bolter and Grusin emphasize the “new” of new media as a particular revision of prior forms of mediation, describing the World Wide Web as “perhaps our culture’s most influential expression of hypermediacy” and further suggesting that virtual reality might portend the “end of mediation” itself.8 Auslander challenges the notion of a live theatre by problematizing the Page 14 →very ontology of liveness itself, arguing that, “historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around” and suggesting that the dominance of mediated forms over live events in a contemporary context results in live performances “produced either as replications of mediatized representations of as raw material for subsequent mediatization.”9 Tracing this process historically, Auslander concludes that in the present moment (1999), any shift in favor of the live event seems unlikely. He argues for a fundamentally changed relation between theatre and media. In particular, he questions widespread claims about the uniqueness of theatrical co-presence by contesting Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as that which disappears, and her claim that “performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”10 In response to Phelan’s assertion, Auslander argues for an historical contextualization of the relation between performance and media rather than a presumed ontological definition of performance as always and necessarily “live.” “To understand the relationship between live and mediated forms,” Auslander writes, “it is necessary to investigate the relationship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined.”11 Liveness has provoked extensive critical response, most recently from Martin Harries, whose essay “Theater and Media before вЂNew’ Media” offers an important corrective to Auslander’s characterization of theatre and media as rivals. Harries asks: How can we specify the function of the embodied presence of performers and audience at a particular historical moment? How does theater put such presence to use—appeal to it, assume it, reject it,

challenge it—in concrete ways, in particular performances? This does not entail the restoration of some metaphysical value to that holy grail, “copresence.” Indeed, it does not necessarily entail questions of ontology at all. It does mean patiently asking what it means when people assert that it matters that two people were present in the same room and that a performance happened in that room. How might theatrical strategies modify the grip of mass cultural formations?12

Auslander’s theoretical arguments about liveness and Phelan’s definition of performance have so extensively influenced the field that few new studies in media and performance begin without some reference to what is often described as “the liveness debate.” Page 15 →Like Auslander, Lehmann attempts to understand the conditions that created the cultural contexts for media and performance intersections and to propose a theory through which to analyze the meaning of performance within this context. His conclusion (more widely explored in the 1999 German publication than in the abridged English translation of 2006) suggests that the role of technology and media has fundamentally undermined the privileged position of text—that is, drama—in contemporary theatre practice. Lehmann writes forcefully about media’s power over previously unmediated events, contextualizing his influential assessment of contemporary performance aesthetics within what he calls the “caesura of the media society” and arguing for a new “paradigm of postdramatic theatre.”13 Taking aim at the histories that sought to locate the origins of contemporary media performance in the historical avant-gardes, Lehmann argues that, “The newly developed aesthetic forms allow both the older forms of theatre and the theoretical concepts used to analyze them to appear in a changed light.”14 His analyses of various companies, artists, and texts—organized according to manipulations of text, space, time, body, and media—explore how changes in media since the 1960s have transformed performance, including analyses of music, scenography, and choreography. These four texts are remarkable for not only their respective influences (each would emerge as among the most oft-cited texts for the next decade and beyond), but also, and more importantly, for their collective agreement that technology, specifically forms of media—what we now often characterize as “the digital”—had radically transformed a range of academic disciplines and, indeed, culture at large. That all four emerged more or less simultaneously speaks to a transformation that in 1999 was only beginning to influence theatre and performance studies, but over the next decade would become a key area of research. Over the past twenty years, attention to media in performance practices has developed into its own genre and area of critical study. A constellation of terms has emerged to define this field, although no single designation has been adopted universally by scholars and artists. Common terms include multimedia performance, mixed media, cyborg theatre, intermediality, digital performance, and mediated theatre, among others. Scholarly journals have devoted special issues to topics such as “Technology” (Modern Drama, Fall 2005), “Digital Media and Performance” (Theatre Journal, December 2009), and “On Technology and Memory” (Performance Research, June 2012), and new book series have emerged, most notably MIT Press’s Leonardo Book Series and Palgrave’s Studies in Performance and Technology.Page 16 →

Historical Surveys A number of books have appeared over the past decade offering broad synchronic and diachronic overviews of work that integrates media and performance. Three of the most comprehensive are Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007) by Steve Dixon with Barry Smith; Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010) by Chris Salter; and Multimedia Performance (2012) by Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer. While all three books concentrate mostly on work produced since the 1990s, they all promote similar historical narratives and trace the history of media and performance from Richard Wagner through the twentieth-century modernist avant-garde (Futurism, Bauhaus, Fluxus, etc.). Steve Dixon’s book encompasses the widest array of artists, theories, and analyses to date. Based on the

Digital Performance Archive, an extensive database documenting digital performance work produced in the 1990s, the book quickly became the essential resource for the field. Although called a history, the book focuses most of its nearly 800 pages on the recent past (Dixon pointedly acknowledges this history as inevitably “partial and incomplete”15). Dixon begins with a “Genealogy of Digital Performance” that situates Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstuerk (the “total work of art”) as “central to the lineage of digital performance both in its advocacy for grand theatrical spectacle and in the paradigm of вЂconvergence’ that unites the Gesamtkunstuerk with contemporary understandings of the modern computer as a вЂmeta-medium’ that unifies all media (text, image, sound, video, and so on) within a single interface.”16 After the first hundred pages, the book turns to theories of media in performance contexts and then to major thematic realms, including “The Body,” “Space,” “Time,” and “Interactivity.” (One will note that despite the counter-Aristotelian claims of this book, and many others, the unities of the Poetics inevitably return.) Dixon embeds his examples within the theoretical debates that emerged simultaneously—for example, exploring the impact of digital technology in art from the perspectives of phenomenology, formalism, remediation, and poststructuralism, productively reevaluating some of the most commonly used phrases (e.g., “interactivity”) and using historical theatrical examples from Brecht to the San Francisco Mime Troupe to contextualize and explore contemporary performance examples. Chris Salter’s extensively researched and compellingly argued Entangled:Page 17 → Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010) is the most wide-ranging survey of digital performance practices since Dixon’s. Salter’s intention is to “fulfill what I perceive as a gap in how the histories of new media arts, in particular—but also theater and other stage-based forms—are being written, specifically from the point of view of technical systems and process.”17 His conception of “technology” is expansive; he properly critiques the tendency among some digital performance theorists to equate “media technology” with “image-based projected media,” resulting in an “ocular-centered” discourse that ignores “senses like touch, hearing, taste, or smell.”18 Moreover, while the bulk of the examples he discusses (especially after the first two chapters) employ digital technologies, technology as he conceives it is not inherently digital. Organized around broad themes—space, architecture, projected images, sound, bodies, machines, and interactions—Entangled traces historical relations among media and performance in each category, using a history of technological advances to situate the evolution of performance and mediated aesthetics. For example, Salter’s analysis of the projected image points back to Greek culture, linking the allegorical image projections of Plato’s cave to Javanese shadow-puppet theatre, early European cinema, and the commercial release of the Sony Portapak portable video recorder in 1967. One of the more distinctive elements of Salter’s book in contrast with the other books we are considering is its rich examination of electronic music, covering such topics as custom-designed interactive instruments, computer-driven musical improvisation, and Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). While much of this material is familiar to scholars of computer music, it is rarely mentioned, and certainly not discussed with such depth and specificity, in the discourse about digital performance and theatre. Like Dixon, Salter’s detailed historical narrative begins with Wagner—but for a different reason. Instead of focusing on Wagner’s notion of Gesamtkunstuerk, Salter locates Wagner’s significance in his design for the Bayreuth Festival House, which reduced the performance image to “a two-dimensional screen” and enveloped spectators “in a continually transforming sea of sound,” thereby producing an “architecturally controlled aural and visual perception.”19 Indeed, architecture is central to Salter’s distinctive understanding of digital performance, much as it is to Gabriella Giannachi in Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (2004).20 Architecture is closely allied to performance in the way that it produces “new kinds of material, technologized spaces” and creates “imaginary spaces that, at the same time, are Page 18 →tangible, felt, and inhabited.”21 Structured recursively, Salter often returns to the same performances and technological developments in different contexts, replaying the same historical periods to situate and interject the significance of specific technological advances into the larger narratives of media and performance developments. The most recent addition to surveys of media and performance is Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer’s Multimedia Performance (2012). Aimed at an inclusive audience, Multimedia Performance usefully defines its

subject, citing some key characteristics of the field—interactivity, remediation (cf. Bolter and Grusin), and immersion—while also noting the importance of fluid definitions: “one of the defining features of multimedia is its inherent mutability.”22 The book productively emphasizes the multiple genealogies of art and technology. The historical overview follows a more or less chronological sequence beginning with Wagner and progressing through early cinema and the European avant-garde, through Fluxus, Nam June Paik, and conceptual art’s engagement with film and video in the 1970s, to the well-known examples of the late twentieth century: Robert Wilson, the Wooster Group, and Merce Cunningham’s digital dances. Although the terminology differs, the reader will find familiar thematic resonances in the text: for example, “the body” is replaced with a chapter on dance and virtual environments; space becomes “Forms of Interactivity in Performative Spaces.” The concluding emphasis on posthumanism, indebted in part to Hayles, returns to Stelarc and some of his best-known projects, such as Movatar. The precedent for the progressive teleology evident in all three of these surveys—as well as other survey’s such as Günter Berghaus’s Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (2005) and Greg Giesekam’s Staging the Screen (2007)23—is Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (2001), edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, a collection that organizes essays by major artists and theorists (such as Wagner, F. T. Marinetti, Paik, John Cage, and Roy Ascott) chronologically within each of its thematic sections: integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity.

Mapping the Field The aforementioned historical and critical works testify to the multiplicity of ways media and performance intersect and interact, while at the same Page 19 →time highlighting recurring and overlapping theoretical issues and structures. Many of these works attempt to make sense of this complexity by developing a map of the field, either implicitly or explicitly. For example, comprehensive surveys such as Dixon’s and Salter’s, rather than attempting to situate all the performances they analyze along a single chronological timeline, divide their case studies into thematic categories, thereby establishing an implicit framework of performance genres. Dixon defines four thematic categories that constitute the four main parts of his book: the body, space, time, and interactivity. Salter defines a larger number of primary categories: space (two chapters), performative architectures, projected image, sound, bodies, machines/mechanicals, and interaction. The similarities and differences here are suggestive. Three of Salter’s categories—space, bodies, and interaction—overlap with Dixon’s. Significantly, however, Dixon does not carve out a separate category for “projected image” (though projected images, of course, permeate the examples throughout his book) or for sound (which is a particular interest of Salter’s). Conversely, Salter does not define “time” as a category. Since neither author explicitly interrogates the logic underlying his divisions, we are left to speculate about the implications of these differences in their thematic frameworks. A number of recent books, however, develop highly methodical, carefully justified conceptual frameworks; these books, at least in one important way, touch most closely on our present project. For example, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi’s Performing Mixed Reality (2011) proposes “to develop an overarching theory to guide the future study and design of mixed reality performance. The foundation of this theory is that we can express how artists design, and participants experience, mixed reality performance in terms of multiple interleaved trajectories.”24 The four trajectories are space, time, interaction, and performance roles. The authors clearly lay out a range of options (in the case of the space trajectory defined as a continuum) for each trajectory: Space Reality Augmented reality Virtual reality Time

Story time Plot time Schedule time Page 20 →Interaction time Perceived time Interaction Secretive Expressive Magical Suspenseful Performance roles Performers Spectators Orchestrators These four trajectories are strikingly similar to the four main categories Dixon uses to organize his analysis—body, space, time, and interactivity—though the concepts are developed and deployed here with greater precision and depth. Another book organized around a rigorously defined conceptual framework is the critical anthology Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2005), produced by the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance research group of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and edited by its conveners, Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. The book begins with an essay by Chapple and Kattenbelt, “Key Issues in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance,” that sets forth a framework consisting of three groups of related concepts: (1) image, word, and sound; (2) body, space, and time; (3) theatrical, cyberspatial, cinematic/televisual, and sonic. The subsequent essays in the book are organized into three sections—“Performing Intermediality,” “Intermedial Perceptions,” and “From Adaption to Intermediality”—that correspond to the three conceptual groupings that comprise the framework. These essays offer theoretical and historical engagements with the field, including studies on early film, opera, dance, and contemporary digital performances. The Intermediality group expanded its scope with a second book in 2010, Mapping Intermediality in Performance, which includes theories, histories, and case studies as an overview of theatre and performance in digital culture. Whereas the previous book argues for theatre as a kind of “hypermedium” capable of staging the other arts, the latter book adopts a more nuanced approach, acknowledging the diverse ways in which digital culture intersects with theatre and performance in different contexts. Page 21 →Attempting a discursive style that emulates the nonlinear organization of digital media, Mapping Intermediality proposes a conceptual map that includes portals (introductions to overarching concepts, such as “performativity and corporeal literacy,” “digital culture and posthumanism,” and “networking”), nodes (detailed descriptions of critical terminology, such as “time and space,” “actuality/virtuality,” and “inter-relations”), and instances (case studies and practical examples of these concepts at work). The collection concludes with a final retrospective section considering the historical precursors for contemporary digital performance. This final chapter, “Early Intermediality: Archeological Glimpses,” by Klemens Gruber, follows other similar

historical paths, locating the pre or proto-digital in Russian cinema, but extends his consideration of Russian formalism to Kasimir Malevich’s paintings and sketches, including Design for Victory over the Sun (1913) and Black Square (1915).25 A system of arrows and nonlinear references populate the Mapping Intermediality, a technique also used in Sue-Ellen Case’s 1997 The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. Another recent attempt to construct an overarching framework to map the field is Lars EllestrГ¶m’s essay for Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010),26 “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” EllestrГ¶m’s project is not to distinguish between ways media intersects with performance, but rather “to build a theoretical framework that explains how all media are related to each other: what they have in common and in which ways they differ.”27 He argues that every medium can be defined and distinguished in terms of four modalities: (1) the material modality, (2) the sensorial modality, (3) the spatiotemporal modality, and (4) the semiotic modality. For example, the material modality of television and film consists of a flat surface of changing images accompanied by sound waves; by contrast, theatre combines sound waves, both flat and three-dimensional surfaces, and “the very specific corporeal interface of human bodies.”28 The sensorial modality of music is sound, and of film is both sight and sound. The spatiotemporal modality of photography consists of the dimensions of width and height, while sculpture adds the dimension of depth, and dance and theatre, of time. Finally, representational painting has the semiotic modality of resemblance (iconic signs), while literature consists of conventional (symbolic) signs, and photography of contiguous (indexical) signs. These four modalities together define what EllestrГ¶m calls “basic” media. He argues that a full understanding of media also requires a consideration of he calls “qualifying aspects.”29 These include (1) the cultural Page 22 →and social context within the work is created and presented, and (2) the aesthetic and communicative characteristics of the media.

Theoretical Approaches Many of the most significant books about media and performance, rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive history or survey, focus on a set of theoretical questions or the application of a particular theoretical paradigm. As we have seen, the question of liveness has been central to many of these discussions; however, many other issues have also engaged and influenced the discourse. Johannes Birringer, a choreographer and prolific writer, has consistently charted a unique path through the technological developments on stage. His Theatre, Theory, and Postmodernism (1989, 1991) considers the impact of changing media (what he characterizes as “postmodern technologies”) on the aesthetics of performance, focusing particularly on dance, multimedia productions, and experimental theatre. Media & Performance: Along the Border (1998) continues his theoretical investigations, this time using his own work as his primary examples. Significantly, he was among the first to acknowledge the importance of recorded documentation in performance analysis. Considering a variety of dance and performance, Birringer charts an evolution of the performing—most often dancing—body in mediated spaces, describing work with video, computers, and media and concluding with a reading of virtual reality performances. Birringer’s theoretical interpretations of contemporary performance are often politically oriented. His perspective on the intersection of media and performance is therefore somewhat ambivalent throughout. “The media arts,” he writes pushed the framing and reframing of ritual bodily transformation, masquerade, and the choreographies of seduction and voyeurisms to the point where the political function of performance, as a radical critique of forms and contents of representation and power, was either denounced or vilified (recall the censorship debates in the United States) or construed as a formal aesthetic ready to become absorbed into the art market and the museum.30 Birringer’s next two books—Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (2000) and Performance, Technology, & Science (2008)—further explore the connections among performance, politics, and digital technologies.Page 23 → Particularly in his most recent work, Birringer uses the term digital performance (simultaneous to Dixon and Smith’s development of the term) to articulate the changing relations among science, technology, and performance. Intended in part as “an introduction to a new field,” Birringer argues

that, “Digital composition and programming of interactive environments signal a fundamental break with earlier conventions of compositional practice for the stage.”31 He concludes with an overview of the new roles for performers in these contexts and how these changes intersect with the contemporary art practice. Dismissing the concern over liveness, Birringer concludes, “Performance anxiety, in the era of digital performance, has nothing to do anymore with the ephemerality of performance and the question of sustainability through repetition and reproduction, the older matters of legacy and reception. New modes of emergent design and real-time, translocal performance are created which constitute themselves as radically open and interactive systems, organisms, game scenarios, and sensorial propositions.”32 Birringer is not alone in observing the breakdown among these varying definitions of mediated and non-mediated performance. Recent scholarship—historical, theoretical, and critical—demonstrates just how perplexing, and perhaps impossible, such fixed definitions between “the mediated” and “live” have become. Interestingly, Adrian Heathfield’s edited collection, emphatically titled LIVE: Art and Performance (2004), includes many of the same examples adduced in collections primarily focused on media in performance contexts. Art historian Amelia Jones has drawn widespread attention to this question, particularly in her recent collection (edited, not coincidentally, with Heathfield), Perform Repeat Record (2012). As Jones asks—and answers—in her introduction: “Is the live body more вЂauthentic’ than the body represented in photographs, film, or video? (My answer to these queries would be; clearly no.).”33 Heathfield’s introduction to the anthology usefully points to what he calls “the temporal paradox of performance”: [Performance] exists both now and then, it leaves and lasts; its tendencies toward disappearance and dematerialization are countered by its capacities to adhere, mark, and trace itself otherwise. Performance art is not variously manifested in global documentary, archival and discursive representations, so much so that we might say that it carries with(in) itself the means of its historicization.34 Page 24 →This is not so different a point from the one Auslander raises in Liveness: that the apparent opposites of live and media (like performance as ethereal and permanent) are simultaneously present in each other and, paradoxically, often reinforce one another even when considered as “rivals” of a sort. Many of the explicitly theoretical inquiries into mediated performances do not delineate between live and mediated, but rather look for productive sites of intersection and new vocabularies. Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001) proposes a general theory of performance (and, indeed, for performance as conceptual paradigm) at the intersection of aesthetics, business management, and technology. More specifically, Matthew Causey’s Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness (2006) develops a theory of media and performance interaction in “technoculture” (a term Causey shares with others, including Birringer). Engaging late twentieth-century critical theory, Causey situates the performer in digital spaces (simulation) and considers the function of performance as a site where the biopolitics becomes visible (embeddedness). Throughout the book, he attempts to describe the relations of technology and theatre—what he characterizes as “colonizing the body through science and technology”—in order to further consider how theatre practices might respond to these potential colonizations.35 Sue-Ellen Case’s Performing Science and the Virtual (2007) draws on her argument in The Domain-Matrix (1996) that “we are caught in an historical era that mixes the customs and beliefs of print culture with the more performative and episodic spaces of the cyber.”36 Moving more or less chronologically, Case traces the influence of science from the reemergence of sanctioned theatrical performance in the medieval European Christian church, through the influences of science in “the cultural imaginary, from performative rites of its technologies to fearful expulsions of its machines and ideologies.”37 Although Case includes numerous case studies, both her chronological structure and emphasis on technological development (including frequent references to “new technologies” of various historical moments) create a sense of evolution that if not deterministic appears to be, at least, progressive. Case’s final sections compellingly address the recent digital moment (as did her earlier The Domain-Matrix, which previewed the “end of print culture”) by focusing on video games, interactive digital performances, and cyborg experiments, such as Stelarc’s mechanistic

Movatar.38 Case usefully situates the development of media performance within a long history of scientific and cultural intersections and reveals how Page 25 →the evolution of media performance intersections is related to, but not exclusively dependent upon, recent digital technologies. Other works select more specific theoretical approaches to explicate the intersections of performance and technology. For example, in Closer: Performance, Technology, Phenomenology (2007), Susan Kozel takes up the question of phenomenology and works through its embodied approach to meaning in many of her own works. Rather than constructing a new theory to understand a range of mediated and digital performances, Kozel adopts Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenological models to analyze her own performance practice. She draws on his notion of perception and embodiment as a means of philosophical inquiry to understand the connections among technology, performance, and bodies, what she calls “the transformations of time, space, and motion as understood through the flesh of experience.”39 Like Birringer (another dancer-theorist), Kozel bases much of her thesis on her own performances, pointing to a future in which digital devices become even “closer” to physical bodies. This connection between bodies and technology is more objectively explored in Susan Broadhurst’s Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology (2007) and Jennifer ParkerStarbuck’s Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011). Like Kozel, Broadhurst usefully includes phenomenology among other theoretical approaches to digital performance, detailing a theoretical overview and arguing for neuroesthetics as a productive frame through which to view these performances: “Digital practices such as Palindrome’s shadow performances, as a result of their multilayered, distorted and delayed effects, challenge the notion of an вЂintegrated experience’ by making perceptible this sequential anomaly; at the same time they ensure the audience’s active participation in the production of meaning.”40 Analyzing many of the more frequently referenced works—Merce Cunningham, Stelarc, and Eduardo Kac emerge again—Broadhurst raises parallels among neurocognitive processes and the construction of digital performance events. For her part, Parker-Stabuck uses the construct of the cyborg—as imaginary icon, actual human-machine interactions, and theory—as the basis for a new model of theatrical and performance practices. She situates these practices within a matrix of technological and bodily intersections that also inform this book.41 Increasingly, important contributions to the theory of the media-performance intersections are emerging from media studies. Some engage Page 26 →audience interactions in a range of mediated contexts, such as Michele White’s The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (2006), and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007). Brian Massumi’s translations and his theoretical Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002) include analyses of Stelarc among other topics of relevance to digital performance, and Donna J. Haraway’s foundational Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) continues as a central theoretical influence. Histories of media, such as Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) and Discourse Networks (1990) are frequently cited, and Lisa Gitelman’s books, including Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (1999) and Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2008), provide useful frames in which to consider the connections between media and performance of all kinds. Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies (2007) remains a touchstone for many projects, including this one. Projects emerging from literary studies and digital humanities are similarly pertinent, including not only Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, but also her My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005) and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) to name only a few of the representative titles in this area. Nonetheless, many books by media theorists, while intersecting at multiple points with key issues addressed in the texts that we have been considering, omit analysis of theatre and performance. For example, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (3rd ed., 2009) includes only four references to theatre, all from the early modern period, with a single example of the use of gaslight to light interior theatres in the early nineteenth century. Despite the clear connections among media forms, neither “theatre” nor “performance” merit a single reference in the index of collections such as The New Media and Technocultures Reader (2011), nor in more theoretical examinations such as Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving

Image Culture (2004) and Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006). This lack of attention to theatre and performance within studies of media and embodiment has only recently been addressed in books such as Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009) and Jason Farman’s Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (2011), both of which locate analyses of games, media, and interactivity within a larger continuum of theatre and performance practices dating to the Greek theatre. Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field seeks to expandPage 27 → upon recent work by theorists and historians of media and performance without creating yet another survey or history. It strives to provide this rapidly evolving field with refined and dynamic tools of analysis while eschewing essentialism and conceptual calcification. Rather than simply present new ideas in familiar forms, this book seeks to change not only what we study, but also how. This approach joins other shifts among the disciplines, most notable those in the digital humanities. As historian Tom Scheinfeldt argues in his essay, “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?” I believe we are at aВ .В .В . moment of change right now that we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not only by ideas but once again by organizing activities, in terms of both organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.42 The approach of developing multiple taxonomies, then, provides a way to engage not only the information, but also the methods by which a field understands, categorizes, and organizes that information. Taxonomies here provide a way to understand the most significant developments in the interactions between theatre, performance, and media and the ways scholars, students, artists, and audiences understand and shape those interactions. As such, we seek not only to reestablish theatre within the domain of media inquiry, but more broadly to invite a larger scholarly community to rewrite a changing field for a digital age. Of course, as with digital media and performance, the concept of taxonomy itself has a long and significant history.

Page 28 →

History of Taxonomy Taxonomy can lay claims to being the oldest, the most basic and the most all-embracing of the biological sciences; it is certainly one of the most controversial, misunderstood and maligned. Clive A. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics1 Although the term taxonomy originated in 1813 with botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841), its roots go much further back, to the human desire to classify and put things in order, as Aristotle’s hierarchical systems of naming remind us. Taxonomy derives from the Greek word taxis, meaning “order” or “arrangement” and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “Classification, esp. in relation to its general laws or principles,” delineating it, emerging from its roots in natural sciences, as “the systematic classification of living organisms.”2 The OED’s second definition, however, becomes much more general: “A classification of anything.” The history of the word and the idea of classification reveal a need for ordering, often manifesting as a hierarchical ordering, but also representing a desire to put things in their place, to make sense of a proliferation of types. There are classification systems for everything, from biblical orders of animals to Linnaeus’s system of nomenclature, to Bloom’s educational taxonomic structure, so it comes as no surprise that early researchers of what started to be called multimedia performance also began to classify the work they encountered in different ways. Like others discovering “new species,” the field responded to new technologies by developing new definitions and categories to analyze the emerging work. A brief overview cannot detail a comprehensive history of classification systems, nor can it reflect the depth and range of terminology within distinct research fields. We can, however, identify the key areas of interest for media and performance up to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Areas such as historical contingency, relationality, naming, and the question Page 29 →of hierarchies all pertain to any attempt to form a taxonomic structure today. Taxonomic systems, for example, provide the opportunity to consider how and what is observed within relations across diverse bodies of work. The introductory biology student learns taxonomy through hierarchies of domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Based on the Linnaean system of ordering, species are classified according to their morphology—or physical similarity and difference (more on this later)—and taxonomy derives from the word taxon, which refers to the group of organisms (the plural is taxa) taken as a unit. Although early taxonomic forms are largely structured hierarchically, often in relation to the human as the pinnacle of the perspective, rather than focusing on such hierarchies, this project locates meta-ideas emerging from historical precedents and systems as the means to trace the ideas of codification and naming that emerge in our contemporary performance analysis. An historical reflection frames our interest in finding diagrammatic possibilities to make sense of the proliferations of “species” that have emerged at the intersection of media and performance. In this sense, the project draws on the more recent emphasis on ecological parallels in contemporary cultural theory and from research into social media on “folksonomy,” a method of using collaborative tagging to analyze and categorize online content.3

Historical/Hierarchical Taxonomies The desire to classify has a long history and Aristotle (384–322 BC) is often considered to be the first Western taxonomist contributing vast, prolific observations and analyses on topics from zoology and biology to drama and ethics. As students of performance know, his hierarchy of drama in The Poetics—plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle—has been the basis for dramatic analysis and debate since. In biology, and relevant here to the trajectory of taxonomic study that originates with the human, Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, or History of Animals, becomes a starting point for taxonomists that followed. He ordered the animals he observed by placing them in what later was called the Great Chain of Being, hierarchically forming a linking chain from humans downward to the earthworm. Although his findings were not always “correct” his attempts to name and classify according to “families” and types influenced later attempts to structure the ever-growing

discoveries of flora and fauna. Page 30 →The question of “correctness” is a frequent critique of hierarchical taxonomies and where a historiographic understanding of the subjective underpinnings of classification is required. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History provides a distinct example of this concern. Closer to what we would consider an encyclopedia than a taxonomy (if we take as a given that a taxonomy implies a relationship between the items being classified) the Natural History (circa AD 77–79) provides an early example of a historic attempt to draw up a collection of knowledges, here especially about the Roman world. Like Aristotle, Pliny observed and wrote down what he observed, but chronicled an eclectic collection of culture. As scholar Trevor Murphy writes, “The unique advantage of the Natural History lies in its comprehensiveness. If you want to know about how ancient mines in Spain were organizedВ .В .В . or the uses of mugwort as a cure for disorders of the womb, you will find the answers here. They are not, in our terms, necessarily the right answersВ .В .В . but they are Roman answers.”4 Scholars chronicle phenomena, seeking patterns, threads, similarities and differences, all of which are, are Murphy suggests, historically contingent. Interesting for the purposes of this project, Pliny’s Natural History, argues Murphy, suggests many relations from which taxonomic systems might be developed. “The text abounds in analogies that might have been the foundations of powerful taxonomic structures .В .В .В . Pliny might well have constructed a comprehensive taxonomy of humans out of an analogy between mankind and animals, plotted against the dichotomy вЂdomestic/wild.’”5 As such, Pliny’s Natural History offers a collection of observations out of which more specific taxonomies might emerge. Understanding this process of analysis and categorization as historically conditioned suggests that taxonomies function not only as means of current analysis, but also to provide important historical documents for how a particular society views its environment—whether cultural, ecological, political, etc.—within a particular historical moment. Writing taxonomies is both analysis and historiography. To wit, the Greek and Roman chroniclers remained critical sources for naming and classifying living organisms until the sixteenth century, when technological developments such as the optic lens offered expanded possibilities. Prior to a codification of organisms, “folk taxonomies” conveyed names of plants within communities until Theophrastus (c. 370–285 BC) recorded about 480 taxa in his De Historia Plantarum, categorizing plant life through morphology, or their form and structure.6 The physician Dioscorides (first century AD) went on to catalogue about 600 taxa in De Page 31 →Materia Medica, which became the standard herbal taxonomy until the sixteenth century. From plant to mineral to animal science, detailed histories of the legacies of collection, discovery, and naming are documented, but it is generally the work of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) that signals the origins of the field of taxonomy. While predating the coinage of the term taxonomy, Linnaeus is often called the “founder of taxonomy” for his extensive work in classification of plant and animal life. His Systema Naturae (1735), which encompassed plants, minerals, and animals, set the standard that is still considered today, of classification from kingdom to species.7 An evolving work in progress, it also includes volumes specifically on plant life—Genera Plantarum (1737 and later editions) and Species Plantarum (1753 and later editions)—that classified and named plants according to “his artificial вЂsexual system.’”8 This foundation stages many of the ideas under consideration in contemporary taxonomic projects such as this one. How to organize the proliferation of emerging examples? What to call the methods and theories surrounding them? Should the examples be collected under overarching rubrics? Linnaeus’s system sets up these ongoing concerns and, according to Edward O. Wilson, made three major historical contributions: (1) the organization of organisms according to anatomical similarity into kingdoms and further into classes, orders, genera, and species; (2) the codification of the binomial nomenclature system in his 1753 Species Plantarum and volume ten of System Naturae for animals (1758), which became the starting point for biological classification; and (3) the initiative to find, collect, and diagnose all of the biodiversity of the world.9 Of these, the binomial nomenclature system has provided scientists a taxonomic structure that remains to this day; naming remains a sometimes contentious but necessary component of classifying, as we further discuss shortly. As scholars of biology know well, Linnaeus’s system consists of a generic name, from genera (genus) which is a subdivision of the families, and lends a “Latin-sounding word in the singular: Cercopithecus, Lemur, Homo,” to which is added the species name, so, for example, Homo sapiens.10 The seven categories, Stace explains, “kingdom, phylum,

class, order, family, genus, species—are referred to as the Linnaean hierarchy because they are only a slight modification of the categories first proposed by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century.”11 With this proposed system of nomenclature, Linnaeus’s “disciples,” as he referred to them, were diligent in collecting and cataloguing specimen and his system is the foundation for current biological science. Here Page 32 →is a system that, although hierarchal, was expansive and flexible enough to catch on, becoming a logical possibility for future classification. Because the nineteenth century was a time of expansion, exploration, and technological innovation, it is perhaps logical that Linnaeus’s system took hold when it did, for to create a taxonomic system there must be a large number of specimens to classify. As we propose taxonomic systems for media and performance practices we do so only through an emergence of examples. Our proposals, like these historical ones preceding us, are open to challenge and to evolution. Those following Linnaeus also continued to challenge and develop his findings, notably A. L. de Jussieu (1748–1836) and J. de Lamarck (1744–1829), who developed Linnaeus’s notion of “families” or “natural orders.” In his Genera Plantarum (1789), de Jussieu divided plants into fifteen classes and one hundred natural orders, and is “regarded as the immediate progenitor of the modern system.”12 Lamarck, over the course of his writings, particularly in the Philosophie Zoologique (1809), supplied, as Wilson argues, the introduction to evolutionary theory based on notions of spontaneous generation but also on the body’s development in relation to environmental characteristics (why the mole is blind, for example).13 His theories (and terminology such as transmuting, based on alchemical properties) influenced Darwin’s development of natural selection, the origins of contemporary theories of evolution. Like these early histories of taxonomies emerging from periods of discovery and the desire to collect, count, and categorize, our development of the taxonomies providing the structure of this book emerges from an expansion of technological innovation and use in performance, and with it an increase of examples to better understand and analyze. As technological development allowed for more expansive travel and discovery, more scientific explorations, such as Captain James Cook’s voyages from 1768 to 1780, introduced a greater number of species for comparison and classification. Following Linnaeus, botanist de Candolle (1778–1841) introduced the word taxonomy in his ThГ©orie Г©lГ©mentaire de la botanique (Elementary Theory of Botany, 1813). During the early nineteenth century, an interest in fossils and collection contributed to the development of taxonomic systems, and after his famous voyage upon the HMS Beagle in 1831, Charles Darwin returned with a large collection of specimens that allowed him to propose his theory of evolution in the 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Linnaeus’s hierarchical taxonomy of organisms, which grouped membersPage 33 → of a species together by virtue of their ability to interbreed, and rigorously defined relationships between organisms on the basis of underlying anatomical features, was perfectly suited to the theory of evolution that Darwin developed a century later, and its compatibility with subsequent biological science ensured Linnaeus’s system its enduring relevance. In Linnaeus’s own time, however, the fate of this approach was far from obvious. Linnaeus’s rival, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was widely regarded as the foremost biologist of his day and was highly critical of Linnaeus’s inflexible, one-dimensional approach to taxonomy. Rather than offering a rigid hierarchy, Buffon’s model, as Stephen Jay Gould describes it, “sought to encompass all the overt complexity of organisms into a nonhierarchical system that recognized differing relationships for various properties.”14 Structured as “a network with multiple linkages rather than a strict hierarchy of inclusion, ”15 Buffon’s approach to taxonomy anticipated the much more recent notion of the rhizome, famously set forth by Deleuze and Guattari, and influential in media theory.16 As we write this volume, we are in an ongoing period of processual change around media practices, and although we are now less interested in the discovery of new examples, we remain concerned with ongoing methodologies and modes of analysis. The hierarchical histories of taxonomic structures importantly provide us with a way to reflect back on questions of relationality, of history, and of naming that we take forward as we develop less rigid structures.

