Foreword

Peter Sellars

The book you hold in your hands exemplifies our age—exhausting but not exhaustive,
much too much information and much too little—and yet hugely stimulating, expansive,
and replete with parallel lives and miraculous confluences. We live surrounded by a chaos
of undifferentiated factoids and half-formed allusions, and in the absence of convincing
structural links, we rely on, search for, or imagine flashes, intuitions, hovering conceptual
affinities, and hyperbolic recurrences that can be explained only by accumulated karma
from previous lifetimes or pure unadulterated random chance. This book reflects all of
these prolixities and unresolvable energies. (That you are even holding a book indicates
your predilection for the antique and demonstrates your own taste for time travel, spirit
possession, and an interest in getting inside other people’s bodies.)
Chris Salter’s project is to propose an exploded performance history of surprisingly
radical inclusivity. In the best twenty-first-century tradition the volume assigns low
priority to the making of judgments, ideological sequestration, and the old-fashioned
twentieth-century scenario of good guys and bad guys and friends and enemies. Across
the teeming pages of this book, everyone is here. Or at least a lot of people and quite a
few art forms. Extending the boundaries of this book across disciplines and geography
means that surprising artists show up in the context of a much richer cross-pollinated
image-flow than in many previous histories of avant-garde practice.
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia are still underrepresented, which is too bad
because we still have a lot to learn about the use of technology from indigenous cultures.
The traditional arts in those places have always been interactive and interdisciplinary,
with ceremonial imperatives that reach beyond the decorative distractions of a wealthy
society with time on its hands and no ethical urge to reshape, reimagine and sustain the
mechanisms of justice in human and divine affairs. Indigenous technological practice is
specifically oriented to the growth and continuum of the natural world and humanity’s
place in it, direct contact with ancestors, and the creative and moral shaping of future
reality.
What is technology? A pencil, a stick of incense, or a feather. Or a neutron bomb or
a brain sensor. Technology itself is nearly neutral; it is the motives of how and why tech-
nology is employed that determine the fruitfulness or devastation of its consequences.
Indigenous ceremony uses interdependent technologies embroidered with accompany-
ing narratives to touch and enter a synesthetic state of transcendence that invites an
evolving community into a shared aura of undifferentiated, imperceptible simultaneities
in which every action is part of another action, in which thought and emotion move in
ways that are not limited or overdetermined by temporal powers. Sharing our lives with
the dead and with the unborn, with the articulate and with the inarticulate, points us
toward an open-ended renewal that hosts and raises spirits and that becomes a direct
empowerment.
It is no accident that the triumph of bourgeois realism in nineteenth-century theater
(itself an avant-garde achievement) was met with a deep counterreaction from artists who
needed to break out of their salons and drawing rooms, with such earthed and cosmic
activities as Rite of Spring, Poem of Ecstasy, and so on. These synesthetic projects were
inspired by accounts from anthropologists coming back from the Pacific Northwest,
Guinea, Morocco, Brazil, or Romania and describing performance practices that were
extreme and astonishing. Could Western culture of the machine, the time clock, the
bureaucracy, the scientifically determined fact be transformed by an action that liberated
multiple sensory perceptions into an experience that broke through the confines of a
crushing materialism? The new material realities in an age of mass production and repro-
duction were certainly shockingly dehumanizing and also strangely human.
The early twentieth-century technologies of mass media were ideal promotional tools
for fascist states because communication typically flowed in one direction, reifying the
position of spectatorship. The absence of reciprocity and the heightened possibilities for
control created a capitalist or communist paradise for manipulative groups and individu-
als. The foundations were laid for corporate brainwashing and the marketing of desire,
craving, and domination fantasies that have proliferated into our current cultural miasma
of virtual realities.
Thanks to the generosity if not the foresight of the military industrial complex, the
late twentieth century saw the arrival of the Internet and a host of interactive technologies
that, if the election of Barack Obama signals anything, have within them the potential
to deepen and extend a genuinely democratic and responsive culture.
The high-tech interface has been appealing to artists because it does have the potential
to fragment and diversify the master narrative, offering simultaneous multiple perspec-
tives, freshly negotiated interdependent vocabularies, and the direct experience of ambigu-
ity, the ineffable, and a sensory and mental landscape that lies above, below, and beyond
ideology. The classic Gesamtkunstwerk that we inherited from the Renaissance in the form

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x
of masques, pageants, and opera regrettably had its muscular and metaphysical transcen-
dence rooted in the heart of empire—the single-point perspective of the ravishing chore-
ography and scenery made sense only from the royal box. Everyone else had to take it on
faith that this worldview was complete.
The early twentieth century gave us wide shots, long shots, close-ups, and montage.
Film language and the mechanisms of projection changed poetry, architecture, music,
painting, and politics. Cutting, pasting, juxtaposition, layering, and simultaneity, the
rhythmic organization of contrasting experiences, all became strategies for disrupting and
interrogating state power. And more important, these new relationships and interactions
of discrete aspects of experience opened into deeper understandings of the nature of con-
sciousness and the workings of the mind.
The performance of liberation and sensory awakening that Chris Salter traces across
the DNA swabs of the following pages has as its primary thread the reorganization of
human interaction and the reimagination of interrelatedness. Contrasting and contradic-
tory emotions and histories are found to be deeply interpenetrating. The complications
of texture that characterize our historical moment of global unease, with its potential for
both confusion and unprecedented solidarities, are best represented in a world theater that
is technically informed and brilliantly wired.
The question that haunts us—does this technology blunt our humanity or enlarge
it?—continues to be explored and understood differently by new generations as the tech-
nology itself evolves along with the human species, and becomes more readily accessible
in price and in prevalence. The performative possibilities continue to take us into more
and more dizzying levels of inherent contradiction, again tending towards a more demo-
cratic play of multiple perspectives and the yin-and-yang dynamic of the universe itself.
The fixed point of view is gone. The participant-observer is a given. Space and place are
remade and remixed in new political, sociological, and cultural constructs.
Chris Salter has invited a vast range of artists and movements to his table. The demo-
cratic impulse of inclusivity means that he gives equal treatment to masterpieces and
minor works, to turning points and to non-events, to revelations and dead-ends, to artists
whose work opened new possibilities that are inexhaustible and still inspiring, and artists
whose work was a temporary flash, a cul de sac, a philosophical blip. This exercise makes
us aware of a collective momentum, a zeitgeist that lies outside the traditional focus on
historical points and persons of originality. Nevertheless, I would encourage the reader to
explore the interesting and the obscure references in this dynamic amalgamation in much
greater depth.
The major artists discussed in this book cannot be described in the two sentences that
a survey format has allotted them. In most cases, behind the honorable mention in these
pages lies a lifetime of inquiry, courage, and risk. All artists court the disaster zone of
self-branding that moves an artistic breakthrough into the realm of a fashion statement,
that trades the unease of relentless experimentation for the relative ease of creating a

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xi
commercial product with its own seductive qualities. For this reason, the entwined his-
tories that Chris Salter lays before us are not necessarily all about success in the conven-
tional sense; some of the successes are slightly depressing, and some of the failures remain
signal, illuminating, and darkly beautiful.
Entangled is a good title for a subject that refuses to lie down, clean up, or invite a
last word. Messed Up would also be a good title for a lot of the work considered in this
perforated catalogue. The fleeting and the improvisatory are at a premium in the face
of the challenges before us. Artists are responding with whatever is at hand to a social,
political, and technological reality that is completely out of control. We do not have a
grip on our moment in history. The hyper-specialization and complexity of every facet of
life precludes our full grasp of even the most basic issues that confront the planet. And
of course, in all our technological proliferation, we have still not learned how to read our
own hearts.
Artists across many fields and cultures are collaborating to create shared areas of nuance,
mutual regard, specificity, hybridization, care, attention, and debate. In the new era,
the power of the work, and the empowerments of authorship, are increasingly held by
communities, not individuals. And the very fact that the illusion of control can no longer
be maintained is the first stage of freedom.

Los Angeles, May 2009

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xii
 Preface: A Reader’s Manual for Entangled

What you have before you is a large work that grapples with how technologies, from the
mechanical to the computational, have radically transformed artistic performance practices
during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on and off the stage. In doing so, it seeks
to answer two specific questions: (1) how developments in electromechanics, projection,
acoustic and sound technologies, new architectural materials, and computational systems
have altered our making and perception of artistic performance, and (2) what socio-
political-cultural-economic contexts have lead performing, visual and media artists,
musicians, architects, choreographers, directors, composers, interaction designers, and
researchers to deploy such developments.
My interest in writing this work stems from several directions. The first is the need
to fulfill what I perceive to be a gap in how the histories of the new media arts, in par-
ticular—but also theater and other stage-based forms—are being written, specifically from
the point of view of technical systems and processes. Many of these histories are caught
up in a tension between the technophilic and the technophobic.1 On the one side, there
is a strange mysticization and godlike awe of technology. On the other, there are the
reactions of performing artists who feel that technology will compete with and potentially
usurp their central role as human performers. Elizabeth LeCompte, director of the inter-
nationally known avant-garde theater collective The Wooster Group perfectly summed
up this tension in an interview about her adolescence in New Jersey:

