Table Of ContentDI G ITAL
PE RFO R MAN C E
A HISTORY OF NEW MEDIA
IN THEATER, DANCE,
PERFORMANCE ART, AND
INSTALLATION
STEVE DIXON
Digital Performance
Leonardo
Roger F.Malina,series editor
Sean Cubitt,Editor-in-Chief
The Visual Mind, edited by Michele Emmer, 1993
Leonardo Almanac, edited by Craig Harris, 1994
Designing Information Technology, Richard Coyne, 1995
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Anne Moser with Douglas
MacLeod, 1996
Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Richard Coyne, 1999
Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, edited by Craig Harris, 1999
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, edited by Peter Lunenfeld, 1999
The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, edited by Ken
Goldberg, 2000
The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, 2001
Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Ollivier Dyens, 2001
Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia, Geert Lovink, 2002
Information Arts: Intersections of Arts, Science, and Technology, Stephen Wilson, 2002
Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau, 2003
Women, Art, and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, 2003
Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Alexander R. Galloway, 2004
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie
Neumark, 2005
The Visual Mind II, edited by Michele Emmer, 2005
CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, 2005
The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, Eugene Thacker, 2005
Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Matthew Fuller, 2005
From Technological to Virtual Art, Frank Popper, 2005
Art Beyond Biology, edited by Eduardo Kac, 2006
New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss,
2006
Aesthetic Computing, edited by Paul A. Fishwick, 2006
Digital Performance: A History of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, Steve
Dixon, 2007
MediaArtHistories, edited by Oliver Grau, 2007
From Technological to Virtual Art, Frank Popper, 2007
META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, Mark Amerika, 2007
Digital Performance
A History of New Media in Theater, Dance,
Performance Art, and Installation
Steve Dixon
with contributions by Barry Smith
The MIT Press
Cambridge,Massachusetts
London,England
© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.
MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional
use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Depart-
ment, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.
This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
and was printed and bound in Spain.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dixon, Steve.
Digital performance : a history of new mdia in theater, dance, performance art, and installation /
Steve Dixon.
p. cm.—(Leonardo)
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-04235-2 (alk. paper)
1. Technology and the arts. 2. Digital media. 3. Arts, Modern—20th century. 4. Performing
arts—History—20th century. I. Title.
NX180.T4D538 2007
700'.285—dc22
2006049426
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
I Histories 35
2 The Genealogy of Digital Performance 37
3 Futurism and the Early-Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde 47
4 Multimedia Theater,1911–1959 73
5 Performance and Technology Since 1960 87
II Theories and Contexts 113
6 Liveness 115
7 Postmodernism and Posthumanism 135
8 The Digital Revolution 157
9 Digital Dancing and Software Developments 183
III The Body 209
10 Virtual Bodies 211
11 The Digital Double 241
12 Robots 271
13 Cyborgs 303
IV Space 333
14 Digital Theater and Scenic Spectacle 335
15 Virtual Reality:The Search for Immersion 363
16 Liquid Architectures and Site-Specific Fractures in Reality 395
17 Telematics:Conjoining Remote Performance Spaces 419
18 Webcams:The Subversion of Surveillance 437
19 Online Performance:“Live”from Cyberspace 457
20 “Theater”in Cyberspace 483
V Time 513
21 Time 515
22 Memory 539
VI Interactivity 557
23 “Performing”Interactivity 559
24 Videogames 599
25 CD-ROMs 623
26 Conclusion 643
Notes 671
Bibliography 737
Index 777
Contents
vi
Series Foreword
The arts, science, and technology are experiencing a period of profound change. Explo-
sive challenges to the institutions and practices of engineering, art making, and scientific
research raise urgent questions of ethics, craft, and care for the planet and its inhabitants.
Unforeseen forms of beauty and understanding are possible, but so too are unexpected
risks and threats. A newly global connectivity creates new arenas for interaction between
science, art, and technology but also creates the preconditions for global crises. The
Leonardo Book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to consider these opportunities,
changes, and challenges in books that are both timely and of enduring value.
Leonardo books provide a public forum for research and debate; they contribute to the
archive of art-science-technology interactions; they contribute to understandings of emer-
gent historical processes; and they point toward future practices in creativity, research,
scholarship, and enterprise.
To find more information about Leonardo/ISAST and to order our publications, go to
Leonardo Online at <http://lbs.mit.edu/> or e-mail <[email protected]>.
Sean Cubitt
Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Book series
Leonardo Book Series Advisory Committee: Sean Cubitt, Chair; Michael Punt; Eugene Thacker;
Anna Munster; Laura Marks; Sundar Sarrukai; Annick Bureaud
Doug Sery, Acquiring Editor
Joel Slayton, Editorial Consultant
Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST)
Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affil-
iated French organization Association Leonardo have two very simple goals:
1. to document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars interested
in the ways that the contemporary arts interact with science and technology and
2. to create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet,
exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate.
When the journal Leonardo was started some forty years ago, these creative disciplines
existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at that time
by the “Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow. Today we live in a different time
of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new
hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the
Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at
work individually and in collaborative teams bridging the art, science, and technology
disciplines. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leonardos,” cre-
ative individuals or teams that will not only develop a meaningful art for our times but
also drive new agendas in science and stimulate technological innovation that addresses
today’s human needs.
For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks,
please visit our Web sites at <http://www.leonardo.info/> and <http://www.olats.org>.
Roger F. Malina
Chair, Leonardo/ISAST
ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Martin Anderson, Michael Joaquin Grey, Larry Larson,
Roger Malina, Sonya Rapoport, Beverly Reiser, Christian Simm, Joel Slayton, Tami
Spector, Darlene Tong, Stephen Wilson
Series Foreword
viii
Preface
This book developed out of a major research project undertaken by Steve Dixon and Barry
Smith from 1999 to 2001, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).1
The Digital Performance Archive(DPA) was established to record and analyze an extraordi-
nary and unprecedented period of activity and experimentation within performance prac-
tice where computer technologies and techniques were increasingly integrated into live
productions, and new forms of interactive performance emerged in participatory installa-
tions, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. An initial announcement sent to relevant arts and
new media culture lists in 1999 summarized the project’s scope:
The Digital Performance Archive (DPA)—http://ntu.ac.uk/dpa/—is a research project documenting
developments in the creative use of computer technologies in performance, from live theater and
dance productions that incorporate digital media to cyberspace interactive dramas and webcasts.
DPA also collates examples of the use of computer technologies to document, discuss, or analyze
performance, including specialist websites, e-zines and academic CD-ROMs.
While the level of such activity was high at that time, its recording and documenta-
tion was uncoordinated and sporadic, and the DPA sought to retain for posterity some
traces of this work. During the years 1999 and 2000, the Archive recorded all activity it
could find within the field, and provided an extensive online database of individual works,
with data fields including date, venue, credits, types of technologies employed, summaries
of the works, photographs, artists’ statements, biographies, and website links (many
artists’ websites were also cloned by the Archive to ensure their longevity). In parallel,
Dixon video recorded twenty-five live performances in the United States and Europe (some
with a single camera, others with a four camera crew), including works by Blast Theory,
Amorphic Robot Works, Random Dance Company, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and ieVR.