Nonhierarchical Taxonomies

In his Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness (2007), Patrick Lambe credits Buffon with devising a highly sophisticated “faceted” approach to taxonomy There were many different ways of relating organisms to each other, based on different attributes and principles. They could be grouped according to the environments that they shared (e.g. air, land or water). They could be grouped by function and adaptation (e.g. having wings and flying brings bats closer to birds than mammals whereas anatomy separates the two). They could be grouped by similarity of behaviour, and so on. Anatomy provided one—but only one—way of classifying creatures.17 Page 34 →Lambe argues that this nonhierarchical approach to taxonomy, while perhaps not as effective as Linnaeus’s in laying the groundwork for evolutionary science, more accurately describes systems such as ecology that exhibit complex interactions among multiple contexts and environments. Because of his organizational system to include dynamic relations within a taxonomic model, “Buffon is now recognized by ecological thinkers as an early forerunner.”18 For the same reasons, this more supple conception of taxonomic structure is better suited to mapping cultural knowledge and artifacts, such as books, essays, films, media, and performance. Indeed, if we look closely at recent theories of intermedial performance, we see that in recent critical work in digital performance—perhaps most especially in considerations of intermediality—very similar discursive structures emerge. Lambe identifies two powerful models of nonhierarchical taxonomy. The first is the matrix, more commonly referred to in social sciences as a typology. One of the most famous examples of a matrixed taxonomy is the periodic table of elements, with the horizontal axis delineating atomic mass, and the vertical axis, electronic structure. Because such matrices can create a theoretical spaces for combinations of variables not yet identified empirically—for example, the periodic table was initially replete with gaps hinting at the potential existence of as-yet undiscovered elements: “they are extremely useful for sense-making as well as for new knowledge creation or discovery.”19 Matrixed taxonomies are, for good reason, popular within performance theory. For example, in “Magnitudes of Performance,” Richard Schechner develops a matrix of performance genres organized according to the dimensions of space (sacred, secular, found, transformed, etc.), time (minutes or less, hours, days, etc.), and event (aesthetic theatre, sacred ritual, etc.).20 Chapple and Kattenbelt offer an elaborate matrixed taxonomy of intermedial performance defined along multiple axes, including the relative significance of word, sound, and image; body, space, and time; analogue versus digital media; and mediatized versus live performance.21 More recently, Mapping Intermediality in Performance used a network structure and mapping concept to articulate these kinds of simultaneous and overlapping relations. Lars EllestrГ¶m’s conceptual model posited in his Media Borders, Multimodality, and Intermediality (2010) suggests a reading of intermediality through nuanced treatments of modalities that “cannot be seen as isolated entities” but rather provide an articulation of “intermediality as a complex set of relations between media that are always more or less multimodal.”22 The three models presented within this book are all defined as matrices, albeit each within its own distinct structure.23 Page 35 →The second kind of nonhierarchical taxonomy Lambe describes is the “faceted taxonomy,” first explicitly defined in 1932 by Indian librarian S. R. Ranganathan as an alternative to the type of “precoordinated” taxonomies exemplified by the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress System.24 A facet is “a base taxonomy comprising only one of the fundamental dimensions in which content can be analyzed.”25 For example, each piece of metadata associated with a library book—author, title, subject keywords, date of publication, etc.—is a distinct facet. Because each facet is assigned independently, items need not be assigned a fixed position relative to other items in the taxonomy, but can relate to one other in myriad ways; for example, the Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet can be identified as a production of Hamlet (along with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh’s productions of that play), an integration of live theatre with historical film footage (along with Erwin Piscator’s Hoppla, wir Leben!), a production directed by a woman (along with Julie Taymor’s The Lion King), a example of “post-dramatic” theatre (along with Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Josef Stalin), and so on. The power of faceted taxonomies lies in their flexibility and adaptability; unlike a hierarchical taxonomy, a faceted taxonomy can easily take on new categories

to reflect new developments in the field. Note that matrices and faceted taxonomies are not incompatible. On the contrary, Lambe makes the important observation that “each вЂdimension’ of a matrix is in fact a distinct facet.”26 Hence, while the three taxonomies in this book are each structured as matrices, they can be combined easily by treating each dimension as a separate facet. In this way, the approach to taxonomies we advocate is inherently mutable and open-ended.

The Rules of the Game When researching how taxonomies have been constructed over time in fields such as botany, primate evolution, and human evolution, several strands emerge from the various literatures, particularly around the rules or codes of taxonomic systems and the question of nomenclature. As we have presented and developed material surrounding this project, a question repeatedly comes from our colleagues: why taxonomy? Certainly one must acknowledge the historical developments of the term, including a perpetual focus on the “rules” for different taxonomic systems. For example, like many others involved in taxonomic research, Colin Groves in Primate Taxonomy, turns to G. G. Simpson’s Principles of Animal Taxonomy (1961) for a solid Page 36 →definition of taxonomy as, “the theoretical study of classification, including its bases, principles, procedures, and rules,” with classification defined as “the ordering of [organisms] into groups (or sets) on the basis of their relationship.”27 While this volume does not presume to work within such specialized scientific classification systems, these organizing principles may yet provide a way to comprehend and negotiate the complications that result from large data sets, in this instance, the many performances to include robust interactions with technology. The purpose then is not to establish fixed relations among distinct categories, but to develop simultaneous and fluid systems that can best articulate the connections among diverse examples. In this sense, the rules and codes of these systems are not the rigid boxes of the periodic table, but rather follow in the naming practices as developed throughout the twentieth century. Historically, as Miekle and Parker point out in Naming Our Ancestors: An Anthology of Hominid Taxonomy, by the mid-nineteenth century within zoological study, rules needed to be drawn up to organize the rapidly expanding inclusion of plant and animal discovery. They specify that A variety of rules were adopted at meetings of the International Congress of Zoology, starting in 1889. In 1905 these were published as the RГЁgales internationals de la Nomenclature zoologique. These were further amended over the years until they were replaced in 1961 by the current International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.28 The Code (4th ed., 1999), regulates the scientific naming of animals and allows for a common ground amongst scientists, and a driving component of taxonomic systems is the naming.29 “We may grumble about taxonomists вЂalways changing the names,’” states Groves, but he also argues for the necessity of naming practices: “Because of new discoveries or hypotheses about interrelationships, alterations in classification are necessary.”30 If classifications should reflect the relatedness and relationship between species, then it is crucial to understand the terms in light of these relations. In the following chapters, we see evidence of these related structures in and through the performance examples taxonomized. As Groves further explains, “new predictions, to be tested in the field, may well emerge from the reclassification”31 and through these new predictions, change is possible. But as Meikle and Parker reiterate, “While the principles of nomenclature are solely concerned with procedures for naming species and higher taxa in a consistent, stable, and universal manner, Page 37 → taxonomy is concerned with discovering the relationships among species.”32 Important for this project then, it is the relationships between taxa as a valuable method for understanding how the field has and continues to develop. While we are not claiming any specific nomenclature, and in fact, often present very different terms to describe our observations, the question of naming persists as a method for evaluating similarities and differences in order to follow both evolutionary and non-evolutionary models in the development of a “species.”

The Past into the Present

From the nineteenth century onward, especially as technological advances made possible a greater understanding of things like DNA coding, technologies have played a crucial role in identifying lineages and characteristic developments across disciplines. In biology, for example, taxonomic organization relied upon more technological methods of classifying such as, as Stace points out, “genetics, electron microscopy, and molecular biology, ”33 and when attempting to apply classification systems to fields such as performance, taxonomy becomes a useful tool. Even in zoology and anthropology, the more morphological systems of taxonomy that have been codified since Linnaeus still apply, not only because methods like DNA testing are expensive and require specific skills, but as Groves explains: “I would not want to miss the excitement of finding out something of the why and how of evolutionary change, its functional correlates, its geography, its ecology, its demography, and perhaps contributing to the current ferment in evolutionary theory.”34 And while he writes about primates, this could be understood across many other fields, including performance. Because of its dynamic and multimodal structure (to cite EllestrГ¶m), mediated performances are best served not by the development of a rigid code or hierarchal system, but rather by methodologies that incorporate subjective tools to distinguish the ever-expanding uses of technologies in performance. In the broadest sense of the term, and most usefully here, taxonomies are essential organizing structures that record not only a classifying system, but also the ideological and historical context of its own classifications. As Lambe points out Taxonomies make knowledge visible, but while they reveal, they also conceal—the “stuff” that is not accommodated at all, and the attributes of our Page 38 →knowledge that our taxonomy builders considered of secondary importance. A taxonomy is a standard, and yet it is also highly contingent on current circumstance.35 In the mid-twentieth century, for example, a group of educators headed by Benjamin Bloom created what is known as “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” a classification of three modes of learning—cognitive, affective, and psychomotor—which itself, like Linnaeus’s system, has since been updated and used in educational practices. “No start on understanding the wealth of variation can be made until some sort of classification can be adoptedВ .В .В . taxonomy is not complete until the data from all other fields of investigation have been incorporated.”36 Although writing about plants here, Stace reminds us that any attempt might best be called an incomplete taxonomy because the data we are investigating is neither fixed nor complete, and can never be fully explored. Performance and media connections include a diffuse and diverse number of examples that can only be understand in relation to each other and within a larger field. In Systema Naturae 250—The Linnaean Ark, a volume celebrating 250 years of Linnaeus’s system, David J. Patterson’s chapter, “Future Taxonomy, ” sees the fragmentation of his discipline as a key issue for taxonomies, noting that, “the consequence is that taxonomy is not integrated, but is fragmented into an archipelago of variously populated and sized island of knowledge.”37 For the purposes of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field however, the “archipelago” is precisely the goal. As the following chapters demonstrate, the ever-expanding use of media in performance requires a series of distinct, yet related, methodological approaches. Rather than develop a single approach (either individually or as a group), we have developed individual taxonomic “islands” that can function either individually or in connection with the others. These neither follow any proscribed code or system, nor do we stake claims to naming at the exclusion of others. As Patterson rightfully observes, “taxonomy is a process that involves continuing discovery—whether through the investigation of new habitats, new technologies, or through a skeptical reappraisal of what is known.”38 Our hope is that the histories we expand upon will provide for exactly this sense of a continued discovery.

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Taxonomy of Distortion Along the Media Performance Continuum Sarah Bay-Cheng Technology has developed faster than man’s ability to incorporate it into the management process. As a result data tend to overwhelm rather than assist the decisionmaker. If data are aggregated, structured and displayed wisely, they can provide you with useful information. Caby C. Smith, Project Director, Data Uses in the Private Sector, 19741

Theatre and Media: An Overview of Contested Relations What is the relation between theatre and other media? Susan Sontag defined a dominant categorization in her 1966 query, “Is cinema the successor, the rival, or the revivifier of the theatre?”2 Published in a special issue of TDR titled “Film and Theatre,” Sontag’s question emerged after more than a half century of debate between theatre and film in which the two were almost invariably positioned as rivals. Early filmmakers and critics defended cinema against comparisons with theatre, challenging the widespread adaptation of theatrical melodramas and well-made plays on screen. Early film theorist Erwin Panovsky, for example, argued that the “the imitation of a theater performance with a set stage, fixed entries and exits, and distinctly literary ambitions is the one thing the film must avoid” and Hans Richter characterized theatricality as a “contaminant” in early cinema.3 Vladimir Pudovkin summarized what many considered the central problem of early cinema’s dependence on other media forms. Pudovkin charted film’s development as an evolution from dependence first on photography, then on theatre and theatricality, and finally coming into its own as a distinct, formal discipline, Page 40 →The first films consisted of primitive attempts to fix upon celluloid, as a novelty, the movements of a train, a landscape seen from a railway-carriage window, and so forth. Thus, in the beginning, the film was, from its nature, only “living photography.” The first attempts to relate cinematography to the world of art were naturally bound up with the Theatre. Similarly only as a novelty, like the shots of the railway-engine and the moving sea, primitive scenes of comic or dramatic character, played by actors began to be recordedВ .В .В . The first experiments in recording serious and significant material appear. The relationship with Theatre could, not however, yet be dissolved, and it is easy to understand how, once again, the first step of the film producer consisted in attempts to carry plays over on to celluloidВ .В .В . The film remained, as before, but living photography. Art did not enter into the work of him who made it. He only photographed the “art of the actor.”4 From a contemporary perspective, such comparisons appear as historical anomalies. Because of the rise of film’s popular influence, the anxiety of formal contamination eventually reversed itself, with twentiethcentury theatre artists arguing for a theatre without undue cinematic influence, or as New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr advocated in 1968, a theatre “fully itself and only itself, uncorrupted by alien dГ©cor, unfussed by borrowings from film or any other medium, undiminished by temporarily profitable surrenders.”5 However, though considered “lost,” the struggle of theatre against cinema and media continues well into the contemporary relations among live performance and media technologies. For example, at a 2009 conference, Caden Manson, artistic director of Big Art Group, described the dynamics of media in theatrical spaces as creating a kind of battle for the audience’s attention.6 On both sides of this divide, critics and artists have perceived the similarities in theatrical and cinematic representation as potential vulnerabilities to the other against which the form needed to resist. Evidenced in both Pudovkin and Kerr’s reference to “surrenders” and corruption, much of the discourse regarding theatre and media—first film and later encompassing nearly all

recording technologies—has been coded in the language of warfare, destruction, contamination, and (somewhat hyperbolically) death. Take, for example, John Gassner’s introduction, “And Still It Moves,” to his Best American Plays: 1951–1957 (1958). Surprised that theatre still endures (in 1958!) Gassner claims that theatre, “according to reasonable expectations should be gasping out its life by now instead of enjoying betterPage 41 → health than those giants of mass-communication, the motion pictures and television.”7 Gassner’s surprise at theatre’s endurance echoes again at the end of the century in Richard Schechner’s editorial, “Theatre Alive in the New Millennium” (2000, emphasis in original). Although surprised at theatre’s durability, Schechner ultimately concludes that, “Theatre has proven vital because it is extremely adaptable and not locked into one or another genre.”8 Thus, we can see two distinct characterizations of the relations between theatre and media: in one model, the two forms succeed independently because of their radical, ontological difference. Each form achieves its superior state when it becomes most distinctly and ontologically itself. Conversely, Schechner suggests that the durability of theatre is enabled by its essential malleability, its ability to absorb and adapt to the changing media landscape. To a certain extent, Sontag identified both trends as she considered these dynamics in the mid-1960s. Regarding theatre’s formal adaptations, Sontag speculated that in one possible outcome, “the arts would eventuate in one artВ .В .В . a vast magma or synaesthesia.”9 This conception was common among media and performance artists in the late 1960s and has had an enduring influence in contemporary theories of theatre and media. American filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek’s essay “вЂCulture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema” (1966) outlined innovative technologies and environments that would make new aesthetic forms possible, including the “Movie-Drome,” a spherical dome to display “simultaneous image of all sorts” with the audience lying “at the outer edge of the dome, feel towards the centerВ .В .В . Thousands of images would be projected on this screen.”10 Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s “Statement on Intermedia” similarly advocated for media as the means to collapse previously held formal boundaries in art. Although he wrote in a very different context, referring primarily to work that would today be most readily categorized as “mixed media,” Higgins’s definition of intermedia is worth quoting at length if only because his language foreshadows the rise of digital technologies and the Internet as a new industrial revolution.11 Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call Page 42 →the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach continued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolutions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation, which constitutes, in fact, a third industrial revolution.12 Still widely used today as terminology (if not always in the way he intended), Higgins’s notion of intermedia denotes the intersections of media and other forms, including theatre and performance.13 In Sontag’s other characterization, theatre is significant because it has resisted combination with other form, what she characterized as “the maintaining and clarifying of barriers between the arts.” In more recent decades, this division has been most prominent in the discussions of “liveness” dominating U.S.-based discussions of theatre and media. Despite the development of both forms over the past century—including not only technological advances, but also the rise of postmodern theory, performance art, among other developments—a fundamental division between live theatre and media has persisted. As David Z. Saltz noted in his editorial introduction to a special issue of Theatre Journal on film and theatre, although postmodernist theory might have challenged some distinctions among theatre and film forms, “Overall, however, film scholars rarely draw on the work of theatre or performance scholars, and concepts such as performativity that are central to theatre and performance theory have so far had little impact on film theory.”14 Where we might expect to see distinctions collapsing over the past decades—particularly in light of the pervasiveness of theoretical

“performativity” across disciplines and the increasing saturation of new technologies throughout all areas of society and daily life—these divisions among theatre, media, and time-based arts have only become more pronounced. Indeed, the “liveness” debate that has so much influenced discussion and debate regarding the relations of media and performance has served largely to reinforce the notions of theatre and media as distinct and separate phenomenon. Philip Auslander, whose widely cited Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999, rev. 2008) questioned the border between “live” and media, also reinforced the rivalry between theatre and media. Building on his prior essays against the ontological definition of “live,” Auslander concluded that, “historically, the live is an effect of mediating technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as вЂlive’ performance, for that category Page 43 →has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility.”15 Significantly, Auslander cast these relations not only in categorical opposition but also economic competition. Rejecting Peggy Phelan’s contention that performance has political power because it “cannot be reproduced or recorded” and therefore resists commodification,16 he framed the relations between theatre and media as a competition in which ultimately liveness loses its ontological distinction and therefore its mode of resistance to the economic pressures of media. Tellingly, he opens his book with Herbert Blau’s quotation from Marx’s Grundrisse in which Marx observed that, “there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others.”17 Agreeing with Blau that film and the televisual are the dominant media forms to which theatre responds, Auslander reads media’s cultural power through the lens of economic dominance, quoting Broadway producer Margo Lion, who acknowledges, “we have realized that we are all competing for the same entertainment dollars where theater isn’t always first on the list.”18 As Martin Harries would later point out, Auslander’s argument “relies on a model of domination translated from the political sphere into the terms of media.”19 As such, Auslander’s critique of liveness not only challenged the long-held privileging of theatrical presence, but also further complicated the categorical divisions between presence and mediated representation, a conception in which any ontological confusion might well be seen as theatre’s “failure” to inure itself against the corrupting and economic dominance of film and mass media. The quality of liveness was ultimately contingent and indistinguishable from the presence of media. While one can debate these distinctions between media and live performance further—and many, many have—our mutual concern in this model is how this debate demonstrates the problems for constructing taxonomies of contemporary media performance. One of the fundamental concepts behind any taxonomy is that the specific elements within it—the items being categorized—have specific and distinguishing characteristics that allow us to divide them one from another. Even elements that are seemingly very similar—for example, two closely related animal species—must have some salient characteristic that identifies a categorical separation between them. As such, taxonomies thus rely on key markers of difference. But, as we see here, the differences in and among various forms of theatrical performance and media are far more difficult to delineate than we find in natural organisms. Even a cursory overview of the field reveals key obstacles to establishingPage 44 → a model that can encompass the connections and divergences of theatre and other forms of mediated performance and technology. Is theatre a medium among rivals or the opposition of mediatized forms? Is our contemporary period one best understood as the conflation of media and performance or does contemporary performance demonstrate the development of ever greater distinctions among various forms? Such questions are fundamental to creating a system of categorization for something as amorphous and dynamic as contemporary media-based performance (or performance-based media?). The challenge, then, is to establish a system of categorization that acknowledges these indistinct boundaries, while simultaneously marking distinctions clear enough to separate and examine the individual performances themselves. Harries provides a useful starting point for some of these considerations. In his essay, “Theater and Media before вЂNew’ Media,” he notes that, “Theater is not one thing, but with some care one can study its place in the world of media.”20 Challenging the construction of theatre-media relations as “a model of domination,” he instead questions the way in which “theatrical strategies modify the grip of mass cultural formations” and through his analysis of Samuel Beckett on stage and screen, considers the ways in which

theatre “makes itself out of the materials of this changed culture: a medium among media, where specificity belongs not to an existence apart from mass culture but to particular ways of working inside a culture reshaped by those media.”21 In this way, Harries points to a more nuanced connection between theatre and other forms of representations in media, arguing for a shared cultural context and greater historical specificity. Recent European scholarship—particularly in intermediality studies—has made similar arguments, particularly in the analysis of new work. Kurt Vanhouette’s analysis of Kris Verdonck, for example, highlights the hybridity between theatricality and new media forms. In contrast to interdisciplinary work that sought to erase the distinctions between media, Verdonck (among others) considers technological culture “that is not bound by one genre, discipline or medium, and that allows the ambiguities and differences to perceptibly play out in order to achieve the highest intensity of experience and reflection.” According to Vanhouette, “Where exactly this happens no longer seems relevant; these artists do not make theatre per se. Thus, they raise the issue of theatricality in a particularly urgent form.”22 What both Harries and Vanhouette highlight are the ways in which theatre and performance more broadly sit within a wider context of cultural media. This is not, I think, the same as Auslander’s claim regarding a contingent relationship between Page 45 →theatre and mediated forms. Rather, Harries and Vanhouette situate theatre within and as a form of media. Or, as I have argued elsewhere, “all theatre is media.”23 Much of this seems to make sense until we attempt to diagram these relations. As is evident in a number of recent works that attempt to articulate the relations among media and performance forms, the problems of categorization quickly appear. If, as Harries argues, theatre is “a medium among media,” how do we contextualize mediabased performance in relation to theatre? What are we to make of performances such as Berlin’s person-less theatre installation Bonanza (2011)?24 How do we situate a performance installation such as Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2008), in which viewers could observe, communicate, and even physically assault (via remotecontrolled paint guns) the artist within a confined gallery space, but were not necessarily directly present for the performance?25 Into what categories do we place the performance installations of an artist like Kris Verdonck, who tends to treat human performers as objects, while constructing performing robots that elicit profound emotional engagement, such that they may appear more human?26 As media become ever more present in daily life, to say nothing of the vast technological advances both seen and unseen in every form of theatre and performance—including, of course, commercial theatre on Broadway and the West End, theme parks, massive performance spectacles installed in casinos from Las Vegas to Macau, and the products of increasingly pervasive surveillance technologies both in public spaces and online—it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the medium of theatre within the larger media sphere of global technology. Technologies that Marshall McLuhan described as a global proscenium arch of satellite vision in 1970 have now, in the form of mobile social media and online dataveillance, penetrated the most intimate spaces of our daily lives.27 This is not just a question of an academic theoretical discourse, but a fundamental question in how we understand contemporary culture. How then do we understand and articulate the relations of performance as a medium among other media?

A Taxonomy of Distortion First, we need to develop a framework in which to discuss these relations. Ideally, such a framework and its terminology should be fluid, so as not to repeat or reify the concerns posed earlier. It may also be desirable not Page 46 →to introduce additional and perhaps unnecessary terminology. In previous writing, I have articulated the relations among forms of time-based performance and recorded media in terms of “distortion.” I derive this application of distortion, in part, from Sergei Eisenstein, who perhaps first drew attention to the relations between a material environment (what he often called nature) and a virtual or cinematic one. In his earliest writings, he identified the cinema shot, for instance, as “The minimum вЂdistortable’ fragment of nature.”28 Such terminology seemed to stick. Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte has called all descriptions—textual and mediated—of live physical actions, “distortions,”29 and the effects of recording technologies—film, video, and digital—have been cited frequently as deviations from the original or undistorted event. One of my key case studies is the contemporary New York-based performance group, Temporary Distortion, whose very name suggests manipulations of time and space, and whose theatrical vocabulary is indebted to the altering effects of media in theatrical spaces. My argument here is not to reintroduce

questions of ontological liveness, nor to propose theatre, or any form of performance, as a pure, original state, nor to cast media as deviation from that originality. Instead, I suggest that all performance—and indeed all representation—reflects some form of distortion and manipulation of a conceptual ideal—an unmediated materiality, reality, or “nature” as Einstein claimed. This configuration is less a matter of situating live performance and media as warring opposites but an attempt to contextualize a diversity of performances along a continuum from the wholly material or real to the totally virtual. Such a configuration allows us to categorize many different kinds of intermedial performances without ignoring or oversimplifying the complexity, or even the contradictions, within a single performance. We can further refine this context by classifying the distortions of each performance according to its specific manipulations of space, time, and bodies. While each of these elements has been radically reconsidered and often revised over the long history of theatre and performance, these three categories remain fundamental to performance practice, even (and perhaps especially) when they are challenged. Media-performance intersections are frequently noted for their potential to radically reorganize space (e.g., telematics, live feeds, and virtual or augmented reality), time (e.g., prerecorded material, flashbacks, simultaneous action), and bodies (e.g., cyborgs, robots, prosthetics, extreme body modification). Considering these elements within a taxonomy of distortions, we can begin to characterize Page 47 →more specifically both the distinctions and similarities among different performances. Rather than relying on the inclusion of specific technological elements that may become outdated over time (e.g., analog video) or particular aesthetic properties, assessing media-performance interactions along a material-virtual continuum allows us to remain flexible and open to a range of new performance techniques, technologies, and practices as they emerge. While others have articulated the relations between theatre, performance, and media of various forms either through the vocabularies of adaptation (e.g., AndrГ© Bazin and Stanley Kauffmann), opposition (e.g., Peggy Phelan) or as documentation (e.g., Patrice Pavis), a taxonomy of media and performance may be best understood along the axes of distortion in space, time, and bodies. How then can we articulate and communicate this taxonomy of distortion?

Theatre and Media: New Analytical Models A possible answer comes from field of computer science and human-computer interactions (HCI). In 1994, P. Milgram and F. Kishino proposed “A taxonomy of mixed reality visual displays,” presented as “Milgram’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum.”30 This continuum spans between a purely physical space (or, “real,” as defined earlier) and a purely virtual environment. Between these two absolute points, Milgram and Kishino proposed infinite variations, including “Augmented Reality” (AR), which accounts for mediated elements in real environments, and “Augmented Virtuality” (AV), which includes real or material objects in virtual contexts. They defined “real” as objects with actual objective existence and “virtual” as those “that exist in essence or effect, but not formally or actually.”31 Milgram and Kishino’s model has been often cited and is most frequently used to articulate similar relations in other fields. However, in certain representational and performance contexts, the delineations in their model become more complicated. In their 2011 paper, for instance, Thomas Holz et al. describe the project MagicBook (2001) as a mixed-reality object capable of spanning the continuum. On the real end of the continuum, the book can be handled and read like any normal, real-world book. Using an AR display, however, the real book is enhanced with virtual imagery, creating a Mixed Reality experience that the Page 48 →authors liken to an enhanced pop-up book. Finally, users can fully immerse themselves in the virtual scene that is playing out on the real book pages, thereby reaching the other end of the continuumВ .В .В . As such, the MagicBook can be seen to span the whole of the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.32 For Holz and his collaborators, MagicBook demonstrates the necessity of developing further this spectrum to account for simultaneous and somewhat contradictory elements. Like many contemporary performances, MagicBook does not sit neatly at one end of the spectrum, but occupies several places simultaneously.

