Texts and Contexts

The intersection of digital media and live performance has evolved significantly since the early 20th century, a relationship sometimes traced back to the cave drawings and rituals of early people on earth. This interdisciplinary field has since grown into a major area of research, encompassing terms like multimedia performance, cyborg theater, intermedia, and digital performance. By the 1980s, digital technologies and video became integral to performance, signaling a shift from media as backdrop to active participant in live events. This reprint of a chapter from the wonderful 2015 text From Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Saltz provides valuable summaries of key texts, theoretical concepts, and artists demonstrating the development of media’s role in performance, from early media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Gene Youngblood, who foresaw the blurring of media boundaries, to more recent scholars such as Philip Auslander, who challenges the concept of “liveness” in the context of mediatized culture. Key works in the late 1990s are discussed to demonstrate the influence of digital culture on performance, marking a transformative moment in theater studies. The authors identify “four trajectories are space, time, interaction, and performance” and related terms useful for analyzing and creating performance and technology works. Drawing from a broad spectrum of disciplines, the three co-authors of this chapter outline the study of performance’s entanglement with digital media and how it continues to evolve, reshaping our understanding of theater, art, and technology today

Context (archaeology) · Digital media · Field (mathematics) · Intersection (aeronautics) · Invisibility · Key (lock) · New media · Transformative learning · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies