For Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, the global digital media environment is a brave new world of opportunity and revolution. InOuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, noted scholars of Shakespeare and new media consider the ways in which various media affect how we understand Shakespeare and his works. Daniel Fischlin and his collaborators explore a wide selection of adaptations that occupy the space between and across traditional genres what artist Dick Higgins calls intermedia ranging from adaptations that use social networking, cloud computing, and mobile devices to the many handicrafts branded and sold in connection with the Bard. With essays on YouTube and iTunes, as well as radio, television, and film, OuterSpeares is the first book to examine the full spectrum of past and present adaptations, and one that offers a unique perspective on the transcultural and transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the contemporary world.
This work equips readers with a solid conceptual and critical foundation for digital creativity, presenting both technical explanations and creative techniques.
Bringing a poet’s perspective to an artist’s archive, this highly original book examines wordplay in the art and thought of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). A pivotal figure in the postminimalist generation who was also the son of a prominent Surrealist, Matta-Clark was a leader in the downtown artists' community in New York in the 1970s, and is widely seen as a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice art. He is celebrated for his “anarchitectural” environments and performances, and the films, photographs, drawings, and sculptural fragments with which his site-specific work was documented. In studies of his career, the artist’s provocative and vivid language is referenced constantly. Yet the verbal aspect of his practice has not previously been examined in its own right. Blending close readings of Matta-Clark’s visual and verbal creations with reception history and critical biography, this extensively researched study engages with the linguistic and semiotic forms in Matta-Clark’s art, forms that activate what he called the “poetics of psycho-locus” and “total (semiotic) system.” Examining notes, statements, titles, letters, and interviews in light of what they reveal about his work at large, Frances Richard unearths archival, biographical, and historical information, linking Matta-Clark to Conceptualist peers and Surrealist and Dada forebears. Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics explores the paradoxical durability of Matta-Clark’s language, and its role in an aggressively physical oeuvre whose major works have been destroyed.
Written by both practitioners and scholars, this significant and timely collection explores the sites of contemporary performance, and the notion of place. The volume examines how we experience performance's varied sites as part of the fabric of the art work itself, whether they are institutional or transient, real or online.
The collections of museums, galleries and online art organisations are increasingly broadening to include more new media art. Because new media is used as a means of documenting, archiving and distributing art, and because new media art might be interactive with its audiences, this highlights the new kinds of relationships that might occur between audiences as viewers, participants, selectors, taggers or taxonomisers. New media art presents many challenges to the curator and collector, but there is very little published analytical material available to help meet those challenges. This book fills that gap. Drawing from the editor's extensive research and the authors' expertise in the field, the book provides clear navigation through a disparate arena. The authors offer examples from a wide geographical reach, including the UK, North America and Asia and integrate the consideration of audience response into all aspects of their work. The book will be essential reading for those studying or practicing in new media, curating or museums and galleries.
A quiet yet powerful revolution is going on. All over this country and across the world creativity-in the form of visual arts, music, dance, drama, and technology-is providing an emotionally expressive vehicle for communicating truth, developing character, and crossing cultural boundaries to build the kingdom of God. J. Nathan Corbitt and Vivian Nix-Early visited numerous artists, faith communities, and arts organizations to discover and document how the arts are being used to transform people and communities, especially in urban settings. The result is this extensive handbook that combines real-life stories with tested methodologies to create a new paradigm for the role of the arts in Christian ministry and mission. Taking It to the Streets provides church and mission leaders, youth ministers, and students with a historical perspective and theology for understanding the transforming power of the arts, a vocabulary for discussing them outside the sanctuary, and creative methods for bringing faith to action in the streets of society.
The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.