This taxonomy of material-virtual continuum has been widely adapted throughout the field of mixed-reality studies, including Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi’s Performing Mixed Reality (2011). Benford and Giannachi draw on Milgram and Kishino’s model both to trace the development of mixed reality performances, particularly the work of Blast Theory, with whom Benford regularly collaborates, and to articulate a theory of this developing subfield within the larger domain of performance and media studies.33 Benford and Giannachi productively explore the ways that mixed-reality performances manipulate space, time, and the interactions inherent within performance, concluding that each performance creates, “its own particular ecology of spaces, times, roles, and interfaces through which participants navigate as the experience unfolds.” Challenging from a taxonomic perspective, they further conclude that These ecologies defy straightforward classification and deliberately challenge well-established conventions. Spatially, they are not virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, or ubiquitous computing, but rather a mix of all of these in new ways. Temporally, they slice up story and plot time and recombine them with schedule and interaction time to create unusual structures in which the fictional and real elements are ever more finely interwoven. Moreover, mixed reality performances appear to combine different interface paradigms at will, integrating mobile phones, wearable computers, tangible interfaces, immersive interfaces, and traditional web interfaces. So we conclude that mixed reality performances are complex hybrids of existing paradigms, forms, and structures, and technologies, and that established concepts from HCI, though clearly relevant, are still insufficient to fully describe how they are designed or experienced.34 Page 49 →Benford and Ginnachi thus identify some of the critical questions facing the field—primarily, how to account for domains that are inherently fluid and do not follow specific and easily identified distinguishing characteristics. One sees the term hybrid return repeatedly in these discussions (cf. Vanhouette’s “Twofold Origin: Performing Hybrids between Theatre and Media”). As Benford and Giannachi highlight here, the manipulations of time and space are fluid and ongoing, making the patterns and forms difficult to assess with existing models. In response, they offer a series of what they term “trajectories,” in deliberate contradistinction to the paradigm of hypermedia and focusing on the transitions between distinct spaces, temporalities, and audience interactions. The visual models they offer are compelling, if also quite varied.35 Although their illustrations are compelling, particularly when linked to individual performances, it can also be difficult to determine how these models—among space, time, and interaction—might also intersect and affect each other. That is, one can see how any single trajectories develops—either over space, time, and in a variety of specific performance-audience interactions—but it becomes increasingly difficult to chart how these elements intersect with each other or how one might compare a single trajectory across multiple performances. Returning to my earlier aim to situate theatre and performance as a medium among other media, the following model attempts to construct a profile of a specific performance according to its distortions of space, time, and body. This profile gives us a clear picture of the performance itself and the means to compare it with other performances, such that we can generate an effective overview of the field. To create this profile and the taxonomy to follow, I take apart the three separate strands of the model. For this exercise, I return to the Milgram and Kishino structure of a continuum line and then adapt this structure to performance more broadly by adding additional lines of time and bodies to their spectrum of space. That is, I propose a model that articulates not one, but three, related dimensions of space, time, and bodies positioned between a notion of “pure” materiality on one end, and total mediation or virtual on the other. Adapting Milgram and Kishino, our axes might appear in the following way. Like the Milgram and Kishino model, these three lines offer a framework in which we can position a performance along infinite points of variability between the ends of the spectra, understanding the relations between Page 50 →the respective polarities as examples of distortion. The structure presumes each end as a “pure” ideal of either materiality or mediation. One end of the spectrum represents a totally unmediated, physical environment; the other corresponds to a completely virtual presence. Of course, both ends are unattainable ideals. As Martin Puchner characterizes in his “The Theater in Modernist Thought,” theatre’s double allegiance to

physical presence and representation has given rise to many of its theoretical debates, schools, and practices. In particular, this double realization has fueled the recurring and necessary fantasy that theatrical mimesis can be unmediated.36 4.1. Material-Mediated Performance Spectrum (2013). Conversely, it is nearly impossible to conceive of a performance that takes place exclusively within a digital environment, if only because spectators and audiences have to have some kind of material interface to connect with the digital. In Second Life, for example, users create avatars through which they experience an entirely virtual space, but they do so using a physical machine (computer) with material interfaces (mouse, keyboard). Even the perception of light photons emanating from the screens must manifest in a physical reality to be apprehended by the eye. While new telematic technologies may someday bypass the existing haptic interfaces—allowing for communication directly with the brain, for instance—for now both the absolute material and totally mediated ends of the spectrum function as theoretical extremes between which we can locate the spatial properties of a range of performance events. By establishing fixed categories as elusive, perhaps even imaginary, endpoints, we can then begin to describe the variations between these end points with greater clarity. More significantly, by placing different performances along these axes, we can establish a fluid Page 51 →comparative model. The point here is not to determine an exact number or point for each performance along an axis, but rather to situate a performance along these lines, so that we can compare it to the position of other performances and begin to understand larger patterns or trends in the field. Understanding that the completely unmediated theatre may remain an unattainable ideal, I propose material and mediated as the nominal ends of the spectra. In this model, material space is not necessarily real (an often contested term), but has physical substance; it is a tangible environment, whatever else it might represent (e.g., a forest, the moon, etc.). A mediated space is one conveyed exclusively through some form of representational—that is, immaterial, media: film, video, digital projections. This includes virtual environments, such as those experienced in head-mounted displays, for instance, as well as live video feeds from adjacent spaces. A good example of this dichotomy in a single performance can be seen in the work of Temporary Distortion, whose works combine densely packed and highly constrained physical spaces—often in the form of boxes—in which actors perform almost totally immobilized physically and often vocally restrained as well. In Americana Kamikaze (2009), for example, actors recited dialog almost motionless on either side of a screen that projected their cinematic characters in films intercut within the live performances. The performers stand motionless in boxes, often delivering their lines in a kind of deadpan monotone, while their cinematic doppelgГ¤ngers operate freely within the cinematic environment. In the Temporary Distortion image, we see examples of both material space—the physical environment of the theatre, including the actors’ wooden boxes and the screen surface between them—and the mediated space of the hotel room projected on the screen. In this framework, material space refers to the physical, tangible environment and objects of the performance, while mediated space includes areas and environments seen only through available media—for example, the hotel room as a space for the characters that is only ever seen on the screen. Continuing with Americana Kamikaze as an example, we can see how the performance also distorts time through media. Temporality in the production happens in multiple, sometime simultaneous, actions. During one sequence, the live actors exchange dialogue, while their filmed counterparts silently move past each other in the hotel room. Because of its juxtaposition, the dialogue from the live actors appears to haunt the filmed scene, as if the Page 52 →words exchanged were the thoughts of the characters on film. In this instance, the presence of media constructs time simultaneously; we are aware of being in two places (perhaps connected?) at the same time. Elsewhere, however, the timing is less clear. Events seem to happen either simultaneously or out of sequence, certain images repeat, and the narrative evolves in a decidedly nonlinear fashion. For the temporal continuum, we can then distinguish between a linear time, or real time, and mediated time. Linear time evolves without interruption or disruption. It follows the chronology of “real time,” the acknowledged, shared time of the audience from the moment they enter into the performance until its (uninterrupted) conclusion. Mediated time exists

independently of linear or real-time chronology, and instead deploys techniques of simultaneity, repetition, and recursions facilitated by media. 4.2. Brian Greer and Yuki Kawahisa in Temporary Distortion’s Americana Kamikaze (2009). В© Temporary Distortion. The final continuum of distortions of the body offers perhaps the greatest diversity of examples between its respective ends, including not only modifications of physical bodies—what Jennifer Parker-Starbuck has identified within the cyborg theatre—but also performing objects such as puppets, robots, digital projections, avatars, and other digitally created entities.Page 53 → Again, it is difficult to imagine a purely virtual body, independent of a physical existence, but returning to Eisenstein we can record the distortions from an unmediated, physical body to a purely virtual entity. In the example of Americana Kamikaze, we see performing bodies represented toward both ends of the spectrum. As in most theatrical performances, the audience observes the physical bodies of the live actors within the theatre space. They are physically present and although they are clearly representational—including costumes, stylized speech and gestures—they are largely unmediated. Their filmic counterparts, however, exist as total media, including not only their presence on screen but also exhibiting special effects in the style of Japanese horror films (one of the production’s key references), such as grotesque makeup, supernatural movement, and other digital effects such as dissolves and a kind of digital haunting. Americana Kamikaze, like most productions by Temporary Distortion, heavily distorts space, time, and bodies. Therefore, we would mark its space on the continuum toward the distorted end. 4.3. Media-Performance Continuum for Americana Kamikaze (2009). We can consider a fuller profile of the performance by placing it somewhat differently in a graph and assigning each characteristic a number on a scale from 1 (totally material) to 10 (totally mediated). As we might expect from a theatre group called Temporary Distortion, the performance of Americana Kamikaze is near the top of the distortion scale in all three categories. This is a relatively predictable profile for many heavily media-based companies, but it also tells us something about the environment in which they operate. For many Temporary Distortion works, but particularly Americana Kamikaze, this performance profile suggests something of the larger meanings embedded in the performance. The performancePage 54 → refers obliquely to a narrative involving two couples and a ghost, but the layers of the plot are complicated across the various characters and the media the characters occupy. Like the experience of watching a Japanese horror film, one is never quite sure where the ghost is or how it will emerge. The rigid structure of the set refers both to the cinematic frame in which the characters seem to experience their greatest freedom (and the most visceral danger) and to the emotional confines of the relationships. Thus, the cinematic distortions of the projections suggest a world in which individuals cannot freely move, except through surreal and dangerous landscapes of fantasy and imagination. What does it mean that the distorted spaces—the cinematic environment filled with ghosts, monsters, lusciously projected—appear more “real” than the flesh and blood bodies in front of us. In many ways, Temporary Distortion uses the available distortions of media to subtly critique the long-held arguments of theatrical “copresence.” What feels visceral to us—what made me jump in my seat, at least—was not the live bodies sharing the space with me, but the digital projections between them, a space of immaterial imagination much more frightening for its very immateriality. 4.4. Media-Performance Profile for Americana Kamikaze (2009). Of course, Temporary Distortion’s productions are conceived explicitly within media. But what about more traditional theatre? How does that factor with this structure? Page 55 →Consider a performance that takes place in a typical black-box theatre setting and uses digital projections from a live video feed both inside and outside the theatre space, as was the physical environment for Ivo van Hove’s production of The Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2007. Within considerations of contemporary performance, van Hove offers a compelling example (and is, not surprisingly

referred to more than once in this book). His works function primarily within traditional theatre spaces, but he uses the tropes of drama and conventions of both theatrical and cinematic realism to explore the boundaries of contemporary media performance. As such, his works provide useful examples for how even the most traditional forms of drama might be understood within a larger media context and along the continuities of distortion proposed here. Set within a transparent frame, Van Hove’s production used two roaming video cameras throughout the production. The images from these were edited in real time and projected across a series of largescreen video monitors across the upstage wall of the set. These cameras offered a range of perspectives, including a space for intimate confessions in a stage-left alcove, where performers turned away from the audience physically, but were captured and displayed in extreme close-up across the set through a camera view placed only inches from their faces. During the fight between Alceste and CГ©limГЁne, the actors tore up the aisles of the theatre to the street just outside, followed all the while by a mobile camera. As the actors played their jealousy spat for random (and somewhat confused) pedestrians on E. 4th St., the audience inside the theatre watched the sequence unfold onscreen. We, of course, recognized the space just outside the theatre but we experienced this scene from the play only through the virtual images of the video projection. As in many of his productions, van Hove used real-time video to link texts from the theatrical past to a contemporary and distinctly mediatized present. Spatially, the performance combined material space with mediated space, even as we recognized the environment projected on screen as representative of an actual place (i.e., the space within the theatre and just outside its entrance). Placing the performance within the spatial continuum, we might represent it in the following way. As noted on the continuum, the performance is much closer to material space than virtual space, although the use of video cameras, screens, and the live video feed clearly mark the presence of mediation as well. Less than half of the environment was conveyed in the video images, but the cameras and screens were a constant presence. 4.5. Space Continuum for Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007). Page 56 →Temporally, The Misanthrope proceeds much like any other production that closely follows Moliere’s drama. Textually, the play allows for some breaks in time, but the performance did not mark these excessively and there were no instances of simultaneity (for example, nothing else happened onstage, while we observed the video antics outside), repetition, or other radical disruptions in time. Therefore, we would consider this production relatively close to the linear end of the temporal spectrum: 4.6. Temporal Continuum for Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007). Similarly, the bodies in van Hove’s Misanthrope conformed to our expectations of actors in performance. Although the video projections created digital echoes of the individual characters—sometimes standing in for the physical character within the stage space—the contiguity of individual bodies and their representation in the fictional stage space was largely unmediated. Like the construction of time, the bodily construction might be positioned closer to the unmediated, material end of the bodily spectrum, though perhaps closer to the virtual end than on the temporal continuum: 4.7. Physical Continuum for Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007). Taking all three axes together, we now have a kind of overview or preliminary analysis of each of the three key elements of production—space, Page 57 →time, and bodies—and their relative proximity on a spectrum between the purely physical and material to the purely mediated and virtual. The placement of these elements from a single production is, of course, largely subjective and relative to the other elements. Without fixed points or specific measures on the spectrum, I placed the respective elements in relation to the theoretical extremes of the end and in comparison with each other. In other words, for van Hove’s Misanthrope, the physical environment tended to be more mediated than other elements, but not necessarily over the halfway point. The play followed a relatively linear plot structure with only minor deviations from a real-time temporality. The mediation of bodies through the video feed and projections was salient, but did not substitute from the mostly unmediated physical presence of the actors on stage. So, placed on a scale from 0 to 10, I assigned these characteristics values

of 4, 1, and 2, respectively. These values are relational and somewhat arbitrary and the numbers themselves are not significant. They reflect a position between the two external points rather than an absolute value within them. What is significant is the relation of each plot point between the theoretical extremes and among the other performance elements. By assigning these numeric values, we can then plot them on a graph, where the representation of the specific performance is visible along the axes of space, time, and bodily distortion. These values record the position of the elements in relation to the absolutes on their respective continuum as well as in relation to each other. The resulting profile is as follows in figure 4.8. Imagine, however, if the same play were performed entirely in virtual space—say in, Second Life. For this, we might assign a value of 9 on the space continuum, such that the image would change to look more like the following (see figure 4.9). Comparing the two images, one can see how the respective values change the performance as reflected in the graph. By combining these values, I can compare multiple performances within a single image and, thus, begin to articulate how performances in various media-performance configurations align (or not) with other examples. A comparison within the same graph demonstrates the ways in which different productions (admittedly, one completely invented) are shaped. Finally, I consider a completely different performance: Kris Verdonck’s robot installation Dancer #1. In this performance, a heavy L-shaped steel bar descends into the stage space. On one end of the bar, the steel shape Page 58 →is attached to a rotating motor. As the steel pipe dangles in space, the motor starts and the L-shape whirls with increasing speed, jerkily whipping at the end of a long tether. Ultimately, the weight of the steel proves too much for the motor and the performance ends when the motor overheats amid sparks and sometimes flames, and the shape slowly grinds to a halt.37 Page 59 →Often laughing, the audience watches the “dancer’s” frenzied performance and ultimate—though not tragic—death on stage. For this performance, the space is largely unmediated and the event unfolds in real time, but the performer (though material—even excessively so) is an abreaction such that we might consider the object as an embodiment of performing media. The “dancer” of the title is sculpture capable of gesture beyond either actor or puppet as performing object. I therefore position this performance as the product of a highly mediated body, but low mediation in space and time. 4.8. Media-Performance Profile for Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007). 4.9. Media-Performance Profile for The Virtual Misanthrope. 4.10. Comparison of multiple Media-Performance Profiles. 4.11. MediaPerformance Continuum for Kris Verdonck’s Dancer # 1 (2008). Page 60 →Adding Dancer #1 values into the graph, the following profile emerges. 4.12. Media-Performance Profile for Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #1 (2008). As in many of Verdonck’s works, Dancer #1 brings out the humanity of the performing object through our experience of its failure. One of the remarkable things about Verdonck’s collective work is the extent to which he appears to objectify human performers even as he humanizes without anthropomorphizing performing objects. In his work with humans, Verdonck has suspended dancers from a large unseen mechanism that turns, lifts, and drags them across the stage (Variations I/II/III/IIII), attached a couple to a crane that slowly turns as they struggle to maintain equilibrium and connection against the threat of falling (Duet), and submerged actors motionless in water tanks, while audiences mill about their fragile air supply (In). His collaborations with human performers emphasize their physical vulnerabilities by making them dependent upon potential dangerous machinery. But whereas these human-machine encounters elicit anxiety on behalf of the performers’ bodily threat, Verdonck’s object performances use mechanical breakdowns—a overheating motor and slowly dying “dancer,” a pogo-stick robot that continually falls over—to elicit sympathy from his audience. These failures allow the objects, though not humanoid in any way, nevertheless, to appear, through their foibles, human. Thus, for Verdonck, the emphasis on bodily distortion seems to have the strongest function within the larger field of media and performance intersections. His performances and installation highlight a distinct profile

of distortion that we can Page 61 →compare with other performances. What performances exhibit high mediation in space, but low in time and bodies? One of the things that Verdonck’s work demonstrates—as do other performances focused on the body—is the degree to which the mediation of bodies may be separated from the mediation of either time or space. Obviously, more performances and rankings are required to make a stronger argument for these patterns and trends in the field. We need to consider many more performances before we can see the range of distortions across areas and the broader patterns and trends. This method provides a relatively simple and uncomplicated means to collect this information and an easy way to synthesize it whether considering a few performances as evidenced here, or hundreds. Collecting similar data from a variety of performances—that is, the categorizations of given performances along the three axes—will further allow us to compare different performances to each other, to understand the interplay of the distortions over time, and to detect certain trends from the field at large. Which distortions emerge most often? Are more media-performance intersections manipulating space, time, or bodies and how do the dynamics in one area affect the other categories? Do performances tend to distort only one element more than others or often all three? Which profiles are most common? As we analyze performances according to these criteria, we see trends and patterns emerge that reveal how theatre and performance function in relation to media. These patterns form the basis for a taxonomy of the field from which one can trace the degrees of distortion across multiple performances over time. A cursory review of work from the past few years suggests four dominant performance profiles: high distortion across all categories (e.g., explicitly media-directed performance groups such as Temporary Distortion, Big Art Group, and the Wooster Group); low distortion across all categories (e.g., psychological realism in linear, climactic structure, performed in relatively small theatres without acoustic augmentation); high space and body distortion with linear temporality (e.g., Kris Verdonck’s robot performances, or productions of realist plays in virtual environments); and high body distortion, with low space and time distortion (e.g., the Seinendan Theater and Osaka Robot Theater Project).38 From this preliminary categorization, one can draw a few preliminary conclusions. Perhaps not surprisingly, distortions of time are almost always reliant on distortion by at least one other element—usually space. Spatial distortion is often (though not always) linked to bodily distortion (usually through the representation Page 62 →of bodies on screens or digitally embedded within the virtual space). However, bodily distortion on its own is often seen, even amid low spatial and temporal distortions. This is usually linked with robots or other performing objects, as well as explorations of the body as a plastic performance material.39 Such conclusions also invite contradiction. Where are the performances that distort time without space? Is this possible? While these four performance profiles are dominant now, it is possible to imagine new technologies that will alter these configurations. A taxonomy of distortions will similarly shift and evolve as new forms are included within it. There are several advantages to this system, drawing on its flexibility and fluidity to address some of the key challenges to the field. As noted in the introduction, taxonomy is most simply, a “classification, esp. in relation to its general laws or principles.” Yet, as evidenced in the extensive theoretical debate regarding the ontology and imbrication of theatre, performance, and media, it can be difficult to formulate a universally accepted system of general laws and principles. Taxonomy further requires a fundamental separation of elements, distinguishing even unique characteristics that create tangible differences between distinct performances. But when media functions as performance and the live emerges as contingent upon media, how do we make such fine distinctions in ways that are useful to the interpretation and understanding of a particular performance and give us a clearer sense of the field as a whole? We have many examples of existing scholarly attempts to provide stable frameworks for a field that is constantly evolving and, most importantly, dependent upon those changes. When media change so quickly, any fixed model risks becoming obsolete. A key advantage of this method, then, is its conceptual consistency at the ends of the spectrum and the fluidity between them. Understanding performances within a model of media distortion does not rely on categorization of specific technologies or techniques, but can remain fairly consistent at its extremes, even within as new forms and technologies emerge. Such a structure maintains the debate regarding specific definitions (what, for instance, counts as “live”?), while providing a consistent structure within which to consider these questions.

This model further constructs a taxonomy without requiring additional terminology. One of the most consistent trends in the field is the coining of new terms and definitions to keep up with newly emerging technologies and practices. Contemporary researchers find themselves awash in numerous terms: multimedia, digital performance, mixed-media performance, new Page 63 →media, or as Lance Gharavi has half-jokingly termed it, “this kind of work.”40 While such fundamental revisions to the field and new terms are necessary to articulate ever more sophisticated forms of performance and media practices, contextualizing these changes within a consistent yet flexible framework provides a basis for comparison across areas, both historically and inclusive of diverse theoretical perspectives. Positioning performance along a continuum of distortion similarly avoids some of the sematic difficulties and questions of translation inherent within the field. Unlike a taxonomy that seeks to organize different performances within specific conceptual domains or within a matrix of categorical elements that may have different meanings in different languages or in different semantic connotations (even within the same language system), the distortion model forms a taxonomy in which individual performances are situated both dynamically between the material and the mediated, and, perhaps most importantly, in relation to other performances. Finally, the model’s reliance on subjectivity ultimately affords its greatest conceptual advantage and forms the basis for the future of the project online. By design, the assignment of values will be subjective to each user, just as the experience of any particular performance is unique to the individual audience member (all claims about a monolithic “audience” to the contrary). This is, in fact, where the real power of the taxonomy comes. Rather than create a taxonomy of already determined categories into which various performances are classified, this Taxonomy of Distortion proposes to construct not a taxonomic model, but rather a taxonomic method that will continue to evolve in response to the contributions of users and participants who situate various performances along the axes of space, time, and bodies. By opening up this system online, these measures of distortion can be defined not by a few critics, but by any audience member with access to the Internet. By entering his or her own subjective analysis for a particular performance, the user collaboratively constructs a taxonomy that responds not to the predetermined definitions of experts, but from and within a larger body of data collected and shared by viewers. These data can be tracked over time, with various performance grouped according to their distorted arrangements, thus allowing future scholars, teachers, and students to see how contributors (not only critics and scholars, but audiences of all kinds) understand the field in a particular moment and how those analyses and the resulting taxonomy evolve. The next step for my development of the Taxonomy of Distortion project is to construct an online Page 64 →environment where performance attendees can quickly upload their reactions via a mobile app (currently in development) and see their responses aggregated in real-time with the responses of others. Artists and companies would be able to observe the reactions and categorizations to their work as it happens, while scholars could access a data set that is constantly growing. This data, although subjective, may provide a consistent basis for comparisons among different interpretations without being over-deterministic. Perhaps in instances of densely mediated performances, it is only through studying the distortions that the patterns and trends of contemporary performance can become clear.

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Cyborg Returns Always-Already Subject Technologies Jennifer Parker-Starbuck When we establish a considered classification, when we say that a cat and a dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds do, even if both are tamed or embalmed, even if both are frenzied, even if both have just broken the water pitcher, what is the ground on which we are able to establish the validity of this classification with complete certainty? On what “table,” according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things1 Foucault asks “on what table” we attempt to sort out different and similar objects, animals, humans, and things. Although he historicizes the human need for order and describes paradigmatic turns in how things are represented, named, and ordered, he also cautions that “we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which included them all.”2 It is with this spirit of proposing, but not fixing, that I explore a matrix for theorizing relationships between bodies and technologies in performance. It grows out of the cyborg matrix I proposed in my book, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal /Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance, and addresses how such a model can be a continued tool for performance analysis.3 Historically, the idea of taxonomy as classification system might be considered too hierarchical or rigid in structure to support the blurred boundaries of the cyborg that I propose. Yet, over the many years doing research in multimedia performance, I have turned to forming charts and “classifying” as an attempt to analyse and write about what I saw, and while not intended to be hierarchical or rigid, the matrix I develop suggests a method for analysing shifting bodies and technologies that continue to emerge as (theoretically) cyborg in performance. Page 66 →The two throughlines that comprise the idea of the cyborg, body and technology, continue to raise debates, and what compels me when fashioning a working model around multimedia performance is that these terms remain open to interpretation and to a renewed consideration for each generation of scholars and artists. As subsets of these larger terms, the complex ideas of the abject, object, and subject allow me to trace a progression from frequent historically problematic readings toward renewed ideas about bodies in a technological world. These are terms that are never intended to suggest a labeling or fixing within the categories but rather terms that speak to both bodies and technologies as they move closer to each other.4 The categories can interrelate, be put in opposition to each other, or at times signify hierarchical positionings, and they have gained theoretical purchase through philosophical unpackings around bodies, feminism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and phenomenology. As we move further into the twenty-first century they may well be replaced with less humancentric terms around bodies, but how all bodies encounter and engage with technologies comprises the cyborg of my research. What remains at stake is the ongoing critical analysis of how these mergings take place and what problems and possibilities they can offer. In the history of taxonomic development, the emergence of technological advancements such as microscopic levels of seeing, X-ray technologies, and DNA testing provided in-depth clues that have shifted notions of classification across plants, animals, and humans. The fact that dinosaur DNA can now be traced through fossilized bones suggests reasons for ongoing, updated, and fluid classification systems. How might, for example, future generations attempt to understand and classify works such as Eduardo Kac’s green fluorescent protein (GPF) rabbit, created through the injection of jellyfish protein into the fertilized rabbit egg, or of other genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and foods? What, within the structures proposed here and by my coauthors, can be learned about the times in which we live, the conditions of our physical lives? Perhaps more importantly, how might these models suggest methodologies for analysis of ongoing performance/theatrical experimentation

between bodies and technologies, organic and nonorganic organisms? It is from this scientific premise—that changes in genetic understanding make it possible to alter, update, and reimagine previous modes of classification—that I introduce an expanded dimension to my matrix.

Page 67 →Exploring the Matrix The matrix that follows expands the chart from Cyborg Theatre through the premise that a “subject technology”—technology that gains agency or carries its own weight on stage—is now such a given that it has become incorporated into each of the technology categories: all technology is now always-already subject. This matrix consists of bodies and technologies moving toward each other in cyborgean mergings, but also, links to what scientists might call “evolutionary history,” classification systems formed around changing relationships of the taxa.5 Consequently, categories continue to forge possibilities between bodies and technologies in performance, but also fold back, connecting to historical and theoretical antecedents to reimagine them in a cyborg era. What follows is a relay of sorts, so that the additional entries into the categories are also, always, in relation back to this evolving point. Imagine strands—of nerves, electrical wires, veins, code, sinew—linking emerging examples back to those that remain the foundation of the categories as they all become cyborg (see fig. 1). It has now become difficult to understand, for example, “abject” or “object” technologies without their inherent “subject” qualities. However, or perhaps due to the understanding that technologies are an integral part of industrialized societies, what I have observed as a growing trend is that with this tacit understanding of technology as subject, practitioners seem interested in returning to older forms, techniques, histories, and stories. As technology has become embedded into our understandings of the world and appears less a fascination in and of itself, its use also takes on an almost retro quality and it is able to be used as a way to return to and comment on older forms. In the following examples, I briefly outline the categories introduced in Cyborg Theatre, and then also offer another, more recent, example encountered since my first consideration of these categories. Taxonomies typically allow for some slippage, shifting, and movement within categories and any one given example might be altered by the inclusion of another. It is in the addition of more examples that the categories gain sufficient weight to make a claim and it is my hope that readers will continue to add their own examples to these initially provided. The table can act as a puzzle, to try out an example here or there until it allows a reimagining of the bodies and technologies through a cyborgean interweaving. Within the “body” categories we might place robot bodies; animal bodies; dancing bodies; stereotypical Page 68 →bodies; trans bodies; racialized, gendered, or differently abled bodies. Observing theatre and performance, bodies always seemed to matter and how they fare through the advent of an increasingly technological time is my primary concern. Through a productive, interactive, relational unity with technologies these terms can be reappropriated and strengthened through a cyborgean inflection. 5.1 Cyborg Theatre Returns. The model that follows invites readers to interact with it, to think of examples you have seen and plug them in to the various sections. Does the addition of a technological element alter the ideas about the bodies? How does a focus on technologies signify changes in body-technology relations? Does a sense of technologies as “subject” reposition, remind, or reinforce ideas about bodily technology reliance? What is the value of placing a particular work into one of these categories over another? What does its placement allow us to discover about bodies or technologies? These are some of the questions that this matrix facilitates. The following chart includes my initial examples from Cyborg Theatre and examples I have experienced since; examples that both explore corporeal/technological intersections, but also, with an added confidence in “subject” technologies, that show an interest in a return (in bold). The “always-already Subject Technology” is indicated as, for example, Abject (Subject) Technology, and because the “Subject Technology” category continues as the locus for a cyborg theatre form I have indicated its continued and strengthening focus in bold: (Subject) Technology. The corresponding Page 69 →examples on the chart are shown in bold so as to distinguish them from the preexisting classifications that underpin the cyborg theatre and continue to allow for additional entries. The matrix produces various integrations between bodies and

technologies, from the initial Cyborg Theatre intersections to those that begin to mark trends and explorations with future technologies.

Column 1. Abject Bodies Abject bodies and technologies are the starting point for the twisting strands in a becoming-cyborg. The abject includes alternatives, resistances, bodies that don’t conform to (problematic) societal norms, technologies Page 70 →that are without mechanical animation, or are hidden. Between bodies and technologies, the abject, a third term positioned in relation to the subject and object, offers many possibilities. On the side of bodies, abject derives initially from Julia Kristeva’s notion as “what I permanently thrust aside in order to live,”6 but also refers to that which suggests instabilities, border crossings, and absences. As a technology, the abject is a logical beginning as tool or absence in juxtaposition to the prevalence and growing invasiveness of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies. It can remind us of alternatives to the technologies so readily at hand or offer possibilities for a conceptual absence of mechanical, digital, computerized objects. It might be the absence of visible or prominent technology or merely the decision to conceptually point to this absence. 5.2 Cyborg Theatre Matrix. The concept of the abject also disrupts the idea of taxonomies—too often sites for establishing order. By including a category that itself disrupts order, the taxonomy already becomes a strategy of inclusion. Kelly Oliver, in a psychoanalytic study of mother’s milk as the abject challenge to subjectivity, reminds us of Kristeva’s account of the “purity” and “impurity” of food regulations, setting up “the borders of the clean and proper subject against the abject.”7 Oliver recalls that for Kristeva, these regulations relate directly to notions of taxonomy: “The pureВ .В .В . will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder.”8 To include the abject then, is to unsettle an established notion of taxonomy as any sort of imposing order, and rather, to allow it to recognize the spaces between a subject-object distinction, to remember the bodies.

A. Abject Cyborgs: Abject Body-Subject Technology Abject body-Subject Technology examples are cyborg entities that also peer back through their structures that link them back to the preceding categories. The examples in my book such as dancer/media artist Cathy Weis, productions of Joe and Ads by Richard Maxwell, Yubiwa Hotel’s Long Distance Love, exemplify bodies that for different reasons are usefully included in the abject category as a site for a renewed understanding of the body as it merges with onstage technologies. Weis, for example, incorporated animated figures and, notably, a large animated gorilla in one piece, which introduced a level of analysis regarding human-animal relations.9 Ads introduces a holographic actor in lieu of living entities. Page 71 →This is the category that most challenges bodies and how we understand them in a cyborgean age. Taxon: Stifter’s Dinge The increasing inclusion of machine and animal bodies in performance raises questions about relations between the human and the nonhuman, and serves to continue discussions about how these bodies might be understood differently through their relationship to technologies. Heiner Goebbels’s installation/performance, Stifter’s Dinge, for example, first performed in London in 2008 and then brought back in 2012, has no visible performers (although technicians are present) aside from an extraordinary machine, made of five deconstructed pianos, which are pulled apart and set on a movable platform over a large pool of water.10 As audience members walk through a large industrial space, or sit and contemplate, or listen and observe, the platform moves, sounds fill the space, the pool bubbles up or rain falls. Mists and smoke appear from crevices in the machinery; the human is largely abject—in this case, invisible through the machine and trees—abject in that it is thrust away from the performance, leaving, rather, a site for the reflection of possibilities of what Bruno Latour has called “the collective,” charged with “вЂcollecting’ the multiplicity of associations of humans and nonhumans.”11 5.3 Stifter’s Dinge, by Heiner Goebbels. Photograph В© Mario del Curto.

Page 72 →Yet, its abjection within this piece is also an act of union with a Subject Technology. It is almost as if the performer has been sacrificed for a different representation of associations, one that does not foreground the human. The machine performs, as subject, but with a clear living presence interweaving through it, human, nature, the living and the technological, performing in tandem in this Abject Body-Subject Technology installation. What also warrants its inclusion here, aside from the memorable and powerful quality of a work without bodies, is that in its seemingly futuristic novelty it is also reaching back to the past. The work is inspired by nineteenth-century Austrian poet, teacher, and painter Adalbert Stifter, whose work often dealt with humanity and nature. The work inspires a sense of intervention—it is not merely a cyborgean union of human and machine, but also a piece (peace) offering reflection in the fissures between humanity and nature, humanity and technology.

B. Abject Bodies and Object (Subject) Technologies Unlike the haunting absence of the human body in the previous example, the Abject Body’s intersection with Object Technology shows itself as distinct and separate from the technology. The bodies here are abject through a fixity within, or transmission through, media. Technologically, the object foregrounds itself as technique or apparatus in performance. Increasingly, as technologies become more reliable, object technology is the “gimmick” of the production, hovering between object and subject (a quality found in other mappings of Object Technology on the chart). My initial example, the Met Opera Live in HD, began in 2006 as a method of transmitting the Metropolitan Opera’s performances to audiences across the globe via satellite. This technique has since spread to include the National Theatre (NT) Live in the UK in 2009 and the trend seems to be growing, with its website reporting that it is featured in 700 cinemas across twenty-two countries.12 The example combines both abject-ed audience bodies and abject-ed performer bodies, both separated through a mediatized distance, as well as an object technology—the transmission via satellite that masks itself as cinematic while also representing a live feed. The show would still go on without the technology, but only for those in the theatrical, not the cinematic, space. The bodies here are obviously not abject for face-to-face audience members, but for cinematic viewers the bodies remain distanced and fixed on Page 73 →their screens. This fixity or capture within the technological apparatus resonates throughout this category, especially in relation to the need to expand the commercial audiences across the distances. In the analysis of an Object Technology there is a greater reliance on technological gimmickry, which itself has been used as a selling point, from the train effects of nineteenth-century melodrama to the helicopter moment in Miss Saigon. The questions of capital and consumerism provoke possibilities for additional interlacings between categories (as we shall encounter in the next category, when a more artisanal mode of production might levy some of the critiques against mass production), but also set stages for the preparation of more mass-produced “objects.” Taxon: Opera Erratica’s, Toujours et PrГЁs De Moi A piece in which “puppet-sized holograms interact with their live, life-sized selves,”13 Opera Erratica’s Toujours et PrГЁs De Moi is an example of an interchange between live bodies on stage and their technologized selves as holograms. The production is, like others in this category, designed to showcase its “gimmick,” here, a twenty-first-century version of the Victorian Pepper’s Ghost technology creating ultra-defined holograms of the actors’ bodies.14 Abject bodies (in this case, both the onstage bodies in relation to the hologram bodies as well as the hologram bodies themselves) relate to an Object (Subject) Technology that is at once historic and also a seemingly futuristic application. The example sits at the interstices of other Abject examples, such as Richard Maxwell’s entirely holographic production Ads, or historically alongside shadow or illusionistic puppetry. Toujours et PrГЁs De Moi is visually spectacular, producing high-resolution images of bodies that hover in the air and fit into small spaces (the images are approximately twelve inches tall and project perfectly into wooden boxes placed on a table on stage that contain them and offer them a visual playground). Set to recorded Renaissance madrigals, the story revolves around the relationship between the two characters who appear on stage as both

living bodies and their holographic counterparts. The story itself is secondary to the gimmick of this Object (Subject) Technology. As the living actors shake free their holograms from the boxes onstage, we are less concerned with the storytelling and more by the precision of these interactions. The technology, once a way to project a living actor upon nineteenth-century stages, representing such figures as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, has been updated to allow the recording of projected figures of actors who Page 74 →leap and fall, climb and float through the air. As we fixate on the moving projections, the living actors and their story get thrust aside, subsumed by the virtuosity of the object technology, which is now also always subject. Striking here, is the way in which histories replay themselves through these categories. The innovative work of Opera Erratica, which has produced work since 2007, purports to “create theatrical experiences that are at once familiar and strange, bringing new perspectives on old traditions and challenging audiences to see differently.”15 This sentiment and curiosity recurs in many of the works included here. Whether made as explicit as Opera Erratica, or simply through a technologically inspired return to a play text, attention to the strands making up the cyborg form shape it further.

