Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance
Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance

Author: Travis Brisini

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1040226930

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Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance presents a novel approach for readers to engage with new materialist performance as a method of qualitative inquiry and as a means of combating the anthropocentric loneliness of modern life. It offers a theoretical and practical examination of how we are fundamentally entangled with a more-than-human world through practices the authors call “naturecultural performances.” The book features a collaborative body of arts-based research by three scholars working at the intersections of performance studies, new materialism, environmental studies, and qualitative inquiry. The result is an interdisciplinary body of theoretical scholarship, including a wide array of landscapes, plants, animals, minerals, and other more-than-human agencies. The book also presents practical examples and case studies of naturecultural performances, showcasing the diverse ways in which the concept of “natureculture” can be applied in research and creative practice. This book will be of interest to faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, performance practitioners, and anyone else interested in exploring or creating work based on their own fundamental relationships with the more-than-human world.

Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance
Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance

Author: Silvia Battista

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 3319897586

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This book provides an interpretative analysis of the notion of spirituality through the lens of contemporary performance and posthuman theories. The book examines five performance/artworks: The Artist is Present (2010) by Marina Abramović; The Deer Shelter Skyscape (2007) by James Turrell; CAT (1998) by Ansuman Biswas; Journey to the Lower World by Marcus Coates (2004); and the work with pollen by Wolfgang Laib. Through the analysis of these works the notion of spirituality is grounded in materiality and embodiment allowing the conceptual juxtaposition of spirit and matter to introduce the paradoxical as the guiding thread of the narrative of the book. Here, the human is interrogated and negotiated with/within a plurality of other living organisms, intangible existences and micro and macrocosmic ecologies. Silence, meditation, shamanic journeys, reciprocal gazing, restraint, and contemplation are analyzed as technologies used to manipulate perception and adventure into the multilayered condition of matter.

Performance and Posthumanism
Performance and Posthumanism

Author: Christel Stalpaert

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 303074745X

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Recent technological and scientific developments have demonstrated a condition that has already long been upon us. We have entered a posthuman era, an assertion shared by an increasing number of thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Grusin, and Bernard Stiegler. The performing arts have reacted to these developments by increasingly opening up their traditionally human domain to non-human others. Both philosophy and performing arts thus question what it means to be human from a posthumanist point of view and how the agency of non-humans be they technology, objects, animals, or other forms of being works on both an ontological and performative level. The contributions in this volume brings together scholars, dramaturgs, and artists, uniting their reflections on the consequences of the posthuman condition for creative practices, spectatorship, and knowledge.

Collaboration in Performance Practice
Collaboration in Performance Practice

Author: Noyale Colin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1137462469

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Collaboration between artists has been practised for centuries, yet over recent decades the act of collaborating has taken different meanings. This publication examines cultural, philosophical and political issues tied to specific instances of collaborative practice in the performing arts. Leading scholars and practitioners review historical developments of collaborative practice and reveal what it means to work together in creative contexts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key questions addressed include how artists are developing new ways of working together in response to contemporary economic trends, the significance of collaborating across culture and what opportunities are apparent when co-working between genres and disciplines. Noyale Colin and Stefanie Sachsenmaier present these perspectives in three thematic sections which interrogate the premises of collective intentions, the working strategies of current practitioners, as well as the role of failure and compromise in collaborative modes of creative work. This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars, practitioners and those interested in contemporary artistic methods of working.

Art and Posthumanism
Art and Posthumanism

Author: Cary Wolfe

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1452966567

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A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down. Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe. One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.

Posthuman Gaming
Posthuman Gaming

Author: Poppy Wilde

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-21

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000963071

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Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman. With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of "self", and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an "I" in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming. This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies. Chapters 2 and 7 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Research Methods in Performance Studies
Research Methods in Performance Studies

Author: Craig Gingrich-Philbrook

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-05

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 135104477X

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Research Methods in Performance Studies offers a unique approach for readers to engage with performance research and methods in practice. It examines ways of making performance, researching performance cultures, researching performers who themselves are engaged in research, and conducting research in the context of enduring and emergent themes of performance studies inquiry. This book features the work of eighteen scholar-artists currently working in performance studies who demonstrate—through applied projects—various methods for conducting performance research. The result is a wide array of novel scholarship including activist performance, slam poetry, video performance, stand-up comedy, adaptation for the Broadway stage, naturecultural performance, intersectional performance, performances of cultural and material preservation, and many others. Faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and performance practitioners alike will benefit from the approaches to performance studies research methods articulated by the scholar-artists featured in this collection.

Spectacular Posthumanism
Spectacular Posthumanism

Author: Drew Ayers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-04-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1501340107

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Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

Posthumanism and Educational Research
Posthumanism and Educational Research

Author: Nathan Snaza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1317668626

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Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from the new research agendas presented by posthumanism.

More Posthuman Glossary
More Posthuman Glossary

Author: Rosi Braidotti

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-11-03

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1350231452

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The notion of the posthuman continues to both intrigue and confuse, not least because of the huge number of ideas, theories and figures associated with this term. More Posthuman Glossary provides a way in to the dizzying array of posthuman concepts, providing vivid accounts of emerging terms. It is much more than a series of definitions, however, in that it seeks to imagine and predict what new terms might come into being as this exciting field continues to expand. A follow-up volume to the brilliant interventions of Posthuman Glossary (2018), this book extends and elaborates on that work, particularly focusing on concepts of race, indigeneity and new ideas in radical ecology. It also includes new and emerging voices within the new humanities and multiple modes of communicating ideas. This is an indispensible glossary for those who are exploring what the non-human, inhuman and posthuman might mean in the 21st century.