C. Abject Bodies and Abject (Subject) Technologies The Abject Body evokes bodies thrust aside or lost, bodies problematically disembodied, yet the abject body is also a body represented—by machines, robots, automata, androids, and images. It reminds us of what we are not, perhaps of what we are afraid of becoming. The projected motion-captured bodies in the Abject Body-Subject Technology cyborg examples such as Merce Cunningham’s Biped, the Robot in Maxwell’s Joe, and the holographic (Pepper’s Ghost) figures of Maxwell’s Ads all also speak to mediatized bodies separated from their living counterparts. At the interchange of Abject Bodies and Abject Technologies sits the puppet. Although too diverse a field itself to break down by individual puppet traditions here, the figure of the puppet is typically a nonhuman body—formed in the shape of a human or animal (as in the puppets of Handspring’s War Horse), or as abstract bits of fabric or objects (as in Basil Twist’s Symphony Fantastique)—human-operated, a separate entity, yet reliant upon a human/nonhuman union.16 The puppet body is both a body and a technology, and the human operating it is, largely, conceptually invisible; yet the two are interdependent in the creation of a whole. Here are the formations of a mediated human/nonhuman intertwining of the cyborg. Puppets are also complex “objects” and could also be located within that category, especially as commercialized figures, as Scott Shershow explains, “puppets have always been, as I have observed, quite literally objects, linked by the locus of the market fair to a broad spectrum of other saleable commodities.”17 In the commercial successes of a production such as War Horse, the abject horse bodies cum puppet objects are now produced en Page 75 →masse to suit the demand of the touring productions. They are brought to life through a cyborgean union between operator and horse puppet that complicates their function as fixed in any one category, and it is this very transmutability that makes them a potent analytic taxon. Although puppets are thriving well in the contemporary field of performance, it is their kin, the robot or android, that offers a key example of Abject Body-Abject (Subject) Technology. Taxon: Geminoid F. and Sayonara Announced on the Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory website, the company responsible for life-like robot actors, Geminoid F. and Geminoid HI-2 (who bears an intentionally uncanny resemblance to the lab’s founder, Hiroshi Ishiguro), is the following proclamation. The end of the information age will coincide with the beginning of the robot ageВ .В .В . information technology and robotics will gradually fuse so that people will likely only notice when robot technology is already in use in various locations.18 The expansion of robotic technologies in medicine, the military, and even in the toy industry is fairly commonplace, though fewer examples can be found in theatre and performance. However, a long performance

history of automata and experimentation with robotics in performance informs current work, such as the experimentation within the Android-Human Theatre Company of Japan.19 A collaboration between director Oriza Hirata and robot designer Ishiguro, the play Sayonara revolves around two women, one facing a terminal illness (played by a living actor); the other (played by Geminoid F), her caretaker, who recites poetry and engages her in dialogue about the meaning of life. Displayed frequently as an “object” of curiosity, (there are examples online of her singing in public, or on display in a department store window in Tokyo) onstage, Geminoid F becomes an abject body in relation to the living human beside her, abject by a question of degrees, set at a further ontological distance than the “object.” Although she is designed to look extremely lifelike, reviews of the production (which has played in Tokyo, Melbourne, New York, and elsewhere) indicate an awkward, out-of-sync, and, well, “robotic” performance. To the production team’s credit, she plays an android in the play, and is not intended to be human, though the longer-termPage 76 → goal of this robotic research is to achieve closer interactions between humans and robots. The technological body is abject, unable to fully overcome the history of the “uncanny” leveled at lifelike beings, and while Geminoid F is remarkably lifelike, she retains a quality that fascinates and repulses.20 Although the technology is hidden—the virtual puppetry of an Abject (Subject) Technology—this example functions as an Abject (Subject) Technology, not only because the technology also is the body, but because in a cyborgean era we understand this figure at a turning point between human and nonhuman, as a real possibility.21 Sayonara also returns us to Karel ДЊapek’s 1920 R.U.R., in which “robotic” figures replace of their human creators, but now, almost 100 years later, these figures are becoming a reality.22 At least, it is impossible not to see them through eyes that understand these realities; in a future version of R.U.R., the characters might be played by “Geminoids.” Although the trepidation over new technologies post–WWI reflected in R.U.R. is replaced in Sayonara with a sense of the robot or android as comfort and intellect, both figures are placed in relation to the human fear of death. Using the form of a play as an unveiling for this android life seems a decidedly retro choice, and as one review suggests: “Hirata’s shows demonstrate theatrical thinking that, rather than being futuristic, is actually quite behind the times.”23 The return to the theatrical, to the form of a play to explore this new technology exposes the automata history of this body-technology coupling. Often used interchangeably with the word robot, the automaton is a self-operating machine that has historically taken the form of animals, humans, and objects. In her study of this figure’s history Kara Reilly makes a provocative observation (here especially in relation to her reading of R.U.R.): “With the advent of Robots, automata became a thing of the past. Automata are unique, hand-crafted entertainers, whereas Robots are mass produced workers.”24 Yet in Sayonara, through Geminoid F, we see a return to the “entertainer,” to a comfortable enough relation to the technological to begin to re-play these forms historically even as they move into the future.25 As the Abject Body-Subject Technology continues to collect examples, whether within the Abject- or ObjectTechnology category, the strand is fortified through the understanding of technology as cyborgean, always-already Subject. The taxa within these categories are unruly, prone to overlap. Any bodies considered “abject” might be reread as subject, and the object and abject are only at times separated by degrees.

Page 77 →Column 2. Object Bodies Object configurations are positioned as tensions and triangulations between the Abject and Subject, highlighting the spaces between these categories even as they each draw closer to each other. In this category distances, gaps, and fissures between bodies and technologies diminish further, but also remain exposed. Object bodies often address issues of identity, are represented as fractured, or illuminate issues of labor. Like the notions of fixity or the focus on the apparatus constituting the Object Technology described in the last section, Object Bodies can appear more fixed and, within this category, also become a form of apparatus upon which ideas are projected. They remain material bodies, but also can function as screens or as machines, able to absorb and transform ideas. They are objects of study, or those conceptually able to be manipulated.

These taxa resist less—in theory, if not in practice—than those in the Abject category. As a primary example of the Object Body-Subject Technology Cyborg, the Wooster Group expose the duality of this positionality. Arguably the leading avant-garde performance company worldwide, they, their works, and their bodies are hardly Object, but their foundational and continued technological explorations exemplify the oscillating space between bodies and technologies attracted to each other toward a cyborgean union.

A. Object Cyborgs: Object Body-Subject Technology The Wooster Group continues to provide rich and potent examples of Object Cyborg Bodies, producing work interrogating how bodies are received and receive technological stimulus. Their 2006–present production of Hamlet is an example of the evolving cyborg theatre through its desire to return to older forms and histories of technological experimentation. In this production the Wooster Group digitally reworked Richard Burton’s film of Hamlet as an object of performance with which to interact. The film, itself a groundbreaking experiment in the early days of live-feed projection, is the backdrop directing the actions of the Wooster Group bodies on stage. Elsewhere I have identified this relay back and forth between the analog and the digital, between stage and screen bodies that form the progressing Cyborg Theatre. 26 This production emerges as cyborg through the relationality between Page 78 →the onstage bodies and those captured on film, historical bodies as objects of morphological study. Many of these examples in this category respond, either dramaturgically to a text, or to a historical moment, or to the past as well as the present. Alongside the other examples—imitating the dog, Katie Mitchell’s earlier media productions, and other works by the Wooster Group’s—Hamlet illuminates how the spaces between these bodies, in history and in the present, on stage and in film, produce a contemporary, cyborgized theatrical example that resists the unquestioned slick and unitary union between bodies and technologies. Taxon: Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner’s codirected FrГ¤ulein Julie FrГ¤ulein Julie, a coproduction between London’s Barbican and Berlin’s SchaubГјhne, takes up Mitchell’s previous explorations with media to reexamine Strindberg’s problematic play through its sharpened, technologically inspired focus on dramaturgy and a reimagining of Naturalism. Following the cook Kristin rather than the usual protagonist, Julie, Mitchell restructures the play so that we see it through the cyborgean eyes of an Object Body and Subject Technology: Kristin as experienced through the cyborgean lens of the camera. Mitchell exposes the means of producing images through the inclusion of sound-effect stations, camera operators, and the physical objects collected to create an image on screen. Although the technology could easily be “object” through its now repeated “gimmickry,” Mitchell has instead constructed an innovative directorial methodology that reshapes the role of the actor on stage and includes technologies as a cocollaborator, as a subject on stage. Similar to Mitchell’s previous media-based productions (Waves, Some Trace of Her, Attempts on Her Life) the stage resembles a film set on which stagehands and actors alike busily construct the sounds and close-ups of Kristin’s narrative presented onscreen throughout the play. Audiences see a walled-off kitchen through a wall of windows, or, vicariously, onscreen, through cameras filming inside. On this stage the bodies are objects, moved into position for the scene’s setup, taking on and off the characterizations when needed. The bodies move into place through a carefully rehearsed choreography, and appear in a clear relation to the cameras, props, and other actors as needed. They are, at times, the literal visual objects necessary for inclusion into a shot, and this is made more evident through the body-double doppelgГ¤ngers wearing similar costumes so that an arm, for example, might pour water into a basin in close-up immediately preceding Page 79 →a cutaway shot to the full body within the kitchen. The character Kristin is listed as played by two actors in the program, emphasizing the interchangeability of the bodies. Just as Kristin is made object dramaturgically to Miss Julie’s forward advances on her fiancГ© Jean, she is literally objectified by this cyborgean entanglement between the components making-up Kristin and the technologies through which we understand her story. However, it is, crucially, through this union of bodies and technologies that Kristin’s story moves audiences—away from the misogynist power play that Strindberg plays out, and toward a possible feminist response.

In this twenty-first-century restaging of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, Mitchell not only returns to a problematic text, but offers a renewed understanding of Naturalism. As a theatrical form influenced by scientific innovation (specifically Darwinian evolutionary theory), Naturalism, proposed by Г‰mile Zola to more scientifically represent reality, was taken up in theatre through both setting and subject. Like the evolution of taxonomy itself, Naturalism addresses the science of life, focusing on a deep and searching look into heredity and environment. By reinvestigating Naturalism through her media techniques, and specifically through the lens of modern-day reality—the camera, Mitchell both illuminates the play through a cyborgizedPage 80 → world view, but also throws up a critique of how we look, and how often we understand “reality” through the camera’s eye. 5.4 FrГ¤ulein Julie, directed by Katie Mitchell. Photograph @ Geraint Lewis.

B. Object Bodies and Object (Subject) Technologies How bodies relate to the technologies of their time is a question that travels through each category but is especially resonant here. Before technologies can shift into a subject position they are objects, things to experiment with, to negotiate, to resist. Vsevolod Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics, developed in the early 1920s, initiates the Object Body-Object Technology intersection at a time when bodies and technologies were merging through the machine. With industrialization comes change; as systems change, so, too, must the bodies that operate them. Meyerhold, influenced by the Constructivists and also interested in growing directorial theories of shaping actors, expanding his ongoing interest in circus, commedia, and gymnastic movement to include the scientific systems of the time, such as Taylorism, by developing a series of exercises to explore machinic movement through actors’ bodies. The Object-Object intersection is also one that has a particular fascination with a visible juxtaposition of theatre and film, cameras, technological conceptions. The oscillation between forms of theatre and other media such as film is one that echoes across most of these categories, and is one of the earliest integrations forming the concept of the cyborg theatre. Since film’s inception it has been compared and contrasted to theatre, and often the two are set in contentious placement to each other. In an essay predating his book Liveness (which sparked the now famous “debate”), Phil Auslander responds to Herbert Blau’s description of an intermedial production (Blau describes it as “a confusion of realms: stage and screen images pursued and combined with each other, splitting and substituting, overlapping”) with the following question: “do we experience live and mediatized images as distinct species whose hybridization can produce the confusion Blau describes?”27 While a cyborg theatre already understands a mediatized worldview, it is the notion of these images as distinct “species,” that remains a fascination especially for the Object category. From the early experimentation of Sergei Eisenstein and on to Erwin Piscator, who in the 1920s used newsreel and documentary footage on the set of his production of Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, Wir Leben, (Hurrah, We Live), the “species” began to hybridize, but also to set the stage for work that includedPage 81 → emerging technology, while also questioning the interrelationship of these forms. Greg Giesekam suggests that Piscator’s blend of the real and the fictional “largely anticipated modern methods of producing television drama documentaries.”28 Revealing historical “DNA” that traces back to Piscator’s explorations into montage and documentary, as well as Meyerhold’s machinic movement, the Object category explores the documentary, and techniques of filming, while also showing the construction of their making. As the Object categories continue to experiment with their different “species” in relationship to one another, they are in a cyborgean tension, being drawn closer and closer towards an interspecies exchange. Taxon: Jay Scheib’s World of Wires Based around the intertwining of texts—Fassbinder’s screenplay turned 1973 television miniseries, Welt am Draht, which was in turn based on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1962 sci-fi novel, Simulacron-3, Jay Scheib’s World of Wires reaches back to texts that themselves reached forward. It is the third part of a trilogy called Simulated Cities, Simulated Systems, in which Scheib investigates texts and events that address Baudrillard’s

ideas of simulations.29 Familiar in popular films like The Matrix, in theatre, simulation is a difficult idea to relay, living bodies stubbornly resist the blurring line between realities. Scheib solves this problem through a highly mediated production intricately designed with multiple levels of screens and surfaces. In the play, a mystery in which people may or may not be living in a computer simulation of their lives, actors as object bodies are both the characters themselves, but also themselves in different realities. The questioning of reality often finds actors both on stage and simultaneously on screen beside themselves. The bodies are objects that constantly question what is real. Rather than the return to the real we saw in Mitchell’s FrГ¤ulein Julie, here the real is precisely what is in question. On the stage of theoretically “real” bodies this tale forces them into the position of objects who may or may not be “real.” World of Wires uses an Object (Subject) Technology—an onstage filming of action and character but always framed by the lenses of simulation—that anticipates the immersive qualities of Subject technologies such as 3-D, or VR. By foregrounding the filmmaker, and always questioning the spaces between bodies on stage and those on screen, the immersion of the potential simulation remains a plot device. Scheib himself is the videographer, trailing behind and in front of actors to capture them on screen. He goes behind walls to unveil scenes behind the action, to show different realities. Page 82 →We see the camera doing its work; we are made aware of the apparatus and understand how the images are being produced.

C. Object Bodies and Abject (Subject) Technologies Controlling the actor’s body could be considered an early method of producing the Object Body in theatre. In Edward Gordon Craig’s (1872–1966) proposal of the Гњber-marionette to replace the actor he suggests that, “The Гјber-marionette will not compete with life—rather will it go beyond it.”30 Object bodies have often been actor bodies, bodies shaped and controlled, bodies having ideas thrust upon them. In his essay, Craig already echoes some of the sentiments put forth by Heinrich Kleist in his 1810 “On the Marionette Theatre, ” in which he argues for puppets over dancers for their ability to overcome affectation and transcend the weighty physical body. The object bodies here are ones to be controlled, and as a director, Craig (although himself also an actor) sought this control through the analogy of the puppet, as Harold Segel has explained. Craig’s enthusiasm for puppet and marionette related mostly to his desire to transform the human actor into a totally submissive instrument by means of which the director, who now stood at the center of the production, could realize his personal vision of the theatrical work.31 Although, as Segel goes on to make clear, Craig was not advocating for the abolishment of the living actor, he was advocating for a new form of acting, an idea that resonates throughout the twentieth century. Craig’s proposal imagines the abject technology of the puppet body as the basis for the actor as an Object Body that the director can transform. Returning to this category today through the Object Body merging with a now Abject (Subject) Technology, I return to the tensions between the human and puppet body, but in this example they are separated, both acting as objects for the communication of the ideas, and produced through a technological form that both hides and reveals, itself hovering between the past and the present. Taxon: Paper Cinema’s The Odyssey In the UK company the Paper Cinema’s production of The Odyssey, a “live animation” shadow-puppet action drama for the mediatized era, the abject puppet is now turned object, transformed through projection to be caught Page 83 →on screen.32 The puppet objects are here literally drawn, pen-and-ink drawings, some created in front of our eyes and others pre-drawn and set out as “shadow puppets” on a makeshift stage downstage. The choice of the ancient text and even their name, the Paper Cinema, suggests a reminiscing, a return, through technology, to a world of journeys and the ancient form of shadow puppets. Fusing together live animation, live music, and (similar to Mitchell’s work) live sound scoring, their Odyssey brings together object bodies to tell the classic story.

The stage displays all of its elements—a large screen upstage, a band stage left with a collection of instruments and sound-makers, objects for sound production, and downstage right two artist/puppeteers who remain visible to the audience at all times. We watch as puppeteer/animators draw pen-and-ink drawings that are projected as animated puppet forms onto a central screen, sometimes painting before our eyes—other times holding up predrawn images and figures in front of the cameras. The bodies here function as operators, and are the tools that allow the characters to come to life—although both can be read in this capacity as object, there is also a hint of the directorial hand controlling the puppet/actor/figures implied. It is inverted shadow puppetry, the stage allows us to watch all the elements equally as the story is created on the screen but in the space around it as well. Like the technological productions created by Katie Mitchell, audiences watch the live Foley sound/music score unfold, a blend of homemade sound effects such as the popping of bubble wrap to create the crackling sounds of fire or the violin creating the sound of seagulls, the technology here makes the story possible, both acting as an apparatus and pointing to itself—we understand how the images are made, how the story is told. Like Mitchell’s Naturalistic camera, here too we can experience a close-up, a bird’s eye view; the camera layers on memories. The technology is at once “object”—it is visible and pointed to, and we start by seeing the spaces between the bodies and technologies—but better described as “Abject (Subject)” for its use of shadow puppetry. If shadow puppetry traditionally veils all of its components in shadows and light, then Paper Cinema reinvents this form for a cyborgean age. This is an abject technology in a digitized era, as the artist-puppeteer sketches before our eyes, and hand-painted figures and cut-out forms are manually manipulated, but turned subject, brought to life in front of the camera. In front of two live video feeds, puppeteers hold hundreds of drawings and figures, bringing them closer or further with the reach of their arm, slightly shaking them to create a sense of movement. Like shadow puppetry, both the bodies Page 84 →and the technology appear and disappears in relationship to each other the story being told.

Column 3. Subject Bodies Donna Haraway’s famous desire, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” is now a reality. Cyborg figures exist, as animals, plants, and humans. The desire to become cyborg has prompted increasing technological access and connectivity to greater reaches of the globe; it has allowed greater flexibility in some working conditions. However, it has a long way to go, and emerging technologies are still in the hands of the few.33 I’ve argued that this category poses a challenge for the premise of the “subject” body as one that has traditionally been held up as a privilege to some, a right to others. In theatre and performance the focus has been on living, human bodies, but as a cyborgean terrain continues to shift, other affinities might also begin to intervene against purely anthropocentric engagements with the world. As the Abject, Object, and Subject bodies and technologies continue to weave and interlace, back and forth across this matrix, the categories and taxa proposed emphasize a sense of the diverse range of possible affinities between these figures.

A. Subject Cyborgs: Subject Body-Subject Technology The Subject-Subject cyborg seems like a logical ending point. It is, after all, the point at which the cyborg theatre form began to take shape and mutate into this new “DNA,” but its placement at the beginning of the section is a reminder that the chart is fluid and able to be read backwards and forwards across time and ideas. The becoming-cyborg examples here all feature close proximity of bodies and technologies, intertwined yet resisting the seamlessness and fixity of troubling cyborgs, and able to form new subjectivities that are open to integrations. Those in this category continue to evolve and mutate, from George Coates, whose experimentation in 3-D musictheatre works has shifted to explorations with social media, to companies such as Big Art Group, who continue to produce work that raises crucial questions about cultural, political, and social technologies. Although the entire chart reflects becoming-cyborg, it is the intersection of the Subject-Body and SubjectTechnology where the two concepts Page 85 →rely most upon each other and are the most integrated. This is the category that attempts to blur boundaries and close gaps between them, although it is the gaps that remind us of theatre, of the bodies within the theatre. This intersection could include new and evolving “species” slowly

shaping from the different strands. One such hybrid continues to be experimentation between theatre and film—its form, techniques, and genres. Although not without its flaws (this mutating form is inevitably one of trial and error), and in part not many degrees beyond some of the other work I have discussed, the following example is an attempt to draw together these various strands to create a new type of entity. Taxon: Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s The Antonioni Project Redeploying three Antonioni film scripts as a basis for a theatrical piece, Ivo van Hove blends cinematic techniques with blue-screen technologies to create a mash-up of these forms in The Antonioni Project. Blending highlights and story lines from three Antonioni films: L’Avventura (The Adventure), La Notte (The Night), and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), the piece is more montage than narrative, and actors merge with the projected and blue-screen technology to facilitate the making of a theatre/film hybrid. The piece is an intriguing cyborgean experiment—echoing elements from Mitchell’s media pieces or Scheib’s World of Wires—in which what happens live is translated onto the screen in a filmic composition, but here the bodies and technologies are integrated more fully and in true cinematic scope are transported to the Minneapolis skyway, to a hospital, to a beautiful beach. This is technology that is not attempting to expose a sense of the “real” as Mitchell’s does, or to highlight the labor in the production of the image (which it does, but almost to show an ease), but rather a technology that competes with film, but offers the added dimension of the onstage Subject body acting. The stage is like a film set—a large blue screen looms over the stage, upon which people act out the scenes. Unlike the quality of the object bodies of Mitchell’s work, here the actors seem undeterred by the constant positioning and remain within their scenes, “acting” in spite of the scene shifts. The “non-places” change around them—we begin in a generic U.S. city, the signs are in English (but the actors speak Dutch), in what could be a hospital, a windowed space that reflects little of its whereabouts, then to the sea, to a hotel room, wherever in the world we need to be.34 The shifting places evoke a sense of human loss as the bodies easily slip in and out of Page 86 →the images but always end up there on the stage before us; the narrative is subservient to the construction of the image, to the materiality of bodies and technologies. The interweaving stories are from the films and largely feature (white, middle-class) couples immersed in themes of seduction, infidelity, greed, aging, and the meaninglessness of love. Against this, the technology takes on more focus than the (banal) tribulations on stage. In the program, van Hove explains that It is no coincidence that Antonioni’s scripts are from the early 1960s, a time when postwar reconstruction had been completed but an outdated system of norms and values was causing an emotional vacuum. Our present day and age shows many parallels to this period. Globalisation and the uprooting of people are putting traditional customs and values under pressure.35 Perhaps van Hove reaches back to these films to place in parallel the people then, and now. Yet, they appear stagnated—the gender roles remain unchallenged, the opportunity for intervention or social and political dimensionality lacking. Perhaps this is the point, a challenge to the “subjects” of today: how to face globalization and the uprooting of people? As van Hove further points out, “The economy of the world is now based around a short-term outlookВ .В .В . empty consumerismВ .В .В . inhuman urbanisationВ .В .В . the anonymous destructive force of nature.”36 Within the production, in contrast to the empty images of global non-places, van Hove interjects a long montage of now familiar images of destruction—the New Orleans flood, the Gulf oil slick, California fires. Van Hove’s techniques reach back to Piscator and traditions of including documentary footage on stage. In The Antonioni Project we are, at times, witness to a laboratory experiment, of a deconstruction and reconstruction of crumbling stories, of global technologies, of acting bodies. We watch the camera move into place and what we see on screen is a blend of theatre and film that refuses to fully merge, that through its gaps and cuts and shifts reminds us of the realities of our lives.

B. Subject Bodies and Object (Subject) Technologies

Josef Svoboda’s media experiments at the Laterna Magika Theatre in Prague historically exemplify the intersection of the Subject Body and Object Technology.Page 87 → Svoboda, primarily a scenographer, founded the Laterna Magika Theatre with director Alfred Radok, in name a return to late seventeenth-century magiclantern projection devices. Influenced by both Piscator and Meyerhold, Svoboda used film and lighting techniques to reshape the scenic space for the actors, inventing what he called “polykran” screens, which worked in conjunction with moving belts and lighting to create an image-based environment. Like the Constructivists, the machine remains at the heart of Svoboda’s technique and the overall effects are spectacular, and seem before their time, though as Steve Dixon has pointed out, the effects were only possible through extensive objects, technology-as-apparatus: “on their 1958 European tour, they carried stage and projection technology weighing over 15,000 pounds, including ten different sizes of mobile projection screens and two moving belts, which slid them into place during the performance.”37 Svoboda’s work reverberates forward, to the specially designed screens and moving ramp on George Coates’s stages, to work considered “live film” or “living media.” This form of technology is as reliant on the “tools” as what was projected upon them. Although “Object Technology” due to the historic significance of Svoboda’s technological innovation,Page 88 → it is also precursor to the Subject category due to how the screens function as subject. Having experiencing the “magic” in person during a trip to Prague, I can attest to the continued impact of the technology, both “object” for projected imagery and film placed upon it, but also alive in the space as “subject.” 5.5 Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s The Antonioni Project. Photograph В© Jan Versweyveld. Taxon: Sunken Garden, a 3-D Opera More an experiment than a success, the Sunken Garden, a media-opera created between composer/director Michel van der Aa and author David Mitchell mixes video and opera to create what the program calls “the first 3-D Opera.” Technically, as strictly opera, it may be this, although the pieces George Coates produced in the 1990s were also this, even if their musical scores were not composed entirely for opera singers. Sunken Garden does, whether aware of it or not, follow in Coates’s footsteps through its use if the 3-D glasses worn by audiences. As opposed to the more subject-driven works in Coates’s cyborg theatrical form, Sunken Garden is a good example of the Object category because of its clear separation of technologies, its highlighting of the technology as a kind of gimmick, and its conscious attempt to merge form and content. The stage is set with large, moveable floor-to-ceiling cube structures that are refigured with different screens to represent rooms or to show large-screen filmic images. The bodies on stage are both Subject Bodies and Object (Subject) Technologies, some on stage, and others only on screen. Three opera singers/actors carry out most of the plot, which revolves around Toby, a video artist making a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a man and his girlfriend, and we get glimpses of other minor characters through the documentary, friends and relatives of the missing persons appearing in interviews and convoluted plot twists. The girlfriend is followed on screen through a series of self-recorded smartphone films she makes of herself as she loses sense of reality. Like other examples of plots seemingly woven around the technological gimmick, this is overly ambitious as it tries to include the 3-D scenes in the second half of the production when the video artist stumbles onto a door under an overpass and into the sunken garden, our cue to don our 3-D glasses. Although the garden is in 3-D, and there are some impressive visual effects, within the play it signifies a conceptual prison trapping people, and in a similar sort of capture as the holograms in Toujours et PrГЁs de Moi, it remains a separate space from the onstage actors. It is in the garden where the Page 89 →video artist finds the couple, locked in a state of limbo. The piece maintained a level of separation between these realms, pointing to the technologies as objects through which the plot was progressing (literally; Toby at one point had a lyric about using a Sony camcorder; another character commented that she has a soft spot for video artists like Bill Viola). Although not ironically at all, the piece kept pointing back to the technology as a gimmick, forcing it to remain Object, yet with the (Subject) understanding of it as 3-D, with a layered understanding of virtual realities, of Second Life and other immersive games.

C. Subject Bodies and Abject (Subject) Technologies Reading across the categories of bodies, the puppet body transforms to the hybrid puppet/actor ubГ«rmarionette and then here becomes a living entity, responding to the stimuli around her or him. At this body’s intersection with Abject Technology is what Jerzy Grotowski calls the “Poor Theatre,” a place of “communion.” The tension between directorial control over the actor desired by Craig and Meyerhold, and the emergence of the actor as celebrated body on stage (again) produces the actor/director relationship in Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Grotowski was clear in his development of Poor Theatre that “the education of the actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism’s resistance to this physic process.”38 Yet, the actor often associated with the perfection of Grotowski’s techniques is Ryszard Cieslak, a body in control and fully subject on stage. In Grotowski’s earlier comment, his directorial force is evident, yet also now reliant upon the “organism” Cieslak, who arguably assisted in Grotowski’s successes. Grotowski called his process via negativa, a stripping away of the trappings, perhaps the strings that had come before. Grotowski insists that the theatre can exist without “technologies” such as scenography or costume, but “it cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, вЂlive,’ communion.”39 Other examples within this category might include a range of “non-mediated” performance: site-specific performance, performance or live art, physical theatre and dance in which the actor’s subject body is foregrounded over set, lights, screens (taking as a given that an abject technology can also mean it is hidden or noncentral to the context or ideas). However, in the always-already subject technology world we live in it now has to be a conscious choice to eliminate all things technological from the stage. Page 90 →Increasingly the technological choices locate the following production in the Subject Body-Abject (Subject) Technology space. Although seemingly a “technologized” piece (using standard lighting techniques and even including a video camera on stage), it is how the technology is used within the narrative of this play that makes it Abject but with a cyborgean return to Subject. Taxon: Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi famously caused a sensation in 1896 when it shocked audiences with its opening line, “merdre.”40 These bodies on stage caused riots and eventually led to the banning of the play; interestingly for this study, an early version of the play was begun when Jarry was only fifteen, and it was conceived of as a puppet play. In a way, it is well-suited to a puppet theatre, and it is upon this premise that Cheek by Jowl’s version functions. The play is perhaps “conducted,” directed from within by a teenage boy, who at first hangs out in the large bourgeoisie living-room set on stage. He brings out a video camera and begins to film the room, slowly, panning across furniture, until he reaches a door and enters, and we are, as in World of Wires, or Mitchell’s FrГ¤ulein Julie, taken into the back room, where we see a man preparing a meal, chopping vigorously, into the bathroom, where we see a slow close-up of the toilet and the eventual trace of the “merde” that we recognize as the play’s opening. He and the main characters eventually return to the living room and the production takes place in the setting of a dinner party. The boy’s parents and their friends carry on with their mundane conversations until activated into the story of Ubu Roi by (or within) the son’s imagination. He controls their actions like an onstage puppeteer, turning them into what we imagine he thinks they are; indeed, the characters a young Jarry created in response to his teachers—greedy, murdering, and childish. This control takes the shape of sudden switching planes as actors return to their former places and resume their conversations amidst chaotic and growing piles of food and detritus. Set in a professional theatre, there is of course technology to guide the lighting, subtitling (it is performed in French), and sound, but what makes me consider it as abject is the decision to enact the story and its differing planes entirely through the acting rather than an attempt at virtual puppetry or animation or projection. The inclusion of the camera converts this conceptually into the Abject (Subject)—that the boy understands life through Page 91 →a lens poses the very real possibility that he could be vlogging (videoblogging) the experience,

or actually filming the scene in order to transform it digitally into a viral Internet meme. The camera becomes a significant trigger on stage for the fantasy world to which he turns.

Conclusion For it is not a question of linking consequences, but of grouping and isolating, of analysis, of matching and pigeon-holing concrete contents; there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things. —Michel Foucault 41 Just as in the science of taxonomic study, there are arguments for and against the different classification systems. Out in the field it is hard to, for example, “identify the monkey on the spot,” as biological anthropologist Colin Groves explains, arguing for multiple modes of analysis.”42 Although I have based my taxonomic thinking on a conceptual DNA attracting bodies and technologies into an interwoven, interrelated entity, the DNA model can only go so far within a theatrical context. As this “DNA” has evolved into a cyborg theatre, subject technology has become a dominant force within the early decades of the twenty-first century, and as the model continues to evolve this strand gains greater focus. However, it is also true that the network of bodies, the directors, composers, actors, producers, and artists involved in the evolution of this form demonstrate a return, tracking back as they go forward, to the long embedded histories—genetic codes, if you will—within the form. My matrix offers a theoretical model of this practice that illuminates its network of historical possibilities, foundations, and connections, and my hope it that is adds to the other possible ways of understanding this field of performance. Reworking these concepts I remember staged bodies I have seen and thought about: singing, mechanical, robotic, caught on screens, in projections, partial, larger than life, animal, medical, behind cameras or in front of them, puppets, and illusions. They collect in these pages as taxa, data, but also as themselves, subjects of my study. The bodies in my memory are always (already) intertwined with technologies, creative and imaginative technologies pushing limits of what we’ve seen and returning us anew to see again: cameras, screens, robots and androids, huge machines and tiny projectors, 3-D images. These categories are most useful as a method for articulatingPage 92 → and analysing various permutations of bodies and technologies. It is a tentative ordering, as Foucault reminds us, and these groupings are not intended to wholly box in or fix any one example; clearly many might shift around the matrix depending upon an individual reading of the category. They are intended as provocations and possibilities, and taken as a whole, as an analytical understanding of multimedia performance.

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Sharing the Stage with Media A Taxonomy of Performer-Media Interactions David Z. Saltz

Introduction My fascination with the possibilities of incorporating digital media into live performance dates back to the late 1980s, when I was first exposed to experiments in interactive narrative and media, video-installation art, computer music, and especially the use of media technologies by theatre practitioners and performance artists such as George Coates, the Wooster Group, and Laurie Anderson. Even during that relatively early stage in the exploration of digital performance, it was clear that digital media could play a multitude of roles in the performance event. However, the theorists and practitioners staking out this new ground often seemed to have a somewhat limited conception of that role. Unsurprisingly, those who came to media as scenic designers, such as Mark Reaney, who established i.e.VR at the University of Kansas, and William Dudley, one of the first people to introduce advanced digital media to Broadway and the West End, conceived of digital media primarily (though not exclusively) as a way to enhance theatrical illusion through virtual scenery. The Wooster Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte approached media from the perspective of a director—in particular, one committed to testing the boundaries of theatre, and exploited technology’s ability to mediate and problematize the phenomenon of live performance itself. Many electronic-music composers were compelled by the ability of interactive technologies to empower musicians by allowing them to create powerful new digital instruments that blurred the boundaries between composing and performing. I began to chart the multiplicity of ways these artists were positioning media in relation to live performers.1 In 2001 I published a taxonomy of Page 94 →performer-media relationships as an analytic tool for ferretting out similarities and differences among artists, and also critical biases among theorists. Just as important, I developed the taxonomy to extend, enrich, and refine the ways performers interact with media technologies in my own work as a practitioner. The initial taxonomy consisted of twelve categories, such as dramatic media, virtual scenery, virtual costumes, virtual puppetry, affective media, and commentary, among others. I have found that earlier taxonomy to be reasonably robust and useful, especially for instructional purposes. It has become an integral part of a course I offer regularly called Interactive Media and Live Performance, providing a tool both to focus students’ own work and to help them talk with more precision about the use of media in other people’s work. However, I have never found the taxonomy to be very satisfying from a theoretical perspective. The inventory of modes is ad hoc; there is no theoretical justification for having twelve categories instead of any other number, and no systematic account of how these categories relate to one another. My goal in this chapter, then, is to supplant the previous inductive taxonomy with a much more rigorous framework. The original inventory provides a useful testing ground to assess the new taxonomy’s scope; a criterion for the new model’s success is that it be able to account clearly for at least the twelve types of interaction I had previously identified, using as few variables as possible to do so. My objective is to develop a model that exhibits what Kenneth Burke describes as scope and reduction.2 The model’s underlying structure is very simple: it identifies variables along three dimensions—dramatic function, space, and time—and it assesses each from two distinct perspectives—the performer’s and the character’s (fig. 1). However, as we will see, this relatively simple structure is capable of generating hundreds of variations.

Key Terms: Media Object, Interaction, Performer, and Character The taxonomy I am proposing maps the myriad ways that live performers, performing both in and out of

character, interact with media objects. Before delving into the details of the taxonomy, it will be useful to clarify the specific sense in which I am using the key terms that define this project: media object, interaction, performer, and character. 6.1. Variables defining the taxonomy. Page 95 →Chris Salter has properly critiqued the tendency among digital performance theorists to conflate “media technology” with “image-based projected media,” resulting in an “ocular-centered” discourse that ignores “senses like touch hearing, taste, or smell.”3 My analysis here is predicated on an extremely expansive and loosely defined notion of media that encompasses audio, video, 3D animation, motion capture, holography, and robotics, among others. The media object is the content represented through the media technology, distinct from the media delivery system itself. For example, when a live performer stands beside a large video monitor displaying an animation of a cat, the cat is the media object. The performer might relate to this virtual cat in a variety of ways. She might observe and respond to the image diegetically, like a viewer passively watching a program about a cat on television; or she might manipulate the cat image interactively as if it were an avatar in a video game or a virtual puppet; or she might relate to the media transparently, as if a real cat were in the room with her. The goal of this taxonomy is to distinguish clearly between these and many other ways that performers engage with media objects. The interactions that I focus on in this chapter are, first and foremost, performative and imaginative, and only incidentally technical and mechanistic. In other words, they are interactions between performers and media objects within the frame of the performance event—a frame that is often, at least in part, defined in fictive terms.4 To continue with the example of the cat on the video monitor: imagine that the performer mimes the action of throwing a treat toward the screen. An image of a treat immediately appears on the video screen and drops in front of the animated cat, who then eagerly laps it up. Though neither the cat nor the treat is real, the interaction itself might be; for example, a video camera might detect the performer’s Page 96 →gestures in real time and trigger the cat’s responses. Alternatively, the interaction between the performer’s action and the media object’s response might be faked; the performer may have rehearsed with a prerecorded video sequence to learn to anticipate the cat’s response. To reduce ambiguity, when I am discussing an imaginary interaction within a fictive frame, I will refer to the character’s interaction with the media object; when I am discussing the actual interaction with the technology (at least as the spectator perceives it), I will refer to the performer’s interaction with the media object. In many instances the character’s and the performer’s interactions are the same. For example, to depict a scene in which a live character is talking with a remote character in real-time via Skype, a production may establish a real-time Skype connection between a live and remote performer. However, it is equally possible for a production to simulate the telematic conversation using a prerecorded video sequence. Later in the chapter, I expand my taxonomy to account for such differences by separating out the performer’s perspective from the character’s. Until then, however, unless otherwise stated, my focus will be on the character’s interaction with the media object, and I provisionally set aside the question of whether that interaction is, or whether the spectator perceives it to be, “real.” Note that the concept of “character” as I am using it is not inherently psychological or biographical. For our present proposes, there is an element of “character” whenever the spectator perceives that the performer is adopting a fictive stance toward the media. For example, watching our hypothetical performance with the mediatized cat, the spectator is fully aware that the performer is not really “feeding the cat,” and, moreover, realizes that the performer her or himself is under no such delusion; the performer is interacting with a video screen; the character is feeding a cat. Significantly, performers can and often do act “in character” to this extent even when they are purportedly performing as “themselves.” In some situations, such as participatory theatre and interactive installations, the spectator and the performer can be one and the same. In such cases, spectators assess the media’s role in relation to themselves rather than to an external performer.5 The taxonomy that I am proposing is fully applicable to this kind of audience interaction,

though, in the interest of simplicity, I draw most of my examples from non-participatory theatre and performance art, where the performer is distinct from the spectator.

Page 97 →Dramatic Function and Interaction The basis of this taxonomy is a distinction between five functions that media can play in relation to the live performer’s actions: scene, prop, actor, costume, and mirror. These functions, with the exception of the last one, correspond neatly with familiar elements of conventional, non-mediatized theatrical production. They are not intrinsic properties of the media object itself; indeed, the same media content might fulfill different functions at different moments in the same production. What defines each of the five functions is the distinctive way the live performer interacts with the media object (fig. 2). 6.2. Dramatic functions and their associated modes of interaction. 1. Media as Scene Media functions as scenery to the extent that it defines the environment within which the performer is acting. For example, the physical set for the theatre company 1927’s production of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets (2011) consists simply of three white screens, with small cut-out windows, in front of and behind which the live actors perform (fig. 3). Meticulous animations in an expressionistic, hand-drawn style fill the screens throughout the seventy-minute show, depicting a series of constantly changing environments including, among others, the exterior of a tenement house covered with crawling cockroaches, domestic interiors, street scenes, a police station, and a park. The mode of performer interaction integral to media-as-scene is navigation. When the media is functioning as virtual scenery, the spectator will interpret a wholesale change in the image as signifying a jump to a new location, and a shift in the perspective within the image as indicating movement within the scene. In this way, the performer’s virtual or fictional locationPage 98 → is anchored to the media.6 For example, the National Theatre’s 2009 production of Peter Pan, designed by William Dudley, featured projected 3D animations that wrapped around the full circumference of the enormous tent constructed as a traveling venue; in the scene in which Peter Pan and the children fly to Neverland, the performers are suspended in front of a detailed 3D model of London sweeping rapidly beneath them, creating the illusion that the characters are soaring through the air. This effect is reminiscent of the piГЁce de rГ©sistance of Lincoln J. Carter’s 1898 production of Chattanooga, which Gwendolyn Waltz describes as the first use of filmed scenery in the United States. 6.3. Esme Appleton and Suzanne Andrade in 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets (2012). Photograph В© Geraint Lewis. During the chase scene, the Southern engineer fought his Northern adversary—who was also his cousin—aboard the locomotive as it appeared to hurtle forward along its tracks, unmanned, into the depth of the moving-picture setting upstage while the motion of the filmed scenery sped towards Page 99 →the spectators.В .В .В . It was the scenery that rushed forward to assault the eyes of the spectators, not the railroad engine. Since Chattanooga seems to have been the theatrical premiГ©re of integrated stage and motion-picture action, this decision was especially apt: it allowed the emphasis of the effect to be on the filmed scenery, rather than on a traditional train stage-apparatus.7 It is important to emphasize that virtual scenery (like the other four functions I discuss) need not be visual. For example, theatrical productions can, and often do, quickly and effectively convey scenic shifts on a bare or unchanging stage through purely acoustical means, for example establishing a nocturnal, exterior setting with the sound of crickets, and then changing the scene to an interior tavern with the sound of chattering voices and clinking glasses.8 The World Wide Web is built on the scenic paradigm, with users interacting with web pages through hyperlinks that allow them to “navigate” to new “sites.” When the contents of a browser window change

completely, the user has the sensation of traveling to an entirely new location. When content changes inside of a relatively static frame—for example, on a corporate site with static graphics and navigational options at the top of each page (and perhaps along the sides and/or bottom)—then the user has the sensation of navigating within a multifaceted site. 2. Media as Prop It has become common in recent productions of Macbeth to project the image of the dagger as it appears to Macbeth just before he murders Duncan.9 When the dagger appears on the screen, the spectators do not construe the change in media imagery to indicate a shift in location; rather, they imagine a new object (albeit, an hallucinatory one in this case) appearing within an existing environment. The media, then, constitutes a prop rather than defining a scene. Similarly, at several points in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, a live performer makes sweeping gestures and animated puffs of dust appear on the screen; at such moments, the media is not simply providing an environment within which the character is acting, but constitutes a virtual prop with which the character interacts. Any object in a virtual scene will function as a “prop” as soon as a performer uses it. A telephone (real or virtual) is a scenic element insofar as it simply sits on a table decorating the set; it becomes a prop when an actor Page 100 →picks it up. In the same way, a virtual window functions as a prop when the actor opens it. When the media is functioning as a prop, the performer/character is the source of agency, manipulating, controlling, or triggering changes in the media (or at least trying to). The performer’s relationship to the media is instrumental. As with scenery, it is important to emphasize that virtual props need not be neither visual nor literal. Electronic musicians have created a wide variety of virtual instruments that allow them to trigger synthesized or sampled sounds interactively, extending at least as far back as the eponymous instrument Leon Theremin invented in 1920, which allows the performer to adjust the pitch and volume of an electronically generated tone simply by moving his or her hands within an electromagnetic field in space.10 Another well-known example among electronic musicians is a custom-designed instrument, created in 1991, called Lady’s Glove, which Laetitia Sonami embedded with an array of sensors, allowing her to trigger various sonic events—tones, voice samples, and sometimes images—by moving her fingers.11 3. Media as Actor The media object functions as an actor when the live performer relates to it as an autonomous agent, a subject in its own right with sentience and volition. In my earlier taxonomy, I referred to this mode of interaction as dramatic media. The relationship between the live performer and the virtual actor here is not instrumental, as it is with a virtual prop, but responsive. For example, in The Animals and Children Took to the Street, one of the primary characters is a girl who appears exclusively as an animation onscreen, and who interacts with various live actors throughout the play. In this case, the animated sequences are pre-rendered and the live performers must adapt their performances to it, creating the illusion that the media is responsive. In other cases, however, a mediatized actor might respond dynamically to a live performer in real time. One way such an interaction can occur is telematically, when a remote performer onscreen interacts in real time with a live one on stage; for example, during each performance of the Builders Association’s Continuous City (2008), the actor Rizwan Mirza, playing a character named J. V., engaged in improvised video chats with members of his real family in London and Virginia.12 Another approach is to program an artificial digital agent capable of interacting responsively with the performer. For example, Susan Broadhurst’s Blue Bloodshot Flowers (2001) Page 101 →featured a computer-generated animated character (consisting simply of a head) named Jeremiah endowed with artificial intelligence by his programmer, Richard Bowden. Jeremiah tracks participants’ movements with a video camera, and responds emotionally to their behavior. For example, Jeremiah becomes happy when in the presence of a lot of motion, but startled if the motions are too sudden; he grows angry if objects in his field of vision are still, which he construes as ignoring him, and sad if they go away altogether.13 Again, the media object, even an autonomous digital agent, need not be visual or even humanoid to function as a virtual actor. In 1997, a team of researchers from MIT presented a piece called “Improvisational Theater

Space,” which featured a “typographic actor” consisting of projected text that responded dynamically to a live performer’s gesture, simple words and sentences to create “an emergent storyВ .В .В . not strictly tied to a script.”14 In 1988, jazz trombonist and digital composer George Lewis created a computer program called Voyager that improvises with live musicians by detecting melodic and rhythmic patterns in real-time performance and generates its own original music in response. Lewis describes Voyager as “a nonhierarchical, improvisational, subject-subject model of discourse, rather than a stimulus/response setup,”15 clearly articulating the distinction between what I am calling the actor function (media as autonomous agent) and the prop function (media as instrument). 4. Media as Costume Costumes in conventional theatre move in conjunction with performers, merging with them to define the character’s identity. In the same way, media objects that function as virtual costumes do not exist as entities discrete from the live performer, either as subject, object, or environment, but are coextensive with the performer. For example, in a segment of Golan Levin and Zachary Liberman’s performance piece Messa di Voce (2003), called “Insect Nature Show,” a performer moves in front of a screen, her body occluded by a blob-shaped black shadow that is created by a video projector that tracks her moving silhouette; a jagged edge outlining the blob expands and contracts in response to the timber and pitch of the performer’s voice (fig. 4).16 Klaus Obermaier and Chris Haring’s D.A.V.E. projects video onto a performer’s body to transform a “barechested, shaven-headed man”17 into, by turns, “a wrinkled body with grey hair,” a “bare-chested woman,” Page 102 →and a “bulbous alien-like” creature with enormous eyes and ears; at one point the performer “lowers his shoulders level with his chest and then peels back his skin to reveal the red flesh underneath.”18 6.4. Joan La Barbara in Messa di Voce (2003) by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman. Another example of media-as-costume is a robotic prosthesis, such as the “gleaming black insectile body-suits ornamented with long prosthetic arm extensions, hinged in the middle, that they could flip open and closed like jackknives” created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop for the Random Dance Company’s Nemesis (2002).19 In some cases, media can serve to meld multiple performers together to create a single character. The dancers in iLuminate perform in pitch darkness wearing costumes embedded with LEDs that are controlled wirelessly by offstage computers. At one point a pair of dancers may work together to create the illusion of a single character whose head floats away from the body and through the air; at another point, a group of dancers might create the image of a monstrous creature with four extremely long, spider-like legs suspending a body high in the air.20 In some of the most sophisticated examples of media-as-costume, the Page 103 →media object and the live performer conjoin to create a cyborg identity. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck has analyzed this phenomenon in depth through the work of performers such as Cathy Weis. In A String of Lies, which [Weis] created shortly after her diagnosis with MS, she projected a juxtaposition of her upper body onto the moving legs of dancer Jennifer Miller, which allowed her to, as she said, “do a ballet piece again.” .В .В . In a piece called Dunkin’ Booth, she juxtaposed her visible upper body atop her projected lower body, which appeared on the screen submerged in a tank of projected water. In a carnivalesque atmosphere audience members took turns trying to “dunk her” by throwing a ball at a target, and when successful the physical Weis dropped and disappeared, reappearing completely swimming within the tank.21 Hence, the costume function, as I am defining it, can span the range from the use of media to enhance conventional costumes, such as by projecting images onto a fabric costume or embedding LEDs within it, to a prosthesis that augments the body, such as a video projection or a robotic appendage that merges with and extends beyond the body, to cyborg technology that conjoins multiple subjects, some live, some mediated, to produce new hybrid identities. In all of these cases, the media and performer(s) merge together in the imagination of the

spectator to constitute a single fictional or virtual subject. 5. Media as Mirror David Rokeby, creator of the pioneering interactive installation Very Nervous System (1986–1990), proclaims that “an interactive technology is a medium through which we communicate with ourselves—a mirror. The medium not only reflects back, but also refracts what it is given; what is returned is ourselves, transformed and processed.”22 Rokeby, notwithstanding his generalizing rhetoric about the nature of interactive technology, forcefully and eloquently articulates the last of the five media dramatic functions that comprise this taxonomy: media as mirror. Media functions in this way when it reflects the performer’s actions.23 Perhaps the most straightforward example is the kind of live-feed video used to help spectators see close-ups of musical performances and athletic events in huge stadium venues. The Wooster Group employs much the same technology, though to very Page 104 →different aesthetic ends, in productions such as Brace Up! (1993), when actors perform in front of video cameras and microphones on one part of the stage while the real-time video feed is displayed on monitors or projection screens elsewhere on the stage. To function as a media mirror, however, the media need not visually resemble the performer. What matters is that the spectators perceive a continuous, reflective connection between the performer and the media object, and as a result can “read” the performer’s actions through the media. A media mirror has no agency of its own, as a media actor does; it simply follows the performer’s actions. It does not merge with the performers’ bodies, as costume media does; it constitutes an entity detached from the performer. And it is not subject to the performer’s intentional control, as a media prop is; a media mirror (such as a live video feed) reflects the performer regardless of the performer’s intentions, desires, or even, in the case of covert surveillance, knowledge. Hence, a performer’s relationship to his or her media reflection is fundamentally passive. While live-feed video creates a photographic reflection of the performer, real-time motion-capture technology creates an animated double, mapping the performer’s movements onto 3D models that might look nothing like the performer, and indeed may not even be human. For example, Western Michigan University’s production of Doctor Faustus (2007) used motion capture to transfer the movements of a single performer onto 3D models depicting, at different points, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, Helen of Trip, the Good and Evil Angels, and even a thirty-person chorus.24 Synesthetic media also reflects the live performance—in this case, by translating one modality of the performance into another modality—for example, representing motion as sound, or sound as image. A musicvisualization algorithm might automatically generate shapes that grow and shrink as the volume increases and decreases, that fill with warmer colors as the pitch rises and cooler colors as it descends, and/or that become rounder when the notes are sustained and more jagged when the notes are staccato. Synesthesia has inspired experiments in intermedial performance for at least one hundred years—since the 1911 publication of Wassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art—and in recent years has proven especially compelling to electronic composers. For example, an announcement for a recent workshop on digital synesthesia at Harvestworks in New York promised to teach students how to Page 105 →turn photographs into music, use our motion to generate images, and turn the songs of Taylor Swift into three-dimensional animated landscapes. Welcome to the world of Digital Synesthesia: the experience of mixing up your senses so that you hear what your eyes see, and see what your ears are listening to.25 As we have seen, a media mirror need not resemble the performer; conversely, media that does resemble the live performer may not function as a media mirror. In some cases, it may function as an autonomous actor, as with Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head (2002), a 3D model of the artist’s head that responds interactively to questions and comments that viewers type into a keyboard. In this case, though, the computer image is modeled after Stelarc’s features, it does not reflect his performance—which is the defining feature of a media mirror.

Space and Time Sorting examples of performer-media interactions according to dramatic function highlights underlying commonalities that might otherwise escape notice, such as the relationship between live-feed video and real-time synesthesia (both mirrors), or between a telematic performer, an animated AI character, and responsive interactive music (all actors). However, to give the taxonomy the ability to account for the important differences between such examples, we need to supplement dramatic function with two additional variables: space and time. The performer can relate to the media object spatially as either here, there, or in virtual space, and temporally as either now or then. To relate to the media object as being here is to interact with it as if it were a real object occupying real space, as in the hypothetical example of the performer feeding the virtual cat. The media in such cases is “transparent” in the sense defined by media theorists Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin: the medium “erases itself, so that the user is no longer a way of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium.”26 It is important to stress that the defining factor here is not the proximity of the media object to the performer or to the spectator, but to the media delivery system, such as the projection, screen, hologram, media sound source, robot, etc. The object represented through the media Page 106 →delivery system is perceived as being here if and only if the performer regards the media as if the media representation occupied exactly the same space as (i.e., is coextensive with), the media object represented. Hence, a performer who relates to the media object as being “here” is almost always adopting a mimetic stance toward it. Indeed, the only condition under which a media object can be said to be truly “here” relative to the media delivery system is in the case of a kinetic sculpture or a robot.27 When performers relate to a media objects as being there (whether now or then), they are relating to them as real objects that occupy—or that once occupied—a location in real space distinct from the media delivery system. For example, a performer may gaze at a video monitor to watch a YouTube video of a kitten, or observe the kitten live on webcam. In such cases, the performer relates to the media object as image—that is to say, as being mediated by the media delivery system. To appropriate a term from film theory, we can say that media in all such cases is diegetic rather than mimetic. A media object that is both there and then is prerecorded. One that is there and now is telematic: the performer interacts with it in real time but as if it is in a remote location. It is important to clarify, however, that “remote” in this context might be hundreds of miles away from the screen or display—as it is in the example I cited previously from Continuous City in which a character converses with people in other cities via Skype—or just a few feet away—as in the scenes in the Builders Association’s Super Vision (2005) in which a live actor playing a border patrol officer sits at a desk downstage while his image is projected in real time beside a second performer playing a traveler, who interacts with the projection rather than the live actor.28 Sometimes media objects do not have, and have never had, any real spatial existence at all, either here or there. They exist as purely virtual or graphical entities in virtual space. Again, the relevant factor here is not the object’s ontological reality, but the performer’s stance toward the object. As we have seen, a performer may relate to an animated cat as if it were real (in the here and now, telematic, or prerecorded). But it is also entirely possible for the character to relate to an animation precisely as the spectator does, as an animation that exists only in virtual space. For example, in a vignette from the production Messa Di Voce called “Pitchpaint, ” two performers “draw” on the screen with their voices; when they sing descending notes, the lines on the screen curl clockwise, and when they sing ascending notes, Page 107 →they curl counterclockwise. The performers do not engage with the images they produce as mimetic objects, but purely as the graphic images they are. A performer can relate to an object in virtual space as being temporally either now or then. To say that a virtual object exists “now” means that it is being generated, modified, or manipulated in real time: a real event is taking place in virtual space, or, to be more precise, in a hybrid virtual-real space, with the media object in virtual space and the performer in real space. Conversely, to say that a virtual object exists “then” means that it has

been pre-rendered, and that its behavior is invariable and predetermined. 29 One final spatial and temporal possibility is that the media exists entirely outside the character’s frame. There is no interaction or relationship at all between the media and character (at least from the character’s perspective). The media in these cases is, to adopt again a term from film theory, non-diegetic. A common example would be a musical score that the characters do not hear, and exists solely to enhance the mood of a scene of the audience. For now, there is little we can say about such uses of media; we will be in a position to analyze them more fully by the end of the chapter once the full model is in place. The real power of the taxonomy emerges from the interplay of the three dimensions: dramatic function, space, and time. It is impossible within the constraints of this chapter to enumerate all the possible combinations of the variables. In the remainder of this section and the subsequent sections I discuss only a sampling of the potential variations to demonstrate how the variables interact and to give a sense of the expansive range of the performative possibilities the taxonomy is capable of unpacking and distinguishing between. 1. Here and Now (Present) Characters typically relate to projected environments as here and now, such as the scenery discussed above from Chattanooga, Peter Pan, and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. The virtual broom in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets is an example of a here-and-now prop, and the animated child in the same play is a here-and-now actor; iLuminate’s LED-embedded costumes and the shadow enveloping the performer in the Insect Nature Show segment of Messa di Voce exemplify here-and-now costumes. It is much harder, however, to find examples of media mirrors in which Page 108 →the media object is “here” relative to the performer. When I interact with an image of myself on a screen, it is hard to lose awareness that the image is a reflection of a real object outside of the screen—since that real object is my own body. And it is difficult (though not impossible) to imagine myself being on both sides of the mirror, in two places at the same time. There is, however, at least one example of media as a here-and-now mirror: when a robot is programmed to track and replicate the movements of a live performer in real time.30 Unlike a video image of a performer, which refers back indexically to the performer’s physical presence, such a robot is a real object that occupies real space in the here and now, a tangible double echoing the performer’s actions. 6.5. Examples of media relationships distinguished by variations in space and time. Page 109 →2. There and Now (Telematic)

Most often, when performers relate to the media object as being “there and now,” the media is functioning either as an actor—as in the staged Skype conversions in Continuous City—or as a mirror, as in the use of live-feed video in Brace Up!, at least insofar as we adopt the perspective of the performer who appears on screen. Examples of props, costumes, and scenes regarded as “there” and “now” are less common, and for that reason even more interesting. The telerobotic art installation Telegarden (1994) offers a simple but powerful example of there-and-now media that functions in all three capacities. For this project, Ken Goldberg and Joe Santarromana installed an industrial robotic arm in a small garden, which viewers could manipulate remotely over the Internet to plant, water, and fertilize seedlings; they could also control a webcam to inspect the state of the garden. The garden functioned as a remote scene, a “there” in which the participants could act communally with other participants around the globe. Machiko Kushara, discussing this piece, emphasizes that “Telegarden is not a simulation. Users are dealing with live plants growing in a real garden. The garden on the Internet is a Commons in the traditional sense. . . . It literally offers users a common ground.”31 With respect to the scenic function, the key media element is the image of the garden on the participants’ computer screen. At the same time, the remote robotic arm that the participant controls functions as an extension of the participant, fulfilling the “costume” function, specifically as a prosthesis. The technology extends the participant’s agency so that it exists in two spaces simultaneously. Finally, the real-time, remote (i.e., there and then) images of the water, fertilizer, and seedlings that the participant interacts with function as remote props for the participant.

3. Virtual and Now (Interactive Animation) Jeffrey Shaw’s landmark interactive installation Legible Cities (1990) is an example of an interaction experienced as “now” but in virtual space. In this participatory installation, gallery attendees sit on a stationary bicycle in front of a large screen that displays a first-person perspective of city streets (laid out following the grid of actual cities) with buildings formed from enormous words; as the viewers pedal and steer the bicycle, they navigate through streets reading the text. In the years since Shaw created Legible Page 110 →Cities, online social networking and gaming applications such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Minecraft have made such present-tense interactions in virtual spaces commonplace. A number of the examples we have already considered, such as the “Pitchpaint” segment of Messa de Voce, and interactive instruments such as the Theremin and Lady’s Glove, exemplify “virtual-and now” props (instrumental media), and other examples, such as the “typographic actor” in MIT’s “Improvisational Theater Space” and the AI animation Jeremiah in Susan Broadhurst’s Blue Bloodshot Flower, function as “virtual-and-now” actors. Finally, synesthetic media is a virtual-and-now mirror, since it must at leave give the illusion of closely reflecting and translating at least one modality of the performer’s real-time performance. 4. There and Then (Prerecorded) Examples of “there-and-then” media are extremely commonplace, and include any use of prerecorded media on stage that functions diegetically—in other words, that the character perceives to be a recording of a past event. If the recording is of a person (or other autonomous agent), then it will typically function as a “there-and-then” actor, such as the voice and image of Johnny Carson that Eddie watches and talks back to on television in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly.32 Similarly, video or photographs of non-autonomous objects function as there-and-then props, and those of remote locales (landscapes, interiors, etc.) function as there-andthen scenes. (Note that if a character watches a cartoon on television during a play instead of a video, the situation is the same except that the media object is in virtual space rather than “there.”) The Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2006) offers an especially compelling example of virtual scenery experienced as then-and-there. The live performers strive to replicate the famous 1964 televised production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, which is projected behind the performers in human-scale. Whenever the camera’s perspective changes in the video, the live performers rapidly adjust their positions, usually with the help of rolling scenery. This staging playfully reinforces the idea that the interaction between performers and scenery is predicated on the concept of navigation. While typically a production using virtual scenery will strive to create the illusion that the media’s perspective on the environment is changing in response to the Page 111 →performers’ movement through space, this production cannily emphasizes the media’s prerecorded status by reversing the direction of the interaction, highlighting the live performers’ efforts to adapt themselves to the changing perspective within the media. An example of a “then-and-there” media mirror would be a recording of the performer. However, very often when performers interact with recordings of themselves, they relate to the media object, at least to some extent, as an actor—that is, as an autonomous agent rather than a reflection. For example, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape shows us a character toward the end of his life listening to audio diaries he made years earlier. The effect of the play depends precisely on our awareness that the passage of time has deteriorated the character’s subjective connection with the recordings as reflections of his present identity, and the character is experiencing his past self as distinct and estranged from his present self; that is to say, Krapp experiences these recordings of past self, largely, as another actor rather than as a mirror. The surest way to establish media’s function as a there-and-then mirror is to incorporate the process of reflection or refraction into the performance itself. An especially vivid way to produce the effect is by means of time-shifting media, as, for example, in Dan Graham’s 1974 video installation “Past Continuous Past(s),” which involved a room with mirrored walls surrounding a video monitor. The image seen by the camera (reflecting everything in the room) appears eight seconds later in the

video monitor (via a tape delay placed between the video recorder, which is recording, and a second video recorder, which is playing the recording back). . . . A person viewing the monitor sees both the image of himself or herself of eight seconds earlier, and what was reflected on the mirror from the monitor eight seconds prior to that—sixteen seconds in the past (the camera view of eight seconds prior was playing back on the monitor eight seconds earlier, and this was reflected on the mirror along with the then present reflection to the viewer). An infinite regress of time continuums within time continuums (always separated by eight-second intervals) within time continuums is created.33

This example, in fact, strains to evoke a sense of the media being “here and then,” though ultimately the media object remains intransigently there: the viewer’s image is always onscreen, never truly occupying the same locationPage 112 → as the viewer’s physical body. Another interesting example of a video mirror experienced as there and then occurs in Blast Theory’s 10 Backwards (1999). According to Steve Dixon: One of the production’s most original and memorable sequences involves Niki using her digital video camera to record herself eating breakfast cereal.В .В .В . She finishes eating, and begins to replay the footage she has just recorded, using a remote control jog-shuttle handset to play the recording at different speeds, including frame-by-frame, forward, or backward. The video plays on screens at each end of the traverse stage, and she studies the screen image opposite her as she slowly shuttles through the digital tape, which is also relayed behind her. As she does so, she synchronously reenacts and mirrors every detail, action by action, grimace by grimace, chew by chew.”34

Character and Performer Perspectives Earlier in this chapter, I suggested that a spectator can interpret a performer’s interaction with a media object from one of two perspectives: the performer’s real-world perspective, or the fictional perspective of the character, recognizing that in many genres of performance (though fewer than one might initially suppose), there is no fictional frame to distinguish the character’s perspective from the performer’s. I provisionally set that distinction aside to focus on the dimensions of dramatic function, time, and space. In most of the examples discussed so far I have focused on the character’s perspective, and so the dynamics of the interaction were not contingent on the spectator’s perception of what was “really” going on. However, there is often a difference between a performer and a character’s perspective, and in many cases that duality, and the doubleconsciousness it produces, is itself a significant aspect of a spectator’s experience of a performance. Hence, it is important to consider the interplay between these two perspectives carefully and systematically when analyzing any performer-media interaction. The distinction between the performer and the character’s perspective, then, is the last key element of the taxonomy.35 If a performance represents the character’s interaction with the media in a counterfactual way—for example, if the character is supposed to be talking with a robot, but the robot is actually just another actor in a robot suit—that’s fair game within the conventions of theatre. But if the performance Page 113 →represents the performer’s interaction with media in a counterfactual way—for example, surreptitiously putting the actor in the robot suit after prominently advertising the production as an amazing demonstration of the latest in robotic technology, then the spectator is being misled or deceived. In certain performance contexts—for example, at a new media arts festival—spectators’ beliefs about the real mechanism underlying performermedia interactions are fundamental to their experience. However, in other contexts, spectators may neither know nor care whether any given interaction is real, as long as the performer sustains the illusion. Christian Denisart’s 2009 play Robots featured actual robots capable of interacting dynamically with live performers. Denisart freely admits that during certain moments in the performance, he was not adverse to cheating: “If you learn a robot’s trajectory and you walk just in front of it, everyone thinks the robot is following you.”36 Denisart’s ready acknowledgement of his deceit suggests that he thinks, probably correctly, that for most of his audience, the technical reality is subordinate to the theatrical effect. Some performances exploit a stark contrast between the performer’s and the character’s perspectives to

great theatrical effect. For example, in 1914, in one of the first uses of animated film in a live performance, vaudeville performer and animation pioneer Winsor McCay introduced Gertie the Dinosaur to the audience and gave the dinosaur commands, which she did not always heed. At one point McCay scolds Gertie, who responds with tears. To make amends, McCay tosses an apple at the screen—in reality a red cardboard prop that he clandestinely stashed into his coat pocket—and into Gertie’s mouth. At the end of the scene, McCay moves behind the screen; and subsequently a cartoon version of McCay appears on screen and Gertie carries him away.37 In this example, McCay’s fictional persona interacted with Gertie as if she were with him here and now, but from the perspective of McCay the performer—whom the audience knew to be Gertie’s animator—Gertie clearly existed only in virtual space and was pre-rendered. Not only was there was no deception involved, but much of the charm of the performance derived precisely from the playfulness of this perspectival duality. Mary Oliver exploits a very similar duality in Never Work with Animals, Children or Digital Performances (2006), a witty solo performance in which she interacts with a prerecorded video sequence of herself, interacting with a manifestly canned, noninteractive video sequence (there-and-then media) as if it were responding to her autonomously in the here and now.38 The virtuosity and comedic effect of this performance Page 114 →derives precisely from the divergence of the character and performer’s perspectives—in this case, not just in the dimensions of time and space, as with Gertie the Dinosaur, but also dramatic function: from the performer’s perspective, the media object is a then-and-there mirror, but from the character’s, it is a here-and-now actor. 6.6. Examples of dramatic interactions defined using the complete model. To give a sense of how the taxonomic model works when one takes into account all of the variables from both the character’s and the performer’s perspectives, and to demonstrate the sometimes subtle and often substantial effect of altering a single variable from either perspective, I will quickly walk through a series of closely related performer-media relationships. I begin by considering a selection of dramatic interactions (fig. 6)—that is, those in which the media functions as an actor from (at least) the character’s perspective. In each of these examples, the mode of interaction is identical from the character’s perspective: the media functions as a here-and-now actor. However,Page 115 → from the performer’s perspective, the dimensions of time and space vary in each case. When the media consists of canned or prerecorded video, for example, when Kelly Clarkson’s quasi-holographic image joined the live Jason Aldean for a duet during Aldean’s 2013 concert tour, the media is there and then.39 When it is a real-time video avatar created by a performer in front of a video camera offstage or out of frame, such as the patrol officer in Super Vision, then it is there and now. When it is a canned or pre-rendered animation, such as Gertie the Dinosaur, it is virtual and then. When it is a virtual agent programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) to interact autonomously in real time, such as Broadhurst’s Jeremiah or MIT’s typographic actor, it is virtual and now. When it is an animatronic robot—in other words, a robot that plays back an invariable, preprogrammed motion sequence—it is here and then.40 Finally, when a robot is endowed with artificial intelligence that renders it capable of interacting dynamically, such as Cynthia Breazeal’s Kismet,41 the mediatized actor exists as here and now for the performer—just as it does for the character. The next several examples I consider are variations of coextensive performer-media relationships (fig. 7). As with the last set of examples, each of these cases is identical from the character’s perspective; in this case, the media object functions as a here-and-now costume. When the media functions as a virtual costume, such as the interactive shadow-enveloped performer in the “Insect Nature Show,” or the robotic prostheses in Nemesis, both the performer and character relate to the media in the same way, as a here-and-now costume. In some cases, not just the relation to time and space, but the dramatic function itself may diverge between the two perspectives. For example, during an episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert once pulled out a trashcan with an iPad glued onto its surface, flipped it upside down, and slipped it over his head so that the iPad displayed his face in extreme close-up in real time, creating a kind of real-time video mask.42 In this case, the video image constituted a here-and-now costume that replaced Colbert’s face forming a surreal character; the uncanniness of this effect, however, results from our awareness that the face we see is actually a there-and-now mirror, a reflection of the performer’s real face inside the trashcan. A variation of this interaction is what I call a telematic

collaborative subject, where the video does not display the performer’s own face but someone else’s, as occurred in the Gertrude Stein Repertory’s Ubu Project when the face of a performer in Japan was projected in real-time onto the mask of a performer in New York.43 As in the Colbert Report Page 116 →example, the impact of this conceit relies on the spectator’s simultaneous perception of a unified fictional character generated by a here-and-now costume, along with the introduction, via the telematic media, of a second, autonomous there-and-now actor in the performance space. A twist is to create a collaborative subject with prerecorded instead of telematic video, as in the example of Cathy Weis’s A String of Lies discussed earlier, in which case the relationship between media and performer is the same as it is in the previous example, except it is perceived as then rather than now from the performer’s perspective. 6.7. Examples of coextensive media defined using the complete model. While the divergence of a character’s and a performer’s perspective affects all categories of mediaperformer relationships, it is integral to one: the class of non-diegetic interactions, where the media does not exist at all within the fictional world of the character (figure 8). One of the most common uses of media in this category is affective: the use of media to sway the spectators’ emotional response to the performance. Such media, though absent from the characters’ world, is present to the performers, and can have a powerful emotional impact on performers; indeed, affective music is sometimes used in rehearsal, exclusively for the benefit of the performers, Page 117 →to establish a scene’s mood or rhythm. Examples of affective music include not just non-diegetic music, but washes of color or non-diegetic images. Affective media often highlights the fact that the performer’s perspective is not necessarily the objective reality of the event; it, too, involves an element of imagination. Media used affectively, regardless of whether it is in fact pre-recorded or generated live (either by human performers or electronically), is experienced as here and now, an in-the-moment response to the performance as it unfolds. The moment the spectator shifts attention directly to the music and regards it as an historical document rather than a present-tense response, it ceases to function as affective media. Affective media is often, aptly, described as “atmospheric”: it functions as an affective environment that envelops the performance, and hence contributes to defining the scene. 6.8. Examples of non-diegetic interactions defined using the complete model. A different use of non-diegetic media is to provide commentary on the performance. Media in this case exists either in virtual space, as media—for example, as textual commentary, charts, graphs—or there, as an historicalPage 118 → record that comments on the action in the form of photographs, video footage, or historical audio such as a famous speech or a vintage musical recording (which in this case will function very differently from affective music). Among the earliest and most famous examples of media as commentary is Erwin Piscator’s use of documentary material, including film footage, in productions such as Hoppla, We’re Alive! (1927).44 A more recent example of media as commentary is the Almeida Theatre’s production of The Cenci (1997), where “at times the images interact with the words and action, at other times they contradict them. The projected images act as a visual counterpoint that does not attempt to explain the text but rather to open it up to different interpretations and comparisons.”45 Commentary offers an autonomous response to the performance, offering a point of view and attitude distinct from the performers’; that is to say, it functions as a non-diegetic (and usually non-mimetic) actor. Non-diegetic media can also serve simply to reinforce the live performance—for example, when a production is miked. The spectator does not regard the amplified voice of a performer as a distinct entity; the audio merges with the performer’s own voice, and sometimes—if the spectator is too far from the performer to hear the unamplified voice—supplants it. Hence, it functions as an aural costume. Moreover, even if spectators have a preconscious knowledge that the amplified sound source is really far from the performer’s body, they experience that body as the source of the media (if it is doing its job properly)—that is to say, as here and now. A closely related use of non-diegetic media is one I discussed previously, in which large, live-feed video projections allow spectators to see performances more easily in large venues. The difference between this case and the previous one is that here the media replicates the performance rather than collapsing into it. An interesting

variation is the use of live composite video to place the performer’s image within a new background. For example, in the Builders Association’s Jet Lag (1998), the performer sits on stool with a camera in front of him and a projected backdrop of water behind him. His image is projected on a large screen at the back of the stage. As Andy Lavender describes the effect: If we simply watched the large screen, we would see a man at sea, talking directly to camera (an effect cheekily underscored when he puts his hand on the “rigging” to steady himself). Since we are theatre spectators, we see that this Page 119 →impression is fabricated by exploiting the camera’s framing properties and the combined movements of the performer and set.46 This example wonderfully illustrates the way a performance can encourage spectators to oscillate willfully between the perspectives of character and performer, between seeing the stage as a space of fiction or presentation. In this case, from the performer’s perspective, the image of the performer onscreen is a reflection of the live performer. However, from the perspective of the character within the composited image, the other elements on screen function as scenery, props, and, should any other sentient beings appear, as other actors. While all the examples of non-diegetic media we have considered so far are out of frame for the character but not the performer, the reverse is also possible, though currently rather unusual: a media object can exist in the character’s world but be out of frame for the performer. An example is a game from the short-form improvisational television program Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Newsflash. In this game, a performer playing a field reporter—typically Colin Mochrie in the U.S. edition—stand in front of a green screen while two other performers playing news anchors sit at a desk and interview him “on location.” The anchors and audience see the performer’s image composited against a virtual background, but the performer is not privy to that image and has to extrapolate from the anchors’ questions and the audience’s responses to guess where his character is. This kind of media-performer interaction is now rare, but may soon become much more common as augmented reality devices such as Google Glass become readily available to consumers. It is easy to imagine an application that could overlay images over anyone who happens to be in the viewer’s line of sight, immersing unwitting performers into virtual scenes, surrounding them with virtual props, superimposing virtual costumes and prostheses on them, putting them face-to-face with virtual actors, and/or generating mirrored doubles of them—all without their knowledge.

Triangular Interactions I have defined all media-performer relationships up to now as an interaction between a single live performer and a media object. However, mediaPage 120 → interactions often involve two (or more) live performers relating to the same media object in different ways. I call such relationships triangular interactions. We can analyze such interactions using this taxonomy by breaking them down into their three component parts: the relationship of the first performer/character to the media, the second performer/character to the media, and to first performer /character to the second one (fig. 9).47 6.9. Media relationships involving two or more performers in relation to a single media object, or two or more media objects and a single performer. Page 121 →We have, in fact, already discussed one of the more common triangular interactions, but only in relation to one performer: telematic media. In the case of a real telematic link between two performers, one performer relates to the media object as a there-and-now actor, while a second relates to the same media object as a there-and-now mirror. The two performers relate to one another as actors, either there and now (if they are in remote locations) or here and now (if they are together in the same real space). A real-time video avatar is very similar, but in this case the telematic nature of the interaction is not diegetic; within the world of the fiction, the character is relating to the media object as being here, and if the second performer is in the same space as the first, the physical body of that performer is nonetheless out-of-frame for the first character. Another example of a triangular interaction is a virtual puppet. Stephen Kaplin helpfully defines virtual puppets as

“performing objects that exist only within the computer, generated out of digitized bitmaps, given tightly controlled behavior parameters and linked by manual controls to the outside, human world.”48 To a performer who interacts with the virtual puppet, the media object is a here-and-now actor, and the live performer controlling the puppet, the puppeteer, is out of frame. The media object’s precise relation to the puppeteer depends on the nature of the puppetry. The puppeteer could relate to the virtual puppet as a prop, controlling it instrumentally; or the puppeteer could relate to it as a mirror, controlling it via motion capture. (In either case, the media object is there and now to the puppeteer.) Steven Rosenbluth, Michael Babock, and David Barrington, who create instrumental virtual puppet control systems for the Jim Henson Group, distinguish between motion capture and instrumental control when they explain that: Henson input devices are not motion capture technologies. Motion capture is both directly analogous to the performer and largely is nonprogrammable. In motion capture, a performer’s arm simply corresponds to the creature arm, a knee corresponds to a knee, etc. The performer cannot enhance or reprogram these relationships. The Henson input scheme is both non-analogous and userprogrammable. Our input devices are abstractions. For example, a puppeteer’s index finger might proportionally control the sincerity or sarcasm of a creature’s entire face. And a puppeteer can reprogram puppet movement easily between and even during performances. A person in a motion capture suit would be hard pressed to perform an octopus. A person operating our control system could take it in stride.49 Page 122 →A puppeted robot is like a virtual puppet except that from the puppeteer’s perspective the media object is here, while for the virtual puppet, it is virtual. However, the same distinction between motion capture and instrumental control applies. The final triangular interaction to consider is subjective perspective. In this case, the media object exists as here and now for only one character. To any other character who is here and now relative to that first character, the media object is out of frame. The subjective media object might have any dramatic function: scene, prop, actor, costume, or mirror. For example, a number of recent productions of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman have used video projection to create Willy’s vision of his dead Uncle Ben, who functions as a media actor. In the Cockroach Theatre’s 2013 production: There’s a scene in which Loman’s having a conversation with his dead brother, but still partially lucid in reality. At this point, the walls are undulating, transforming, but caught between the setting of past and present, trying to be in both, the way Loman is throughout the more damaged scenes.50 Roboscopie (2012), a production for a robot and human created by the CNRS Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems in Toulouse, France, offers a fascinating variation on subjective perspective by using media to take the audience into the “mind” of a robot. As the robot moves though the space of the stage, a computer tracks its motions, and it scans a series of 2D barcodes attached to objects distributed throughout the space. A video screen above the stage displays the 3D reconstruction of the room as the robot’s software generates it in real time.51

Conclusion The taxonomy that I have proposed here is simple in structure, but it is capable of generating a vast number of possible combinations and making very fine distinctions. The basic model consists of just five categories of dramatic function, three of space, and two of time. These variables can be combined in thirty ways, each representing a distinct relationship between performer and media, though some of these combinations, at least at this point in performance history, are very rare. The combinations expand exponentially as we take into account the interplay of perspectives, which, Page 123 →as we have seen, has a significant impact on the dynamics of many performance events. The possibilities continue to expand as we consider that one can have any number of performers and any number of media elements in any given performance (or moment of a performance)—and

that, as the examples of triangular media relationships demonstrate—simultaneous interactions between multiple performers and media objects are not merely the sum of their parts, but can produce quite distinctive dynamics in their own right (such as virtual puppetry). Clearly, it is impossible to wrap one’s mind around such a large number of variations. That is what gives the taxonomy its power. The theoretical framework that I propose is not an inventory; it is a taxonomy engine. It provides a calculus that allows one to hone in on any given performance dynamic with precision. Moreover, it can be used to generate more specialized taxonomies focused on specific genres of interaction, as the charts in this chapter demonstrate. For example, we might chart the array of interactions associated with a single dramatic function, such as dramatic media (fig. 6) or coextensive media (fig. 7); or, alternatively, we may sort the interactions according to time and space and treat dramatic function as a subsidiary variable (fig. 5). The taxonomy is entirely nonhierarchical. No combination of variables is more fundamental than any other, and none of the variables or perspectives is privileged. The current taxonomy encompasses the twelve categories of media-performer relationships I proposed in 2001.52 In most cases, the earlier categories straddle a range of possibilities described by the new taxonomy, and, moreover, the new taxonomy helps us see precisely where some of the older categories overlap with one another. The following chart defines the relationship between the two taxonomies. It is important to emphasize that this taxonomy is, in fact, targeted toward a very specific aspect of digital performance: the relationship between media object and performer. It is not a taxonomy of different kinds of media per se. Hence, it is deliberately silent about the media object’s mode of representations—for example, whether it is photographic, pictorial, textual, etc. As we have seen, a here-and-now media actor might be represented through video, animation, or typography. That is not to say that the mode of representation is unimportant; it is simply not the focus of this taxonomy.53 The taxonomy is also deliberately silent about the mechanics of the technology underlying the media, since again the focus is on the nature of the performer’s interaction with the media object, not the means of creatingPage 125 → it. Nonetheless, there is an indirect connection between the technology and the types of interactions that are the focus of this taxonomy insofar as certain technologies offer certain affordances that make particular kinds of interactions possible, or at least easier. For example, creating a media object that functions as a there-and-now actor for the performer requires some sort of telematic technology, just as a media object that is out of frame for the performer requires technology that allows for some kind of augmented reality. Page 124 →6.10. The twelve modes comprising the initial (2001) taxonomy defined using the new model. This taxonomy highlights media’s potential to occupy a staggering number of different roles within a performance event, and indeed to occupy any number of these roles in any given production. Hence, it helps to explain why media is often so challenging to integrate into the conventional theatrical production process. Is it the province of design? Performance? Props? Costumes? A separate “media” department? Different theatre companies have answered this question in different ways—and that is as it should be. No single model for positioning media could accommodate the range of possible performer-media interactions. In most cases, media is, in fact, tightly integrated into some other area of production (acting, scenery, costume, etc.) and so demands a process that allows for close and dynamic collaboration. When a theatre company integrates media as pervasively and dynamically into its productions as the Builders Association does, the person charged with creating the media—in that case, James Gibbs—is apt to be deeply engaged in every aspect of the production process. Hence, Marianne Weems, the Builders Association’s artistic director, had an epiphany when she suddenly realized that the title “media designer” failed to capture the nature and extent of Gibbs’s contribution to the company’s productions: “We were splitting off into work groupsВ .В .В . and I said вЂWhat are you thinking you’ll do?’ and [he] said something brilliant and I said вЂOk, well you take care of it.’ And then it hit me, he is the best kind of dramaturge.”54

Page 125 → Page 126 →

Intersections and Applications In the preceding chapters, we described three taxonomies that take different approaches to delineating some of the key variations and distinctions among media-enhanced performances. Each of these taxonomies maps the same general field to address a different set of questions. In this chapter, we explore the relations among the taxonomies, highlighting their unique strengths and the way they complement one another. We also proffer a series of exercises that suggest ways to engage actively with the taxonomies, applying, adapting, exploring, testing, and augmenting them for one’s own purposes. Finally, we will point toward the future, suggesting areas of inquiry that transcend the boundaries of these taxonomies, and proposing methodologies to continue to explore and expand the field in deeply collaborative ways. To illustrate the differences and connections among the taxonomies, we begin by deploying each in turn to analyze the same case study: the Builders Association’s production Continuous City.1 The play features four characters: Mike; his daughter Sam; Sam’s nanny, Deb; and Mike’s boss, J. V., who is launching a new social-networking site called XUBU. Mike is traveling the world to promote XUBU; we see him only onscreen as he chats via webcam with J. V. and Sam. The stage is filled with suspended screens of various sizes that open and close to create video walls in various configurations, with images sometimes appearing on a single screen and sometimes spreading across several screens. Technicians controlling the video sit onstage in view of the audience.

Page 127 →Continuous City and the Taxonomy of Distortion Sarah Bay-Cheng’s taxonomy situates performances in three separate dimensions—space, body, and time—along a spectrum that spans from completely unmediated, undistorted live performance at one extreme, to complete media saturation at the other (with neither extreme being fully realizable). Space in Continuous City occupies a position toward the middle of the spectrum, slightly closer to the “media saturation” pole. The production occurs simultaneously in live and mediated space, and the balance between the two poles is integral to the piece: the production links live and the mediated spaces to make them “continuous.” Mediatized space, however, acquires a slight edge for several reasons. First of all, while the space depicted on stage is limited to two environments—J. V.’s office and Sam’s home—the mediated space encompasses the globe: as Mike travels around the world, he chats, via webcam, with both his boss J. V. and his daughter Sam, telematically linking the remote spaces he is visiting to their respective computer screens. J.V. also engages in video chats with other people (family, girlfriends, and business associates) around the world. The balance is similar with respect to bodies. With only a couple of exceptions, every scene depicts an interaction between live and mediated performers. The mediatized bodies tend to dominate simply because there are more of them: only three characters appear on stage (until Mike appears live for his curtain call, making four), while at least seven different characters appear onscreen. Moreover, when the live actors are performing on stage, we very frequently see live-feed video of their faces on large screens suspended above them. Video of both the live and remote performers often span multiple screens, producing huge composite images that visually overwhelm the physical performers. When spread across multiple monitors, the video images become further distorted, fragmented, and transformed, shifting the balance of the performing bodies as whole toward the distorted end of the spectrum. While the production occupies a middle point along the axes of space and body, weighing slighting closer to the side of distortion, the representation of time in Continuous City falls close to the opposite pole, remaining relatively undistorted. The action unfolds as a clear linear narrative. Since the use of media in the production consists almost entirely of either live-feed video of stage performers, or a real-time exchange between stage and remote performers, the mediatized and stage performers exist within a Page 128 →unified narrative present, and the live performances and the media representations are tightly aligned along a single timeline. Continuous City thus fits the profile of high space and body distortion, but relative low temporal distortion, a configuration common in media performance works.

Continuous City and the Cyborg Matrix The Builders Association’s work continues to challenge and stretch the parameters of Parker-Starbuck’s taxonomy, providing examples that overlap and push across the fluid boundaries of her model. Continuous City highlights a way of using the taxonomy to explore multiple readings.2 A given moment or scene might be read individually as, for example, an object technology (the thirty or so folding screens positioned across the space that make up the production’s scenography) in relationship to a subject body of an actor on stage (for example, J. V., the onstage developer of a new social-networking sight, XUBU, and someone also engaged throughout the play in online dating). In one scene, J. V. alternates between the different women he is chatting with online, clicking from one to another as they appear on the various screens above his head. His engagement with these “objects,” here perhaps both technologies and bodies, is both humorous and pathetic as he tries to keep his cool and remember what he has said to whom. This scene might highlight the overwhelming screen presence that we are manipulating and controlling to find new modes of communication. Analyzing an individual scene through the cyborg matrix might provide a way to think about how integrations of specific technologies shape, change, and influence bodies. Or, from a directorial or actorly perspective, the intersection of terms might offer a space to play with their balance—what if, for example, the example was taken in reverse, so that the screens were constructed with an emphasis on a subject technology in relation to J. V.’s object body, how might this positioning shift the emphasis of the scene? Taken overall, Continuous City also lends itself to an analysis of abject-ed bodies in the wake of ever growing subject technologies. Each body, whether portrayed on screen (as is the father, Mike), or his daughter, who is live on stage, has taken a back seat in this production to the technologies that allow them to have human-to-human communication. There is a weight placed on these technologies so that they take center stage in the narrative. The technological proficiency and expertise the Builders Association brings to their stages inevitably foregrounds the technologies at play (the Page 129 →folding screens here were impressive pieces of machinery used to great effect throughout). The actors play a new form of twenty-first-century body, abjected by the very technologies they produced. Mike struggles through the lens to make contact with his daughter; they rely on the camera’s lens to play a game of hide-and-seek to share a moment together. Even the girl’s nanny communicates her material experiences with her loved ones through a video blog, or vlog. These readings show the possibilities of exploring the terms of the cyborg matrix.

Continuous City and the Taxonomy of Performer-Media Interactions Typically a production will employ only a small subset of possible interactive modes encompassed by David Saltz’s taxonomy. In Continuous City, the live performers mostly use media to establish telematic connections with one another, and almost invariably relate to it as there and now. They never interact with a screen image as if it were here and now. Moreover, with a few significant exceptions, the media functions throughout the production as either a mirror or actor. The use of media, then, occupies a sharply circumscribed area within Saltz’s matrix of interactive possibilities. However, the Builders Association explores the use of media within those rigorous parameters thoroughly and inventively. In terms of Saltz’s taxonomy, the simplest use of media in the production occurs in the recurring scenes in which we see Deb creating her video blog, Deb in the City. As Deb sits in front of her computer, we see two images on screens suspended above her. One screen displays still images of what Deb is describing—for example, her house, churros, and a man from Kabul she met working at a store. Deb relates to all of these images as there and then, and they function, respectively, as scene (implicitly asserting “I was here”), prop, and actor. The second screen shows us a real-time video image of Deb’s face, and so functions as a there-and-now mirror reflecting the live performance. The situation is complicated, however, by the fact that the monitors the audience sees are out of frame from the character’s imaginary perspective (though not from the performer’s). The images on the monitors mirror those that Deb is (purportedly) watching on the computer screen, which we, therefore, experience as once-removed. That dynamic has relatively little impact on the photographs, which are already there-and-then for both Deb and the audience, but it interestingly complicates the way we experience Deb’s image, which becomes a twice-removed mirror of Deb’s Page 130 →here-and-

now physical presence. This arrangement not only produces a technological verfremdungseffekt distancing us from the live performance, but elegantly conveys the inherent multiplicity of video as it propagates online. Our experience of Deb’s image is informed by our awareness that Deb (as a character) is not really performing for us, but for the prospective viewers of her blog, who will experience the video as there and then. Hence, as the production invites us to imagine the there-and-now video mirror becoming a there-and-then video actor, it provides a vivid demonstration of Derridean deferral of presence, of “speech” becoming “writing” before our very eyes. This dynamic becomes even more complicated during the many scenes where characters chat with one another telematically. In these scenes, typically we see the live performer sitting in front of a computer while a suspended monitor mirrors his or her face, just as in the scenes with Deb described earlier. But we also see a real-time image of a second character in a remote location. In some cases, this telematic connection is real (there and now for the performer), while in others, it is prerecorded (there and then for the performer). Usually this second image functions as a there-and-now actor for the live character, but at one critical point during a web chat with his disinterested daughter Sam, Mike turns his webcam away from himself and toward what he is seeing. From Sam’s perspective, the media transforms from a there-and-now actor to a there-and-now scene, suddenly seizing her interest by transporting her telematically to the foreign cities Mike is visiting.

Taxonomic Synergy As the analyses of Continuous City in the previous section demonstrate, each of the three taxonomies highlights different aspects performances and engages with them on a different scale. Bay-Cheng’s taxonomy is designed to facilitate macro-level analyses of productions and to connect an individual analysis with many other responses. The model is concerned with the overall scope and structure of media’s role within a production as a whole—that is to say, the degree to which a production is mediated, as assessed separately along the axes of space, time, and body. To arrive at single value for each axis requires that one assess the overall impact of the myriad particular moments that make up a production in aggregate. The taxonomy’s Page 131 →ability to encapsulate its analysis of a production into three values renders it ideally suited to cross-production comparisons, and ultimately to analyzing data from a large array of productions to identify patterns of media use both diachronically—over time, and synchronically—across cultural and aesthetic contexts. Parker-Starbuck’s taxonomy is similarly designed to assess the overall impact of a production rather than particular moments, (although, as described in the earlier example, it might also be usefully applied to an individual scene or moment). The focus in this case is ultimately ethical: on the relationship between organic (human or animal) and technological agency within performances, and the way that a performance constitutes, resists, and negotiates subjectivity, identity, and power. It is a highly dynamic model, emphasizing transitions and negotiations. Its taxonomic designations serve as starting points for nuanced analysis, not as ends unto themselves. Finally, Saltz’s taxonomy enables micro-level, fine-grained analyses of specific moments of performer-media interaction within performances. The taxonomy is designed as a tool to serve other objectives and agendas, whether practical or theoretical, aesthetic or ideological. While the taxonomies were developed independently, reflecting different critical sensibilities and addressing different concerns, they have the potential to complement one another, illustrating the general principle that we need not construe taxonomies as mutually exclusive, fixed, and immutable structures. Rather, we can regard them as flexible frameworks to incorporate creatively into our own models of thinking. When we put multiple taxonomies into play, we allow their different, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives to intersect with, inform, elucidate, and complicate one another. For example, when media functions as either a here-or-now mirror, costume, or actor according to Saltz’s taxonomy, it creates distortion along the axis of the body according to Bay-Cheng’s taxonomy, and when it functions as scenery (whether “here” or “there”) it creates distortion along the axis of space. Similarly, in the process that Parker-Starbuck describes of abject bodies merging with technology as they move toward becoming-cyborg, there is often a high degree of “distortion, ” in Bay-Cheng’s sense, along the axis of the body. And in many, though by no means not all, of Parker-

Starbuck’s examples of the abject body becoming-cyborg, media functions as a “costume” in Saltz’s sense, extending, modifying, or completing the performer’s body.

Page 132 →Engaging with the Taxonomies The raison d’être of this project is not to perform theoretical and interpretive analyses for passive consumption, but to provide critical tools for others to employ, adapt, and expand upon. To that end, we have developed a series of exercises to facilitate active and creative engagement with our taxonomies. Our hope is that these exercises will prove useful in the classroom—but our goal here extends beyond pedagogy. We offer these exercises as a model for participatory and collaborative scholarship and as a bridge to the more fully interactive online phase of the project. The most basic exercise involves running a single case study through each of the taxonomies, much as we ourselves did earlier in this chapter with the Builders Association’s Continuous City. The point of this exercise is twofold: first, to gain a fuller, more concrete, and practical understanding of each taxonomy, to kick the tires and see what it can do, and perhaps to push against some of its limitations; and second, to explore the way the taxonomies complement, intersect, and interact with one another. It is important to emphasize that there is no “right” way to apply these taxonomies to any given case study; the taxonomies are designed to help stimulate, articulate, and sharpen original acts of interpretation, not to dictate uniform and predetermined responses. To facilitate this exercise, we have reproduced the diagrammatic overviews of all three models here for easy reference. A useful place to begin is with a case study that we have already analyzed in terms of one of the three taxonomies, such as Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #1, a robotic installation that Sarah Bay-Cheng discussed in chapter four. In this piece, a mechanical steel structure spins wildly on the stage, accelerating until the motor overheats, sparks, and ultimately self-destructs. Bay-Cheng characterizes this performance as being low in distortion with respect to time and space, but high in distortion with respect to the body. How would you situate this performance within Parker-Starbuck’s cyborg matrix? Does the robot exemplify subject, abject, or object technology? And how do bodies function here, if at all: as subject, abject, or object? It may be useful to review Parker-Starbuck’s analysis of the installation Sifter’s Dinge in chapter five, which is at least superficially similar to this example insofar as it incorporates a non-anthropomorphic mechanical performer and no human performer (but note that these superficial similarities may mask deeper differences). A very different set of questions arises when you Page 133 →consider Stifter’s Dinge in light of Saltz’s taxonomy of performer-media relationships. What theatrical function does the robotic sculpture fulfill: scene, prop, costume, actor, or mirror? Is it “here” or “there”? Are the answers to these questions, in this case, different or the same when one considers the performance from the character and performer perspectives? 7.1. Bay-Cheng’s Media-Performance Continuum. 7.2. Parker-Starbuck’s Cyborg Theatre Matrix. 7.3. Saltz’s Taxonomy of Media-Performer Relationships. This exercise can be repeated using case studies from Parker-Starbuck’sPage 134 → chapter, such as the production of FrГ¤ulein Julie directed by Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner, in which the live performers function as object bodies performing for the subject technology of cameras as the audience watches the meticulously composed images onscreen. And it can be repeated yet again with a case study from Saltz’s chapter, such as Golan Levin and Zachary Liberman’s “Insect Nature Show,” in which an undulating, blob-shaped shadow functions like a here-and-now virtual costume as it covers the outline a live performer, sticking to her as she moves across the stage. Radically different aspects of each of these performances come to light when they are considered from the perspective of the other two taxonomies. A second exercise is to modify a performance hypothetically to alter its status within one of the taxonomies. This exercise provides a way to investigate the dynamics of each model closely and precisely, and also to discover how the taxonomies can contribute to the creative process. For example, how might we modify Bay-Cheng’s example, Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #1, to increase the level of distortion in the spatial dimension to match the

distortion of the body? Or how could we alter the production of Fräulein Julie so that, in Parker-Starbuck’s terms, the body moves away from the object and closer to the subject position? Or how might we alter “Insect Nature Show” so that the media image functions as an actor rather than a costume? Finally, we might come full circle and, after hypothetically modifying each case study to alter a single parameter within one of the taxonomies, once again consider this altered case study in light of the other two taxonomies. When does changing a parameter in one of the taxonomies also alter a parameter in one of the other taxonomies—and when does it have no effect? This exercise can provide a powerful way to explore some of the ways the taxonomies interact, as well as ways that they carve out distinct areas of concern. Of course, ultimately the power of the taxonomies will only be revealed and tested as the taxonomies are applied to a range of performances that transcend the limited scope of the examples we have adduced in this book. Our hope is that these exercises will provide a launching pad for further applications of the taxonomies, not just to other instances of theatrical and performance art, but also to other kinds of cultural performance, such as those that take place in social media and online games—and to forms of cultural and technological performance that have yet to be invented.

Page 135 →Incomplete Taxonomies We began this project by considering some of the critical issues we understood to be at the heart of our investigation into taxonomies in multimedia performance, issues relating to the rapid expansion of media performance, to spectatorial relationships, and to maintaining openness to the diverse and expansive work being produced in the field. Our individual taxonomies begin to explore some of these issues and offer methods for analysis and classification for a wide range of work in the field. Whether a motion-capture installation with no body present, a cinematically inspired new play production, or the integration between human and nonhuman figures in performance, we hope that our respective approaches—either individually or taken together—inspire new ways of seeing and understanding performance that integrate media in a substantial way. However, as we prepare this project and work toward a companion web project intended to include wider audience participation, we are also aware that what we have proposed is not the whole picture. These are, as we mentioned in our introduction, “incomplete taxonomies,” not only because we hope that they will be questioned, used by, and augmented through the engagement of other scholars and artists in the field, but also because we acknowledge our own limitations in proposing such structures. The three authors of this project are, of course, shaped by our own experiences, geographies, and understanding of the field, while being aware of its wider scope. And while the larger web project is intended to expand these horizons, it is worth reiterating that our hope is to trouble categories, not fix them. Questions will always arise when terms are suggested, labels affixed, or boxes drawn around specific elements within performance. How can we, for example, suggest a boundary-blurring, as Parker-Starbuck does in her proposal of a cyborg theatre, through the distinguishing of categories of bodies and technologies? Is this a productive or a reductive tension? Perhaps by returning to the scientific origins of taxonomy we can propose new modes of understanding derived by these very distinctions. Breaking apart our own conceptions of what a “body” is and seeing how it is augmented through an encounter or union with technology audiences might help us rethink how these bodies are understood, socially or politically. Part of a theoretical analysis and then application emerges from close observation, unpacking, slow and careful consideration of the parts of the “whole.” By Page 136 →breaking down media in performance into categories of scene, prop, actor, costume, and mirror and then further considering aspects of space and time, as David Saltz does in his chapter, performance scholars and artists may be able to bring new dimension to dramaturgy, scene design, or acting, to name but a few possibilities. Or, what if Sarah Bay-Cheng’s user-friendly sliding-scale rule might be made available as a smartphone app, so anyone who sees a performance could input data about a performance allowing it to accumulate over time? We hope not only to offer modes of analysis, but also modes of production for artists interested in working with technologies in performance. We ideally envision a relaying space where theories and practices might inform one

another, where artists and scholars and artist-scholars might share ideas, begin to work across the great digital divides, and make work that also breaks down boundaries of geography, race, class, and other political dimensions. What are, for example, the cultural implications of cross-cultural or geographic tele-presence? How might media-driven performance practices facilitate connections across global terrains, possibly encouraging further collaboration or development? This kind of work (as Lance Gharavi would put it) 3 that unites communities across distances has been made possible because of advancements in technologies and points to further needs for these connections. The “Facebook Revolution” that empowered the Arab Spring promised social changes in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other countries, but as we write this in 2014 Syria and Iraq are again experiencing bloody unrest, suggesting the need for deeper and more nuanced understandings of the many ways that technologies and bodies wind together across diverse cultural contexts. We have covered a wide range of work in these chapters, often relying on examples that may be familiar to our readers, or have been featured in international cities and festivals. We propose these specific examples to establish a foundation upon which a collective analytical layering can begin. With the addition of the web component of the project, we hope to discover and explore more diverse models. As technologies such as Skype grow stronger and Internet access arrives to remote areas of the globe (including the recent efforts of Internet.org), it will be possible to expand these taxonomies and to incorporate some of the pressing issues that implore artist to develop work. Consider, for example, Dries Verhoven’s Life Streaming, in which audience members were invited into a portable trailer and spent the course of the “performance” engaging in a phone conversation with someonePage 137 → who had experienced loss after the devastating tsunami in Indonesia in 2004. Such performances begin to highlight the challenge of technology’s reach across the globe. The realities of performance meeting media in the ways we have outlined in our taxonomies often boils down to economics: technology is not cheap, though it is always getting cheaper (cf. Moore’s Law).4 However, these taxonomies are not reserved only for the high-tech or highly funded projects, but also extend to work that find innovative and imaginative uses of technology in performance—to examples such as Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, which featured a camera traversing the streets of New York to follow a narrative and relayed it back to a seated audience, or Peggy Shaw’s Ruff, which relied on screen to capture her memories, movements, her band, and at times her text as she explored performance post-stroke. Each example allows these taxonomies to become richer and to reflect the changing shape of performance and media.

Digital Futures: Dynamic Taxonomies Online Science and technology, the handmaidens of materialism, not only tell us most of what we know about the world, they constantly alter our relationship to ourselves and to our surroundings. —Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968) As Jack Burnham suggested in his analysis of art amid an era of rapid technological expansion of the midcentury—the space race, atomic development of the Cold War, and advances in biological research—technologies always impact the culture that surrounds us. As we have attempted to demonstrate throughout this book, the emerging technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have transformed not only contemporary performance practice, but also the critical methodologies with which we seek to understand and contextualize those practices. Scholars of various disciplines increasingly rely on digital archives, online databases, and data visualization as essential tools for their projects. Digital collections and preservation of these collections—both those materials “born digital” and print collections transferred to digital media—represent some of the fastest expanding areas of library development, to say nothing of the ways in which online environments are reshaping higher education. Amid Page 138 →the many structures and developments that these new tools offer is the opportunity for greater collaboration. The Digital Public Library project, for instance, has the goal of creating “An open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”5 Such tools offer new modes of

engagement for research at every level, including not only scholars and faculty, but also their students. This emphasis on digital connections resonates with other trends in the cultural historiography of theatre and performance. Since at least the mid-1980s, theatre scholars have called for an understanding theatre history within larger social contexts. As Bruce McConachie wrote in 1989, “Play performance and audience response must be looked at together as mutually interactive elements of a single phenomenon.”6 But what are these elements today and how do they interact? Contemporary audiences are clearly participating and engaging with theatre and performances of all kinds in new and thoroughly mediated ways such that a single performance can occur in multiple places simultaneously. The phenomena of live tweeting, blogging, digital images, and other nonmaterial markers of presence in performance circulate among social media both as new forms of cultural capital and data for analysis. Today’s social context—the mutual interactions between audience and performance—is clearly a digitally infused and mobile one. According to a 2012 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Survey Project, 88 percent of Americans own a mobile phone and 55 percent use their phones to go online with almost one-third (31 percent) using mobile phones as their primary Internet access.7 Globally, 75 percent of the world’s population accesses the Internet via mobile phones. According to the World Bank, mobile-phone use rocketed from 1 billion in 2000 to more than 6 billion in 2012, and it further estimates that by 2015 the growth of mobile phone subscriptions will exceed the world’s population.8 Wherever there is an audience today, the vast majority of them are online and on the move. Such developments have significantly impacted research techniques and scholarship. As evidenced by the recent trends in so-called citizen science and crowdsourcing, researchers from diverse fields use mobile technologies and collaborative software to include diverse audiences and group in everything from data collection on birds and insects, to weather patterns, to astronomy.9 McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolesence (2011), both opened the peer-review process Page 139 →to the public online, giving anyone the chance to comment on and respond to the manuscript prior to publication. Wark has continued to extend his research project online in the form of his website GAM3R 7H30RY, hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book.10 Theatre and performance researchers are similarly using new tools to expand not only the audiences for their research, but also the methods and modes of engagement with the research as it develops.11 Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field acknowledges these changes and seeks to expand its mode of scholarship beyond the publication of a print book into digital domains. We intend the various taxonomies offered here to provide useful approaches to scholars, artists, faculty, and students invested in understanding, analyzing, and discussing the intersections of media and various forms of performance, both historical and contemporary. However, as scholars and artists invested in continuing the development of these intersections, we also recognize the value in a dynamic approach that can respond to changes over time. We take seriously the potential and capacity for audiences—of all kinds—to participate in the development of this work over time. While print publications have a significant, even primary, place in this scholarship, the future of Performance and Media is not only in print, but also online as a forum where scholars, artists, faculty, and students can engage with the existing taxonomies, revise and create their own, upload new data to the site, and connect and communicate with others invested in these areas. This online environment joins other similar efforts, including collections of digital performance documentation such as the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library (HDVL), On the Boards, and the Routledge Performance Archive, and networks of artists and scholars such as dance-tech.net and contemporaryperformance.org.12 The purpose of the site is to create a dynamic environment that allows for experimentation in research methodologies and the collection of data in the form of audience responses to performance over time. As a digital reference, Performance and Media offers several advantages: the resources included would be navigable, sortable, and accessible from anywhere in the world. With the increasing ease of digital-media uploading, individual researchers, theatre companies, and artists and archivists could easily augment the taxonomies and, if desirable, create their own. The organizational logic is inherently analytical, offering three initial ways to organize the material conceptually. This framework makes the abundance of data much more accessible to the beginning theatre or media student. Page 140 →Because they exist in a digital domain, however,

these core relationships are not permanently fixed. Researchers will be able not only to access the data, but also to reconfigure it (either permanently in their own taxonomy or temporarily on the site), thereby contributing to the resource itself. Data, such as case studies of individual performances and profiles of distortion (as outlined in BayCheng’s chapter, “Taxonomy of Distortion”), would be integrated into the site, continually allowing the formation and development of different taxonomic systems to be negotiated, debated, and developed within the site itself. The online Performance and Media site provides not only a reference tool for mapping and understanding the field, but also a venue to discuss new technologies, performances, and works as they emerge. This project thus offers a new form of theatre and performance research that is collaborative, interactive, and dynamic, just like the events, projects, and performances we seek to explore.

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Notes Introduction 1. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, eds., The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, DVD (British Film Institute, 2002), xxvi. 2. Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), 223. 3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17. 4. See Carsten Griesel, “The Type-Token Distinction and the Mind and Brain Sciences,” Proceedings of the Conference on Reduction and the Special Sciences, Tilburg, April 10–12, 2008, 6, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3860/. 5. Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1984), 16–17. 6. Dan Cohen, “The Digital Public Library of America: Coming Together,” Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog, October 16, 2012, http://www.dancohen.org/2012/10/16/the-digital-public-libraryof-america-coming-together/. 7. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : the Extensions of Man, critical ed. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003); Jean FranГ§ois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 10 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 9. 9. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 218. 10. Tara McPherson, “After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era,” Lecture, University of Michigan, November 29, 2011, http://lecb.physics.lsa.umich.edu/CWIS/browser.php?ResourceId=4174. Page 142 →11. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 12. Diana Taylor, “Save As: Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” Lecture presented at the Imagining America’s national conference, Seattle, 2010, 14. 13. McPherson, “After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era.” 14. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 194. 15. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 199. 16. See Tara McPherson, “Vectors Journal: Introduction,” http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php? page=Introduction. 17. Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks, Archaeologies of Presence (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2012), 7–8. 18. Philip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (2012): 10. 19. Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 73. 20. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2.

Texts and Contexts 1. The term entanglement here alludes to Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 2. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P . Dutton & Company, 1970), 54, 77. 3. Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche to Archetype (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 9–10.

4. Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 13. 5. Andy Lavender, “Digital Culture,” in Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah BayCheng et al., Media Matters (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 125–34. 6. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286. 7. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 290. 8. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 43, 161. 9. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 51, 162. 10. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 146. Page 143 →11. Auslander, Liveness, 51. 12. Martin Harries, “Theater and Media Before вЂNew Media,’” Theater 42, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 11. 13. Hans-Thies Lehmann, The Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen JГјrs-Munby (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 22, 24. 14. Lehmann, The Postdramatic Theatre, 23. 15. Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, Leonardo Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 30. 16. Dixon, Digital Performance, 41. 17. Salter, Entangled, xiii. 18. Salter, Entangled, xiii. 19. Salter, Entangled, 3. 20. Among the earliest books to attempt an overview of new performance techniques in media culture, Gabriella Giannachi’s Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) draws together theories and examples from media art, architecture, digital design, and virtual-reality experiments. Her 2007 book, The Politics of New Media Theatre: LifeВ®в„ў (New York and London: Routledge, 2007) further explores intersections of economics and ecology within the context of globalization. 21. Salter, Entangled, 350. 22. Rosemary Klich, Multimedia Performance (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 11. 23. Berghaus presents a similar chronology to Salter, but focuses on a singular line of development within a linear narrative from avant-garde theatre in the early twentieth century to the present. He suggests a clear causal progression from what he calls the “Genesis of Modernity and of the Avant-Garde,” through Fluxus, Happenings, and Body Art to contemporary examples. Giesekam covers much of the same territory, drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s term remediation as a central theoretical concept and suggesting clear links between early cinema (juxtaposing the LumierГЁ brothers’ realism with Georges MГ©liГЁs magic film effects), the work of Czech designer and director Josef Svobada and his Lanterna Magika, and recent performances, mostly from the late twentieth century: the Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, the Builders Association, and Robert Lepage, among others. 24. Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi, Performing Mixed Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 2. 25. Klemens Gruber, “Early Intermediality: Archeological Glimpses,” in Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah Bay-Cheng et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 247–57. 26. Lars EllestrГ¶m, “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars EllestrГ¶m (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2010), 11–51. Page 144 →27. EllestrГ¶m, “The Modalities of Media,” 5. 28. EllestrГ¶m, “The Modalities of Media,” 17. 29. EllestrГ¶m, “The Modalities of Media,” 17. 30. Johannes H. Birringer, Media & Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 9.

31. Johannes H. Birringer, Performance, Technology, & Science, 1st ed. (New York: PAJ Publications, 2008), xxi. 32. Birringer, Performance, Technology, & Science, 326. 33. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012), 15. The “clearly” in this sentence refers to Jones’s earlier essay, “вЂPresence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 11–18. This essay defended the use of performance documentation as no less authentic or meaningful than the original experience of performance art in time. 34. Jones and Heathfield, Perform Repeat Record, 28. 35. Matthew Causey, Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 180. 36. Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 4. 37. Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. 38. Stelarc, Movatar, 2002, http://stelarc.org/?catID=20225. 39. Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Leonardo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 15. 40. Susan Broadhurst, Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 54. 41. See Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance, Performance Interventions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 41. 42. Tom Scheinfeldt, “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 125.

History of Taxonomy 1. Clive A. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2. “Taxonomy,” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198305? redirectedFrom=Taxonomy#eid. 3. For an example of ecological systems in media analysis, see Jussi Parikka, Page 145 →Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2010). For more on folksonomy and web analysis, see Isabella Peters, Folksonomies: Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0 (Walter de Gruyter, 2009) and Renaud Lambiotte and Marcel Ausloos, “Collaborative Tagging as a Tripartite Network,” in Computational Science–ICCS 2006 (New York: Springer, 2006), 114–17, 152. 4. Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8. 5. Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, 42. 6. See Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 17–18. 7. In fact, the complete title of the later volumes (there were thirteen editions) is, in Latin: Systema naturae per regna tria naturae : secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis (Systems of Nature by the three Natural Kingdoms: according to class, order, genus and species, with character, differences, synonyms and places). 8. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 22. 9. Edward O. Wilson, “The Major Historical Trends of Biodiversity Studies,” in Systema Naturae 250—The Linnaean Ark (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010), preface. 10. Colin P. Groves, Primate Taxonomy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 16. 11. Groves, Primate Taxonomy, 16. 12. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 26. 13. See Wilson, “The Major Historical Trends of Biodiversity Studies,” 1–2. 14. Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 80.

15. Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, 80. 16. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 17. Patrick Lambe, Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness (Oxford: Chandos, 2007), 220. 18. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, 221. 19. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, 26. 20. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 2–3. 21. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, “Key Issues in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance,” in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 22–23. 22. Lars EllestrГ¶m, Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 24, 37. 23. Sarah Bay-Cheng proposes a three-dimensional matrix that charts the degree of media distortion along the axes of the body, space, and time. This model Page 146 →can be represented as three facets with numerical values. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck offers a two-dimensional matrix along the axes of body and technology, with each axis allowing for one of three values: abject, object, or subject. Hence, this model can be represented as two facets, each containing one of three fixed values. Finally, David Saltz’s model describes performer-media interactions using a pair of three-dimensional matrices, one describing the “performer perspective” and the other the “character perspective.” Each of the two matrices has three axes—function, space, and time—and each axis has a distinct set of fixed values. This model, then, can be represented as six facets, three for each matrix. 24. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, 33. 25. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, 37. 26. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, 37. 27. Groves, Primate Taxonomy, 3. 28. William Eric Meikle and Sue Taylor Parker, Naming Our Ancestors: An Anthology of Hominid Taxonomy (Prospect Heights, IL.: Waveland Press, 1994), 4. 29. The Code can be found on the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature’s website. See Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. 30. Groves, Primate Taxonomy, 5. 31. Groves, Primate Taxonomy, 5. 32. Meikle and Parker, Naming Our Ancestors, 9. 33. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 3. 34. Groves, Primate Taxonomy, 6. 35. Lambe, Organising Knowledge, xvi. 36. Stace, Plant Taxonomy and Biosystematics, 4. 37. David J. Patterson, “Future Taxonomy,” in Systema Naturae 250—The Linnean Ark (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010), 118. 38. Patterson, “Future Taxonomy,” 117.

Taxonomy of Distortion 1. Caby C. Smith, ed., Data Uses in the Private Sector : Proceedings of the Executive Seminar, October 4, 1973. (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Social and Economic Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, 1974), 1. 2. Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” TDR/Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1 (1966): 33. 3. Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 235. See also Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. V. I Pudovkin, Lewis Jacobs, and Ivor Montagu, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Lear,

1949), 51–52. 5. Walter Kerr, “Can the Words Alone Still Make a Play?; Can Words Still Make Page 147 →a Play?, ” New York Times, June 23, 1968, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html? res=F10715FF3E5F127A93C1AB178DD85F4C8685F9. 6. Caden Manson, “Crossing the Disciplinary Minefield,” Panel discussion presented at the NoPassport Conference: Dreaming the Americas: Legacy & R/Evolution in Performance, Martin E. Segel Theatre Center, CUNY, February 14, 2009, http://www.theatrewithoutborders.com/node/1148. 7. John Gassner, Best American Plays: Fourth Series, 1951–1957 (New York: Crown, 1958), xi. 8. Richard Schechner, “Theatre Alive in the New Millennium,” TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 5. 9. Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” 35. 10. Stan Vanderbeek, “Culture: Intercom,” TDR/Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1 (1966): 43. 11. For only the most recent example, see Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 12. Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries : Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts/ Dick Higgins. (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 12. 13. In Europe there is further discussion of “intermediality.” For a useful overview, see Henk Oosterling, “Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse,” IntermГ©dialitГ©s: Histoire et ThГ©orie Des Arts, Des Lettres et Des Techniques no. 1 (2003): 29–46. 14. “Editorial Comment: Film and Theatre,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 4 (2006): x. 15. Philip Auslander, “Against Ontology: Making Distinctions between the Live and the Mediatized, ” Performance Research 2, no. 3 (1997): 51–52. 16. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 140. 17. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 1; Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 121. 18. Rick Lyman, “ON STAGE AND OFF,” New York Times, December 19, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/19/movies/on-stage-and-off.html. 19. Martin Harries, “Theater and Media before вЂNew Media,’” Theater 42, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 10. 20. Harries, “Theater and Media before вЂNew Media,’” 9. 21. Harries, “Theater and Media before вЂNew Media,’” 9, 10–11, 23. 22. Kurt Vanhoutte, “Two-Fold Origin: Performing Hybrids between Theatre and Media,” Contemporary Theatre Review 20, no. 4 (2010): 479. 23. Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Theater Is Media Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance, ” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 27. 24. Nick Salvato, “The New Old Rush,” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 99. 25. “Wafaa Bilal,” http://wafaabilal.com/html/domesticTension.html. 26. “A Two Dogs Company,” http://www.atwodogscompany.org/. 27. The full quote reads, “Since Sputnik put the globe in a вЂproscenium arch,’ and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally,Page 148 → is the use of public space for вЂdoing one’s thingВ .В .В . The world itself has become a probe.” Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche to Archetype (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 12. 28. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1977), 5. 29. Elizabeth Lecompte, “Who Owns History?” Performing Arts Journal 6, no. 1 (1981): 51. 30. Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” IEICE Transactions on Information Systems E77-D, no. 12 (December 1994): 1–15. 31. Milgram and Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” 6–7. 32. Thomas Holz et al., “MiRA—Mixed Reality Agents,” International Journal of HumanComputer Studies 69, no. 4 (2011): 254. 33. Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi, Performing Mixed Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 34. Benford and Giannachi, Performing Mixed Reality, 229.

35. In particular, see figures 5.1 and 5.3 in Marshall McLuhan, From ClicheМЃ to Archetype (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2011), 12. 36. Martin Puchner, “The Theater in Modernist Thought,” New Literary History 33, no. 3 (2002): 531. 37. Video documentation of this performance is available on Verdonck’s website: http://www.atwodogscompany.org/. 38. This performance collaboration is part of the developments by Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Humanware Innovation Program at Osaka University in Japan. The most recent performances to tour North America included Sayonara and I, Worker in 2012–2013. See Hiroshi Ishiguro, “Humanware Innovation Program, Osaka University,” http://www.irl.sys.es.osaka-u.ac.jp/. 39. This anomaly in the case of the body as distinct from distortions of space and time seems to support Parker-Starbuck’s emphasis on the body as one of the central categories of media-performance intersections. She makes this argument quite compellingly throughout Cyborg Theatre and in her own taxonomic structure offered here. 40. Lance Gharavi, “вЂThese Three Things’: Challenges, Models and Mad-Libs for Classifying вЂthis Kind of Work.,’” in Theatrical Histories, presented at the American Society for Theatre Research, Nashville, 2012.

Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies 1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xix. 2. Foucault, The Order of Things, xvii. 3. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/technological IntersectionsPage 149 → in Multimedia Performance (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. For in-depth outlines of these concepts see Cyborg Theatre. 5. As described in the volume Plant Taxonomy, “a unique feature of taxonomy is that none of its sources of data ever becomes obsolete. We cannot dispense with morphology and anatomy just because we have cytological and chemical data.” V. Heywood, Plant Taxonomy (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1976), 3. 6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 7. K. Oliver, “Nourishing the Speaking Subject: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Abominable Food and Women,” in Cooking, Thinking, Eating: Transformative Philosophies of Food, ed. D. Curtain and L. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 74. 8. Kristeva in Cooking, Thinking, Eating, 73. 9. I have written about this piece as a “becoming-animate.” See Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “Becoming-Animate: On the Performed Limits of вЂHuman,’” Theatre Journal 58, no. 4 (2006): 649–68. 10. As of this writing the piece is still touring, and was featured in Germany in 2013. See Heiner Goebbels’s website for more information and production dates: http://www.heinergoebbels.com. 11. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 55. 12. Evidently distinguishing itself from the Met’s Opera productions, the NT Live Website does claim that NT Live is “the first theatre in the world to film a live performance in high definition and broadcast it via satellite on cinema screens around the world,” http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/support-us/whysupport-the-national-theatre/national-theatre-live-digital-innovation. 13. http://www.the-print-room.org/page37.htm. 14. Pepper’s Ghost is an illusionary trick created with two-way mirrors that make objects appear as if they are projected into 3-D space. 15. See http://opera-erratica.org/#/about/. 16. For an interesting puppet taxonomy, see Stephen Kaplin, “A Puppet Tree: A Model for the Field of Puppet Theatre,” TDR/The Drama Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 28–35.

17. Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and “Popular” Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 225. 18. http://www.geminoid.jp/en/mission.html. 19. See Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 20. For a brief example of the uncanny valley, see one minute of the robot and her doppelgГ¤nger, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=efumWDcOhnE&list=PLG7sRAdtlqAnTTRWCdDth9db4K55gLQ89&index=1. 21. Although early accounts of Geminoid F’s operation in the play indicated that Page 150 →she was tele-operated and controlled by an operator from backstage in real time, in further conversations with writer /director Oriza Hirata, David Saltz and Cody Poulton alerted me that at this point in the production Geminoid F’s motions are entirely prerecorded. She is turned on at the top of the show and the live performer adapts her performance to Geminoid F. A technician is available to make any necessary adjustments as are required in real time. Thanks to David, Cody, and Elizabeth Jochum for their advice on this matter. 22. Although the play coins the term “robot,” the characters are more like artificial intelligence or genetically engineered lifeforms. 23. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/theatre-reviews/sayonara-i-workerthese-plays-are-a-little-too-robotic/article9123716/ 27, February, 2013. 24. Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, 150. 25. Another production that would be worth including here and which replays these forms is Heddatron, a robot revamping of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler by the company Les Freres Corbusier. It was performed at the Here Arts Center in New York in 2006. 26. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “The Play-within-the-film-within-the-play’s the Thing: Retransmitting Analogue Bodies in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5, no. 1 (2009): 28–29. 27. Philip Auslander, “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance,” DegrГ©s: Revue de SynthГЁse Г Orientation SГ©miologique 101 (2000): 1. Also posted on Auslander’s website: http://lmc.gatech.edu/~auslander/publications/liveness.pdf. 28. Greg Giesekam, Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2007), 41. 29. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 30. Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London: Browne’s Bookstore, 1912), 84. 31. Harold B. Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons and Robots in Modernist and Avant-garde Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 55. 32. I saw this production on February 22, 2013, at the Battersea Arts Centre in London. 33. A humorous internet meme followed Google’s announcement of its new Google Glass, “White Men Wearing Google Glass,” which speaks to the ongoing structures of access and privilege, see http://whitemenwearinggoogleglass.tumblr.com/. 34. Marc AugГ©, Non-Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995), 77–78. 35. Ivo van Hove, “Program Notes,” Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s the Antonioni Project, the Barbican Theatre, London, February 1–5, 2011. Page 151 →36. Ivo van Hove, “Program Notes,” Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s the Antonioni Project, the Barbican Theatre, London, February 1–5, 2011. 37. Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 83. 38. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 16. 39. Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, 19. 40. Although written as “merdre” with the extra r, the work merdre means “shit” in French and it is this association that caused the uproar. 41. Foucault, The Order of Thing: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences., xix.

42. Colin P. Groves, Primate Taxonomy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 6.

Sharing the Stage with Media 1. David Z. Saltz, “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001): 107–30. See the conclusion of this chapter for the complete list, analyzed in terms of the new taxonomy. 2. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 59. 3. Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), xxxv. 4. My analysis in this chapter is predicated on a model of spectatorship that emphasizes the role of the spectator’s imagination, such as the theory of aesthetic reception developed by Kendall Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). More specifically, the analysis here is consistent with, but does not depend on the details of, the approach I set forth in “Infiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theatre, Performance and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 203–20. 5. David Z. Saltz, “The Art of Interaction: Interactivity, Performativity and Computers,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 117–27. 6. My initial discussion here of virtual scenery assumes, for the sake of simplicity, that the performer is relating to the media as “here and now.” As I will discuss shortly, it is also possible for the performer to adopt different spatial and temporal relationships with media. Insofar as the media functions as scenery, the performer will still interact with it by navigating through it, but the performer’s own virtual location not be anchored to the media image. For example, a performer might navigate through a remote location telematically, exploring a distant terrain by moving a webcam via remote control. 7. Gwendolyn Waltz, “Filmed Scenery on the Live Stage,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 4 (2006): 564, 566. Page 152 →8. Note, however, that when most of the content on a page is static and only one element changes, such when a user updates a shopping cart to calculate shipping charges, the sensation is that of interacting with an object within a static scene—in other words, the media functions as a prop, as defined in the following section. 9. Recent productions that depicted Macbeth’s vision of the dagger via a projection include DeadKat’s 2009 production at the Brighton Fringe, and TheMASSIVE’s 2012 production in Chicago. See Chris Hislop, “Macbeth: Brighton Fringe 2009,” Fringe Review, http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/2911.html; Scotty Zacher, “Review: Macbeth: As the Dust Settles (TheMASSIVE),” Chicago Theater Beat, http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/2012/10/25/macbeth-asthe-dust-settles-themassive/. 10. Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 25–27. 11. Laetitia Sonami, “Lady’s Glove : Laetitia Sonami,” http://www.sonami.net/works/ladysglove/. 12. Mark Blankenship, “Theater—In вЂContinuous City,’ the Builders Association Interfaces With the Online World Onstage,” New York Times, November 14, 2008, http://theater.nytimes.com/2008 /11/16/theater/16blan.html?_r=1&. 13. Susan Broadhurst, “The Jeremiah Project: Interaction, Reaction, and Performance,” TDR/The Drama Review 48, no. 4 (2004): 50. 14. F. Sparacino, G. Davenport, and A. Pentland, “Media in Performance: Interactive Spaces for Dance, Theater, Circus, and Museum Exhibits,” IBM Systems Journal 39, no. 3.4 (2000): 496. 15. George E. Lewis, “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager,” Leonardo Music Journal (December 2000): 34. 16. Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman, “Messa Di Voce—Tmema/Blonk /La Barbara,” March 11,

2005, http://www.tmema.org/messa/messa.html. 17. Andy Lavender, Freda Chapple, and Chiel Kattenbelt, “Mise En ScГЁne, Hypermediacy and the Sensorium,” in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 58. 18. Lavender, Chapple, and Kattenbelt, “Mise En ScГЁne,” 59. 19. Lewis Segal, “вЂNemesis’ Leaves Little to Imagination,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/31/entertainment/et-random31. 20. This description is based on a performance at Six Flags Over Georgia in the summer of 2012. 21. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance, Performance Interventions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 68. 22. David Rokeby, “Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media,” in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. Simon Penny (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 133. Page 153 →23. Steve Dixon devotes an excellent chapter of Digital Performance to the notion of the “digital double.” His concept of the double overlaps significantly with the concept of media mirror I set forth here; most, but not all, of examples he describes in that chapter are versions of what I would call media mirrors. Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 241–70. 24. Kevin Abbott, “How I Did That: Giving New Power to an Old Story,” Livedesignonline.com, August 1, 2007, http://livedesignonline.com/resourcecenterhowtoshowi/how-i-did-giving-new-power-oldstory. The University of Georgia also used real-time motion capture in its production of The Tempest (2000); see Saltz, “Live Media,” 118–23. 25. Adam Rokhsar, “Digital Synesthesia,” Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, June 9, 2013, http://www.harvestworks.org/jun-9-digital-synesthesia/. 26. Levin and Lieberman, “Messa Di Voce—Tmema/Blonk/La Barbara.” 27. Note that in the case of a robot, there are situations in which a performer relates to the media as being “there” rather than “here,” as, for example, in the case of a remote controlled robot. I briefly consider such cases later in this chapter. 28. Of course, there is an important difference between a performance in which the object represented by the media is present in the performance space and one in which it is hundreds of miles away in a remote location. Later in the chapter, I will be in a position to account for that difference by considering the interaction between multiple perspectives. 29. For the purposes of this taxonomy, I am conflating the categories of “then” and “virtual time, ” though from a logical standpoint there is, in fact, a distinction. Consider the difference between (1) a pre-rendered animation, and (2) a video-capture of an interaction that took place in a virtual environment, such as Second Life or a multiplayer game. In the latter case, though the interaction occurred in virtual space, there was an actual event, a “now.” By contrast, the pre-rendered animation is a purely simulated event; is was never “now,” and so strictly speaking, can never truly be described as “then” (though it can be imagined that way). In the case of a pre-rendered animation, then, both time and space are virtual. Time is similarly virtual in fictional films that use continuity editing; a ten-second sequence might have been recorded over several days, out of sequence; the event never really took place, and the narrative temporality that the spectator experiences is virtual. However, none of the many examples I consider in this chapter are differentiated simply according whether the performer or character regards the media object as temporally “then” as opposed to “virtual”; in practice, that distinction is often difficult for spectators to make, and is very rarely significant to the interaction between the media and a live performer. Nonetheless, the “then” and “virtual” categories of time can be pulled apart at any point the distinction proves useful. 30. For a rather prosaic example of such a performance, designed as a technical demonstration, see Christopher Stanton, Anton Bogdanovych, and Edward Ratanasena,Page 154 → “Teleoperation of a Humanoid Robot Using Full-body Motion Capture, Example Movements, and Machine Learning,” in Proc. Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2012, http://staff.scm.uws.edu.au/~anton/Publications/acra_2012.pdf.

31. Machiko Kusahara, “Presence, Absence, and Knowledge in Telerobotic Art,” in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 206. 32. David Rabe, Hurlyburly: A Play (New York: S. French, 1985), 158. 33. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990), 186. 34. Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, 247. 35. Since my taxonomy is concerned with the different ways audiences perceive and interpret performance events, everything, ultimately, depends on the spectator’s perspective. Hence, what I am describing here as the “performer’s perspective” is in fact the perspective the spectator ascribes to the performer. It may be tempting to think that, since what I am calling the “performer’s perspective” is actually the spectator’s perception of the performer’s perspective, the performer’s perspective is always the same as the spectator’s. However, while that is typically the case, it is not necessarily so; in some cases, the spectator may think the performer misunderstands the reality of the interaction. Such a situation is especially likely in the case of participatory performances, where the spectator observes another member of the audience come onstage to participate in a performance, or when one viewer of an interactive installation observes another viewer interact with the work. 36. Simon Bradley, “Robots Steal the Musical Show,” Swissinfo.ch, May 6, 2009, http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/Robots_steal_the_musical_show.html?cid=996590. 37. John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, Revised and expanded (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), 176–99. Film historian Steve Massa recreated the vaudeville act at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY. Gertie the Dinosaur—Vaudeville Reenactment, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-XGIA-lbf4&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 38. Mary Oliver, “Mary Oliver Artist—Recent Activities,” http://www.maryoliver.co.uk /#!/page_More. 39. Media accounts typically describe Clarkson’s image as a hologram, but it was, in fact, a life-size 2D projection, a digital variation on the nineteenth-century Pepper’s Ghost illusion. The most famous use of this effect in concert was the posthumous appearance of Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella festival. That example is slightly more complicated, however, because Tupac’s image was a CG simulation rather than a straightforward video, as in the case of Clarkson’s image. Hence, from the performer perspective it was “virtual-and-then” rather than “there-and-then”—thoughPage 155 → still experienced as “here-and-now” from the character perspective. See “Jason Aldean Beams Kelly Clarkson into ConcertВ .В .В . Here’s How Those Country Holograms Work,” http://www.nashvillegab.com/2013/07/jason-aldean-beams-kelly-clarkson-into-concert-heres-how-thosecountry-holograms-work.html; “Exclusive: Tupac Coachella Hologram Source Explains How Rapper Resurrected,” MTV.com,” http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1683173/tupac-hologramcoachella.jhtml. 40. Seinendan Theater’s production of Sayonara, directed by Oriza Hirata and featuring an extremely realistic humanoid robot developed by the prominent roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, provides an excellent example of the animatronic robot interaction. During a post-performance discussion session, Hirata explained that the robot’s half-hour performance was entirely preprogrammed; once the robot started the sequence, it could not be altered. However, this fact about the performance, though not secret, was not explained in the program or any publicity materials, which simply and truly emphasized that the production featured real, state-of-the-art robots. Hence, it is likely that few spectators perceived the difference here between the performer and character perspectives, and for them the performer-media relationship was that of an AI Robot. I saw the production, and attended the talk-back, of this production as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe at the Christ Church Neighborhood House on February 16, 2013. 41. See “Kismet,” http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html. 42. Colbert Report, “Errol Morris,” 2012, http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos /419303/september-20–2012/errol-morris. (Described sequence starts at 04:01.) 43. See David Z. Saltz, “The Collaborative Subject: Telerobotic Performance and Identity,” Performance Research 6, no. 4 (2001): 76. This essay also discusses a number of other examples of what I

call the “collaborative subject.” 44. Hugh Rorrison, “Piscator’s Production of Hoppla, Wir Leben 1927,” Theatre Quarterly 10 (1980): 30–41. 45. Paolo Rosa, “Confidential Report on an Interactive Experience,” in Multimedia VideoInstallation-Performance, ed. Nick Kaye, trans. Gregory Conti (London: Routledge, 2007), 153. 46. Lavender, Chapple, and Kattenbelt, “Mise En ScГЁne,” 57–58. 47. In many cases the relationship between the two performers is not symmetrical. For example, in many examples of virtual puppetry, the puppeteer performer sees and acknowledges the other characters (so they are “here and now” to the puppeteer), but the other characters interact only with the media puppet, ignoring the puppeteer (who is out of frame for them). Hence, a thorough analysis of triangular interactions requires eight lines on the chart: analyzing the relationship of the (1) first performer to the media, (2) second performer to the media, (3) first performer to the second, and (4) second performer to the first, all from both the character Page 156 →and performer perspectives. While in some complex cases it might be useful to run through all of those perspectives, however, simply to highlight differences between uses of media, an abbreviated analysis suffices. For the sake of simplicity, the chart I prepared to illustrate triangular interactions (fig. 9) defines triangular relationships using only three lines, considering the relationship from the standpoint of only one of the two performers, and omitting the performer perspective. 48. Stephen Kaplin, “Puppetry into the Next Millenium,” Puppetry International 1 (1994): 38. 49. Steve Rosenbluth, Michael Babcock, and David Barrington, “Controlling Creatures with Linux,” Linux Journal, November 1, 2002, http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6216. 50. Max Plenke, “With New Technology, Cockroach Theatre Dusts Off Classic вЂDeath of a Salesman, ’” April 24, 2013, http://lasvegascitylife.com/sections/ae/stage/new-technology-cockroach-theatredusts-classic-%E2%80%9Cdeath-salesman%E2%80%9D.html. The Warehouse Theatre production of Death of a Salesman (2003) also represented Uncle Ben digitally. See Neil Shurley, “Review of Death of a Salesman,” MetroBEAT, September 16, 2003. 51. SГ©verin Lemaignan et al., “Roboscopie—Openrobots,” http://www.openrobots.org/wiki /roboscopie. 52. Saltz, “Live Media,” 124–26. 53. Cf. Chappel and Kattenbelt, who incorporate the semiotic systems of word, sound, and image into their taxonomy. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, “Key Issues in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance,” in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 21. 54. Richard Schechner, “Building the Builders Association: A Conversation with Marianne Weems, James Gibbs, and Moe Angelos,” TDR/The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (2012): 41.

Intersections and Applications 1. Continuous City was conceived and directed by the Builders Association’s Artistic Director Marianne Weems, with video design by Peter Flaherty. It premiered in 2008 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and subsequently toured across the United States and in countries including Denmark, Canada, Spain, Belgium, and London. The Builders Association, “Continuous City,” the Builders Association, 2007, http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/prod_continuous.html. 2. See also Parker-Starbuck’s discussion of Continuous City in Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “The Spectatorial Body in Multimedia Performance,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 33 no. 3, (September 2011): 67–70. 3. Lance Gharavi, “вЂThese Three Things’: Challenges, Models and Mad-Libs for Page 157 →Classifying вЂthis Kind of Work.,’” in Theatrical Histories, presented at the American Society for Theatre Research, Nashville, 2012. 4. Moore’s Law is the principle named after Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore. In a paper from 1965, he noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled roughly every two years and would likely continue. The effect of this has been to radically increase storage capacity and processing

speed, and to lower cost for most electronics. See, Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, Reprinted from Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965, Pp.114 Ff.,” IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Newsletter 11, no. 5 (2006): 33–35. 5. Dan Cohen, “The Digital Public Library of America: Coming Together,” Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog, October 16, 2012, http://www.dancohen.org/2012/10/16/the-digital-public-library-ofamerica-coming-together/. 6. Bruce A. McConachie, “Reading Context Into Performance: Theatrical Formations and Social History,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 3, no. 2 (1989): 232. 7. “Smartphone Ownership Update: September 2012,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-Sept-2012.aspx. 8. “Mobile Phone Access Reaches Three Quarters of Planet’s Population,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mobile-phone-access-reaches-three-quartersplanets-population. 9. For an overview and list of relevant links, see “Citizen Science Alliance,” http://www.citizensciencealliance.org/. 10. McKenzie Wark, “GAM3R 7H30RY,” http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/. 11. At the 2013 conference for the American Society for Theatre Research, for example, Sarah Bay-Cheng and Debra Caplan offered a working group session on “Digital Methodologies” that included a variety of theatre and performance projects. Space precludes a full listing here. 12. See, “HIDVL,” http://hidvl.nyu.edu/; “Rent, Buy & Subscribe at Ontheboards.tv,” OntheBoards.tv, http://www.ontheboards.tv/; “Routledge Performance Archive,” http://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com/; “Contemporary Performance Network,” http://contemporaryperformance.org/; Marlon Barrios Solano, “Dance-tech.net,”, http://www.dancetech.net/.

Page 158 → Page 159 →

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Page 169 →Index abject bodies abject (subject) technologies and, 74–76 object (subject) technologies and, 72–74 subject technology and, 69–76 abject (subject) technologies abject bodies and, 74–76 object bodies and, 82–84 subject bodies and, 89–91 actor interactions with media by, 112–19 media as, 100–101 telematic function and, 109 Ads (Maxwell), 70–71, 73 affective media, performers’ interaction with, 116–19 “After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era” (McPherson), 6–7 Aldean, Jason, 115 Almeida Theatre, 118 Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Gitelman), 26 Americana Kamikaze (theatrical performance), 51–54 Anderson, Laurie, 93 Andrade, Suzanne, 97–98 Android-Human Theatre Company, 75 “And Still It Moves,” 40–41 animals, in performance, 71–72 The Animals and Children Took to the Streets (interactive performance), 97–101, 106–8 animation virtual actors and, 100–101 virtual and now in, 109–10

The Antonioni Project (van Hove), 85–87 Appleton, Esme, 97–98 Arab Spring, technology and, 136–37 Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, 8 architecture, performance and, 17–18 Archive Fever (Derrida), 4 Aristotle, taxonomy and, 28–30 art installations, multimedia and, 11 Ascott, Roy, 18 Attempts on Her Life (Mitchell), 78 audience interaction media studies and, 26 performer-media interaction and, 94–96, 112–19 Augmented Reality (AR), 47–64 Augmented Virtuality (AV), 47–64 Auslander, Philip, 8, 13–14, 24, 42–45, 80 Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (Berghaus), 18 avatars, performers’ creation of, 115–19, 121 Babock, Michael, 121–22 Barbican Theatre, 78–80 Page 170 →Barrington, David, 121–22 Baudrillard, Jean, 81 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 3, 9, 39–64, 127–30, 132, 134, 136, 140, 145n.23 Bazin, AndrГ©, 47 Beckett, Samuel, 44, 111 Benford, Steve, 19–20, 48–49 Berghaus, GГјnter, 18, 143n.23 Best American Plays: 1951-1957, 40–41 Big Art Group, 40, 84–86

Bilal, Wafaa, 45 bio-art, 11 biomechanics, object bodies and, 80 Biped (Cunningham), 74 Birringer, Johannes, 3–4, 22–23, 25 Black Mountain College, 11 Black Square (film), 21 Blast Theory, 112 Blau, Herbert, 43, 80 Bloom, Benjamin, 28, 38 “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” 38 Blue Bloodshot Flowers (Broadhurst), 100–101, 110 bodies abject bodies, 69–76 cyborgs and boundaries of, 131–35 material-virtual continuum and, 55–64 object bodies, 77–84 in performance, 19–20, 127–30 Body Art, 143n.23 The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (White), 26 Bolter, Jay David, 13, 105, 143n.23 Bonanza (theatre installation), 45 Bowden, Richard, 101 Brace Up! (Wooster Group), 104, 109 Branagh, Kenneth, 35 Broadhurst, Susan, 25, 100–101, 110, 115 Bryson, Bill, 1 Buffon (George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de), 33–35 Builders Association, 11, 100–101, 119–19, 125–30, 132

Burke, Kenneth, 94 Burnham, Jack, 137–38 Burton, Richard, 77–80 Cage, John, 18 Čapek, Karel, 76 Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Sobchack), 26 Carter, Lincoln J., 98–99 Case, Sue-Ellen, 21, 24–25 Causey, Matthew, 24 The Cenci (multimedia production), 118 Chapple, Freda, 20, 34 character performance-mediation interaction and, 112–19 taxonomy of, 94–96 Chattanooga (Carter), 98–99, 106–8 Cheek by Jowl theatre, 89–91 Cieslak, Ryszard, 89–91 citizen science, 138–39 Clarkson, Kelly, 115, 155n.39 Closer: Performance, Technology, Phenomenology (Kozel), 25 CNRS Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems, 122 Coachella festival, 155n.39 Coates, George, 84–88, 93 Cockroach Theatre, 122 Colbert, Stephen, 115 The Colbert Report (television program), 115–16 computer technology, theatre and media and, 47–64 Constructivism, 87 object bodies and, 80

contemporaryperformance.org, 139 contextuality, digital culture and, 11–27 Continuous City (Builders Association production), 100–101, 106, 109, 126–30, 132 Cook, James (Capt.), 32 costume, media as, 101–3, 116–19, 134 Craig, Edward Gordon, 82–84, 89 Critical Arts Ensemble, 11 Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Flanagan), 26 critical theory, cultural context and, 6–10 crowdsourcing, 138–39 culture, digital media and, 12–15 Page 171 →“вЂCulture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema” (Vanderbeek), 41 Cunningham, Merce, 11, 18, 25, 74 cybernetics, 6, 12 cyborgs, 52–54, 65–92. See also virtual actors abject bodies, 69–76 boundary-blurring in performances with, 135–37 in Continuous City, 128–30 matrix and subject technology in, 67–91, 128–30 media as costume in, 102–3 object bodies, 77–84 subject bodies, 84–91 Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Parker-Starbuck), 25, 65–92 dance, multimedia and, 11, 18 Dancer #1 (robot installation), 57–64, 132, 134 dance-tech.net, 139 Darwin, Charles, 32–33, 79 database, as cultural form, 7 D.A.V.E. projects, 101

Death of a Salesman (Miller), 122 de Candolle, Augustin Pyramus, 28, 32 De Historia Plantarum (Theophrastus), 30 de Jussieu, A. I., 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 6 De Materia Medica (Dioscorides), 30–31 Denisart, Christian, 113 Derrida, Jacques, 4 Design for Victory over the Sun (film), 21 Dewey Decimal System, 35 “Digital Culture” (Lavender), 13 digital double, 153n.23 “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective” (Auslander), 8 digital media Birringer’s concept of performance and, 23 conceptual frameworks for, 18–22 performance and, 11–15 performer-media interactions, 93–125 text and context in, 11–27 Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Dixon and Smith), 4, 9, 16–19 Digital Performance Archive, 16–18 Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology (Broadhurst), 25 Digital Public Library project, 5–6, 138 digital technologies documentation of, 5–10 online taxonomies and, 137–40 Dioscorides, 30–31 Discourse Networks (Kittler), 26 distortion, taxonomy of, 39, 45–64, 134

Dixon, Steve, 4, 9, 16–19, 23, 87, 112, 153n.23 DNA coding object bodies and, 81 taxonomy and, 37–38, 91–92 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 104 The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Case), 21, 24 Domestic Tension (Bilal), 45 dramatic function interaction and, 97–105 space and time and, 105–6 dramatic media, virtual actors and, 100–101 Dudley, William, 93, 98–99 E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), 11 Eisenstein, Sergei, 46, 53, 80–81 electronic instruments, performance using, 100 EllestrГ¶m, Lars, 21–22, 34, 37 Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Salter), 16–19 evolutionary theory naturalism and, 79 taxonomy and, 32–33 Page 172 →Expanded Cinema (Youngblood), 12 experimental music, 11 Facebook, Arab Spring and, 136–37 faceted taxonomy, 35 Farman, Jason, 26 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 81–82 film contested relations in, 39–45 distortion in, 46–64

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 138–39 Flanagan, Mary, 26 Fluxus, 18, 41, 143n.23 folk taxonomies, 30–33 Foucault, Michel, 65, 91–92 Fräulein Julie (Mitchell and Warner), 78–81, 89, 134 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4 From Cliché to Archetype (McLuhan), 12–13 Fuller, Loïe, 11 Fuller, Matthew, 9–10, 26 Galouye, Daniel F., 81 GAM3R 7H30RY website, 139 Gamer Theory (Wark), 26, 138–39 gaming technology, interactive animation and, 109–10 Gassner, John, 40–41 Geminoid robot actors, 75–76, 149n.21 Genera Plantarum (de Jussieu), 32 Genera Plantarum (Linnaeus), 31 Gere, Charlie, 13 Gertrude Stein Repertory, 115 Gesamtkunstuerk (total work of art), 16–17 Gharavi, Lance, 136 Giannachi, Gabriella, 17, 19–20, 48–49, 143n.20 Gibbs, James, 125 Giesekam, Greg, 18, 81, 143n.23 Gitelman, Lisa, 26 Gob Squad, 137 Goebbels, Heiner, 71–72 Goldberg, Ken, 109

Google Glass, 119 Gould, Stephen Jay, 4, 33 Graham, Dan, 111 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler), 26 Great Chain of Being, taxonomy and, 29–30 Greer, Brian, 51–52 Grotowski, Jerzy, 89–91 Groves, Colin, 35–37, 91 Gruber, Klemens, 21 Grundrisse (Marx), 43 Grusin, Richard, 13, 105, 143n.23 Guattari, Félix, 6 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (McLuhan), 12 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 35 Hamlet (Wooster Group), 77–80, 110–11 Happenings, research on, 11, 143n.23 Haraway, Donna J., 26, 84 Haring, Chris, 101 Harries, Martin, 14, 43–45 Harvestworks, 104 Hayles, N. Katherine, 13, 18, 26 Heathfield, Adrian, 23–24 Heddatron (Les Freres Corbusier production), 150n.25 Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HDVL), 7, 139 here-and-now environment, performer-media interaction and, 107–8, 114–16, 134, 151n.6 Higgins, Dick, 41–42 Hirata, Oriza, 75, 155n.40 Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory, 75–76 Historia Animalium (Aristotle), 29–30

historical/hierarchical taxonomies, 29–33 Holtz, Thomas, 47–64 Hoppla, Wir Leben, (Hurrah, We Live) (Toppler), 80–81, 118 Hoppla, wir Leben! (film), 35 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies IN Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Hayles), 13, 26 human-computer interactions, 47–64 Hurlyburly (Rabe), 110 Page 173 →hybridity, mixed-reality projects and, 49–64 i.e.VR project, 93 “Improvisational Theater Space” (MIT), 101, 110, 115 incomplete taxonomies, in performance and media, 135–37 “Insect Nature Show” (performance piece), 101–3, 106–8, 115, 134 “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (Freud), 1, 4 Institute for the Future of the Book, 139 instrumental interactions interactive animation and, 110 media as prop and, 100 interactivity dramatic function and, 97–105 performance and, 19–22 performer-media interactions, 93–125 taxonomy for, 94–96 intermediality, 41–42, 44–45 object bodies and, 80–84 Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, 20 International Code of Zoological Nomenclatures, 36–37 Internet cultural production on, 136–37 online taxonomies and, 137–40

virtual scenery on, 99 Ishiguro, Hiroshi, 75–76, 155n.40 Jarry, Alfred, 89–91 Jet Lag (Builders Association), 119–19 Jim Henson Creature Shop, 102 Jim Henson Group, 121–22 Joe (Maxwell), 70–71, 74 Jones, Amelia, 23–24 Jordan, Ken, 18 Kac, Eduardo, 11, 25 Kandinsky, Wassily, 104 Kaplin, Stephen, 121 Kaprow, Allan, 11 Kattenbelt, Chien, 20, 34 Kauffmann, Stanley, 47 Kawahisa, Yuki, 51–52 Kerr, Walter, 40 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., 26 Kishino, F., 47 Kittler, Friedrich, 26 Kleist, Heinrich, 82 Klich, Rosemary, 9, 16–18 Klüver, Billy, 11 Kozel, Susan, 25 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 111 Kristeva, Julie, 70 Kushara, Machiko, 109 La Barbara, Joan, 101–2 Lady’s Glove (electronic instrument), 100, 110

Lamarck, J. de, 32 Lambe, Patrick, 33–35, 38 La Notte (The Night) (film), 85 Laterna Magika Theatre, 86–89 Latour, Bruno, 71–72 Lavender, Andy, 13, 119–19 L’Avventura (The Adventure) (film), 85 L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (film), 85 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 46, 93 LED technology, media as costume and, 102–3 Legible Cities (interactive installation), 109–10 Lehmann, Hans-Theis, 2, 13, 15 LePage, Robert, 11 Les Freres Corbusier, 150n.25 Levin, Golan, 101–3, 134 Lewis, George, 101 Liberman, Zachary, 101–3, 134 Library of Congress digital documentation by, 5 taxonomy system, 35 Life Streaming (Verhoven), 136–37 The Life and Times of Josef Stalin (Wilson), 35 Linnaeus, Carl, 28, 31–33 Lion, Margo, 43 The Lion King, 35 Page 174 →LIVE: Art and Performance (Heathfield), 23–24 Liveness; Performance in Mediatized Culture (Auslander), 13–14, 24, 42–43 Long Distance Love (Yubiwa Hotel), 70–71 Lovnik, Geert, 8–9

Lyotard, Jean-François, 6 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 99–100 machines, in performance, 71–72, 87–89 MagicBook project, 47–64 “Magnitudes of Performance” (Schechner), 34 Malevich, Kasimir, 21 Manovich, Lev, 6–7 Manson, Caden, 40 Mapping Intermediality in Performance, 4, 9, 20–21, 34 Marinetti, F. T., 18 Marx, Karl, 43 Massumi, Brian, 26 Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Munster), 26 material-virtual continuum space, body and time on, 127–30 theatre and media and, 48–64 matrix in Continuous City, 128–30 as nonhierarchical taxonomy, 34–35, 145n.23 subject technology and, 67–91 The Matrix (film), 81 Maxwell, Richard, 70–71, 73 McCay, Winsor, 11, 113 McConachie, Bruce, 138 McHale, John, 12 McKenzie, Jon, 24 McLuhan, Marshall, 6, 12–13, 45 McPherson, Tara, 6–7, 9 Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Kirschenbaum), 26

media. See also digital media as actor, 100–101 as costume, 101–3 digital culture and, 11–15 historical surveys of, 16–18 as mirror, 103–5 performer-media interactions, 93–125 as prop, 99–100 as scene, 97–99 taxonomy for, 1–5, 145n.23 taxonomy of distortion and, 39–64 theatre and performance in analysis of, 26–27, 39–45, 47–64 theoretical approaches to, 22–27 Media and Performance (Birringer), 3–4 Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (Elleström), 21–22, 34 Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Fuller), 10, 26 media object, defined, 94–96 Media & Performance: Along the Border (Birringer), 22 mediated space, material-virtual continuum and, 49–64 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25 Messa di Voce (performance piece), 101–3, 105–6, 106–8, 110 Met Opera Live in HD performances, 72–74, 149n.12 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 80, 87, 89 Miekle, William Eric, 36–37 Milgram, P., 47 Milgram’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum, 47–64 Miller, Arthur, 122 Minecraft, 110 mirror

media as, 103–5, 107–8 prerecording and virtual mirror, 110–12 telematic function in, 109 Mirza, Rizwan, 100–101 The Misanthrope (Moliere), 55–64 Miss Saigon, 73 Mitchell, David, 88–89 Mitchell, Katie, 78–81, 83, 85, 89, 134 mixed-reality projects, 47–64 Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (Farman), 26 Page 175 →mobile phone technology, 138–39 Mochrie, Colin, 119 Moore’s Law, 137, 157n.4 motion-capture technology media as mirror and, 104–5 virtual costume and, 102–3 Movatar, 18 Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (Packer and Jordan), 18 multimedia performance art installations and, 11 cyborg theatre and, 65–92 postmodernism and, 22 taxonomy, 28 Multimedia Performance (Klich and Sheer), 9, 16–18 multimodal scholarship, 7 Munch, Edvard, 4–5 Munster, Anna, 26 Murphy, Trevor, 30 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), 17

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Hayles), 26 Naming Our Ancestors: An Anthology of Hominid Taxonomy (Miekle and Parker), 36–37 National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, 5 National Theatre (NT) Live, 72–74 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 30 Naturalism, 78–80 Nemesis (Random Dance Company), 102, 115 network culture, performance studies and, 8–9 Networks without a Cause (Lovnik), 8–9 Never Work with Animals, Children or Digital Performances (Oliver), 113 The New Media and Technocultures Reader, 26 nomenclature, taxonomy and, 35–37 non-diegetic media, 116–19 nonhierarchical taxonomy, 33–35 Obermaier, Klaus, 101 object bodies, 77–84 abject (subject) technologies and, 82–84 object (subject) technologies and, 80–82 subject technology and, 77–80, 134 object (subject) technologies abject bodies and, 72–74 in Continuous City, 128–29 object bodies and, 80–82 subject bodies and, 86–89 The Odyssey (Paper Cinema production), 82–84 Oliver, Kelly, 70 Oliver, Mary, 113 Olivier, Laurence, 35 online taxonomies, 137–40

On the Boards collection, 139 “On the Marionette Theatre” (Kleist), 82 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 32–33 On the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 104 Opera Erratica, 73–74 The Order of Things (Foucault), 65, 91–92 Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness (Lambe), 33–35 Packer, Randall, 18 Paik, Nam June, 11, 18 Panovsky, Erwin, 39 Paper Cinema, 82–84 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Massumi), 26 Parker, Sue Taylor, 36–37 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, 25, 52–54, 65–92, 102–3, 128–29, 131–35 participatory theatre, 95 “Past Continuous Past(s)” (video installation), 111 Patterson, David J., 38 Pavis, Patrice, 47 peer review, online taxonomies and, 138–39 Page 176 →Pepper’s Ghost technology, 73–74, 155n.39 performance animals and machines in, 71–72 conceptual frameworks for, 18–22 cyborg theatre and, 65–92 digital culture and, 11–15 historical surveys of, 16–18 media and, 11–15 performer-media interactions, 93–125 taxonomy for, 1–5, 39, 134

taxonomy of distortion and, 46–64 theoretical approaches to, 22–27 Performance, Technology & Science (Birringer), 22–23 performance analysis, digital technology and, 8–10 Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (Birringer), 22–23 performer defined, 94–96 media interaction and, 112–19, 154n.35 performer-media interactions character and performer perspectives on, 112–19, 154n.35 in Continuous City, 129–30 dramatic function and, 97–105 material-virtual continuum, 57–64 prerecording and, 110–12 present time and, 106–8 space and time and, 105–12 taxonomy for, 94–96 telematic function in, 109 triangular interactions in, 119–22 triangular interactions with media and multiple performers, 119–22, 155n.47 virtual and now in, 109–10 Performing Mixed Reality (Benford and Giannachi), 19–20, 48–49 Performing Science and the Virtual (Case), 24 Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (McKenzie), 24 periodic table of elements, 34 Peter Pan (Barrie), 98–99, 106–8 Pew Internet and American Life Survey Project, 138–39 Phelan, Peggy, 14, 43, 47 Philosophie Zoologique (Larmack), 32

physical continuum, theatre performance and, 56–64 Piscator, Erwin, 11, 35, 80–81, 86–87, 118 Planned Obsolence (Fitzpatrick), 138–39 plants, taxomonies of, 30–33, 149n.5 Pliny the Elder, 30 Poetics (Aristotle), 16 “polykran” screens, 87 “Poor Theatre,” 89–91 post-archival culture, 6–7 Postdramatic Theatre (Lehmann), 2, 13, 15 postmodernism, performance and media and, 22, 42 prerecording technology, performer-media interaction, 110–12, 153n.29 present, performance-mediation interaction and, 106–8 Primate Taxonomy (Groves), 35 Principles of Animal Taxonomy (Simpson), 35 props media as, 99–100, 152n.8 virtual puppets as, 121–22 Prosthetic Head (Stelarc), 105 Pudovkin, Vladimir, 39–40 puppets abject (subject) technologies and, 74–76, 82–84 as prostheses, 102–3 subject body and, 89–91 virtual puppets, 121–22, 155n.47 Pylshyn, Zenon, 5 Rabe, David, 110 Radok, Alfred, 87–89 Random Dance Company, 102

Ranganathan, S. R., 35 Reaney, Mark, 93 recorded documentation, performance and media and, 22 Reilly, Kara, 76 Page 177 →Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin), 13, 143n.23 remote actors, performances by, 100–101, 153n.28 rhizome, Deleuze-Guattari concept of, 6 Richter, Hans, 39 Rieser, Martin, 1–2 Roboscopie (media production), 122 robots abject bodies and, 73–76, 155n.40 engagement with, 132–34 object bodies and, 82–84 performers’ interactions with, 112–19, 153n.27 prostheses, 102–3, 115 virtual puppets, 121–22 Robots (Denisart), 113 Rokeby, David, 103–5 roles, performance and, 19–22 Rosenbluth, Stephen, 121–22 Routledge Performance Archive, 139 Ruff (Shaw), 137 R.U.R. (ДЊapek), 76 Russian cinema, intermediality in, 21 Salter, Chris, 16–19, 95, 143n.23 Saltz, David Z., 42, 93–125, 129–31, 133, 145n.23 Santarromana, Joe, 109 satellite technology, media and, 12–13

“Save As . . . Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” 7 Sayonara (Ishiguro), 75, 155n.40 scenery media as, 97–99, 151n.6 present time and virtual scenery, 106–8 Schaubühne theatre, 78–80 Schechner, Richard, 34, 41 Scheer, Edward, 9, 16–18 Scheib, Jay, 81–82, 85, 89 Scheinfeldt, Tom, 27 The Scream (Munch), 5 Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (Gitelman), 26 Second Life, 50–64, 110 Segel, Harold, 82 Seinendan Theater, 155n.40 self-surveillance, in social media, 4–6 sexual reproduction, Linnaeus on, 31 Shakur, Tupac, 155n.39 Shaw, Jeffrey, 109–10 Shershow, Scott, 74 Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Haraway), 26 Simpson, G. G., 35 Simulacron-3 (Galouye), 81 Simulated Cities, Simulated Systems trilogy (Scheib), 81 Skype, 136 Smith, Barry, 4, 9, 16–18, 23 Sobchack, Vivian, 26 A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 26 social networking

Arab Spring and, 136–37 interactive animation and, 109–10 Some Trace of Her (Mitchell), 78 Sonami Laetitia, 100 Sontag, Susan, 39, 41–42 space material-virtual continuum and, 51–64 non-diegetic media and, 117–19 performance and, 19–22, 127–30 performance-media interaction and, 105–12 Species Plantarum (Linnaeus), 31 spectatorship. See audience interaction Stace, Clive A., 28 Staging the Screen (Giesekam), 18 “Statement on Intermedia” (Higgins), 41–42 Stelarc, 18, 25–26, 105 Stifter, Adalbert, 72 Stifter’s Dinge (Goebbels), 71–72, 133–34 Strindberg, August, 78–80 A String of Lies (Weis performance), 116 Stuart, Gilbert, 4 subject bodies, 84–91 abject (subject) technologies and, 89–91 in Continuous City, 128–29 Page 178 →subject bodies (continued) object (subject) technologies and, 86–89 subject technology an, 84–87 subject technology abject bodies and, 69–76

in Continuous City, 128–29 matrix and, 67–91 object bodies and, 77–80, 134 subject bodies and, 84–86 triangular interaction and, 122 Sunken Garden (media-opera), 88–89 “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?” (Scheinfeldt), 27 Super Night Shot (Gob Squad), 137 Svoboda, Josef, 11, 86–89 Symphony Fantastique (Twist), 74 synergy in taxonomies, 130–37 synesthesis, media as mirror and, 104–5, 110 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus), 31 Systema Naturae 250 - The Linnaean Ark, 38 taxonomies abject bodies and, 70–76 alternative systems for, 91–92 contested relations in, 39–45 current trends in, 37–38 defined, 28 of distortion, 39, 45–64 engagement with, 132–34 historical/hierarchical taxonomies, 29–33 history of, 28–38 incomplete taxonomies, 135–37 intersections and applications in, 126–40 nonhierarchical, 33–35 object bodies and, 78–84 online taxonomies, 137–40

for performance and media, 1–5, 9–10 of performer-media interactions, 93–125 rules of, 35–37 subject bodies, 88–91 synergy in, 130–37 technological advancements and, 66 Taylor, Diana, 7 Taymor, Julie, 35 TDR journal, 39 technology abject bodies and, 69–76 modes of production and, 136–37 performance and, 25 subject technology, 67–91 Telegarden (art installation), 109 telematic media, performer interaction with, 109, 121 Temporary Distortion, 46, 52–54 10 Backwards (Blast Theory), 112 textuality digital culture and, 11–27 distortion and, 46 “Theater and Media before вЂNew’ Media” (Harries), 14, 44 theatre. See also cyborg theatre distortion in, 46 media and, 39–45, 47–64 performer-media interactions in, 93–125 theoretical approaches to study of, 26–27 Theatre, Theory, and Postmodernism (Birringer), 22 “Theatre Alive in the New Millennium” (Schechner), 41

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness (Causey), 24 Theatre Journal, 42 theatre studies, digital technology and, 8–10 Theophrastus, 30 ThГ©orie Г©lГ©mentaire de la botanique (Elementary Theory of Botany) (Candolle), 32–33 there-and-now environment, performance-media interaction and, 109, 115 there-and-then environment, performance-media interaction and, 110–12, 114–15 Theremin, Leon, 100, 110 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Page 179 →Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 6 3-D technology cyborg theatre and, 88–89 media as mirror and, 104–5 time material-virtual continuum and, 51–64 performance and, 19–22, 127–30 performer-media interaction and, 105–12, 153n.29 Toller, Ernst, 80–81 Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 85–87 Toujours Et PrГЁs De Moi (Opera Erratica), 73–74 trajectories, in mixed-reality projects, 49–64 triangular interactions, performers and media, 119–22 Troika Ranch, 11 Twist, Basil, 74 typology, as nonhierarchical taxonomy, 34–35 Гњber-marionette, 82–84 Ubu Project, 115–16 Ubu Roi (Jarry), 89–91 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan), 12 van der Aa, Michel, 88–89

Vanderbeek, Stan, 41 Vanhouette, Kurt, 44–45, 49 van Hove, Ivo, 55–64 Van Hove, Ivo, 85–87 vaudeville, media and, 11 Vectors, A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, 7 Verdonck, Kris, 44–45, 57–64, 132, 134 Verhoven, Dries, 136–37 Very Nervous System (Rokeby), 103–5 via negativa process, 89–91 Viola, Bill, 11, 89 virtual-and-now environment, performance-media interaction and, 109–10, 115 virtual technologies actors, 100–101 costumes, 101–3, 116–19, 134 interactive animation, 109–10 performers’ interactions with, 112–19 prerecording and, 110–12 props, 99–100, 152n.8 puppets, 121–22, 155n.47 scenery, 97–99, 151n.6 space and time and, 105–12 telematic function in, 109 triangular interactions of multiple performers, 119–22 Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (Giannachi), 17 The Virtual Misanthrope, 55–64 Voyager computer program, 101 Wagner, Richard, 16–18 Waltz, Gwendolyn, 98–99

War Horse (Handspring), 74–75 Wark, McKenzie, 26, 138–39 Warner, Leo, 78–80, 134 Waves (Mitchell), 78 Weems, Marianne, 125 Weis, Cathy, 70–71, 103, 116 Welt am Draht (television series), 81 White, Michele, 26 Whose Line Is It Anyway (television program), 119 Wiener, Norbert, 6, 12 Wilson, Edward O., 31–32 Wilson, Robert, 18, 35 Wooster Group, 11, 18, 35, 46, 77–84, 93, 103–4, 110–11 World Bank, 138 World of Warcraft, 110 World of Wires (Scheib), 81–82, 85, 89 Youngblood, Gene, 12–13 Yubiwa Hotel, 70–71 Zapp, Andrea, 2 Zola, Émile, 79