I didn’t think of media as a different thing than the theater. I thought the television was no dif-
ferent than what was for Chekhov opening a door and seeing imitation light outside. The television
was there all the time, it was a natural element of our environment . . . at the time (during the
1960s) the television wasn’t used in the theater because people said if you put the television in
the theater, if you put a TV image in the theater, everyone will watch the TV. They won’t watch
the theater experience . . . which fascinated me.” (1987)
 Despite this artificial but continually propagated tension between the technical and
the human, I am nevertheless genuinely curious to explore what performance traditions
can teach other emerging practices, for example, the heterogeneous field described as the
new media. I have long held that training in such computer-based arts demands a hybrid
approach, in which students not only study code and electronics but also master other
practices that are directly imported from performance traditions, like dramaturgy, light-
ing, sound, or the creation of scenographic environments that involve multiple elements
functioning in space and time.
Many new media curricula are now bearing this observation out. First, as event and
interactive environment design become commonplace design practices, there is a growing
interest in performance techniques among students and professionals. Second, accompany-
ing this interest is a demand for critical studies that discuss the histories of such perfor-
mative practices involving technical processes in a rigorous and thorough manner. Despite
a growing cadre of books on performance and technology, however, many of these works
focus on one narrow field of coverage, such as media applied to the stage or the performa-
tive elements of installation art.2
But if we are to really understand what is going on in these technocultural trends, we
need to grasp how performance practices using technical systems have been widely inter-
polated across a number of disciplines that are rarely, if ever, gathered in the same volume.
The more I have talked with students, teachers, and professional artists during the process
of writing this book, the more I have realized that there is a deep desire for a historical
and critical reference work that is not aligned with just one specific discipline.
Perhaps a more fundamental reason for this book is the necessity I feel for both theorists
and practitioners to know what has come before them. This desire is not just an academic
exercise, rooted in critically analyzing historical trends, concepts, and movements,
but is instead aimed to inform future praxis itself. Indeed, this book stems as much from
my own professional work for more than fifteen years with technological means in
performance in a variety of disciplines as it does from conceptual and historical interests.
The fact that I am a maker of as much as a spectator to these processes, of course, puts
me both in a privileged and precarious position: privileged in the sense that the practices
explored are not mystical but pragmatic, yet precarious, as I certainly cannot employ
observational distance in the way that social scientists or ethnographers of laboratory
practices do.
Thus, this book has been written to be broad and far reaching in order to capture the
resonances between different practices that may have been overlooked in their original
historical contexts due to disciplinary and other constraints. This does not mean, however,
that it is without a conceptual or theoretical basis. Lest I give a false impression, the
introduction that follows is designed to expand our conceptual context of what we mean
by “performance.” While other books have described the “performance” context from
anthropological or linguistic perspectives, what distinguishes this attempt is the focus it

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xiv
lays on more recent theoretical work that is just beginning to find its way into artistic
performance discourses, for example, science and technology studies.
Although this move may at first seem like an unnecessary detour for a book that is
mainly focused on artistic praxis and not performance in its multiple other theoretical
guises (e.g., linguistic acts, social and anthropological rituals, or the practices undertaken
in scientific laboratories), it is essential if we are to grasp performance’s meaning and
stakes within the technoscientific culture we inhabit. These technocultural frameworks,
of course, apply to the stage, for example, in discussing the impact on spectator perception
when a video monitor suddenly invades a text-based play or when a dancer’s double
appears on a screen, but they also pertain to other disciplines that we might never imagine
as “performative”: architecture or participatory urban spaces that do not clearly demarcate
performer and spectator, for example. In other words, I am interested in how performance,
as both method as well as praxis, can be explored across a wide range of artistic fields and
how these practices have participated in a set of common histories across the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, despite their disciplinary borders. In order to accomplish this
none-too-formidable task, I have organized the book in eight chapters entitled, “Space 1:
Scene/Machine (1876–1933),” “Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–),” “Performative
Architectures,” “The Projected Image,” “Sound,” “Bodies,” “Machines/Mechanicals,” and
“Interaction,” with each chapter focused on a specific area: theater scenography;
architecture; video/image making; music and sound composition; body-based arts like
dance and performance art; machine and robotic art; and, finally, the construction of
interactive, participatory environments in research, festival, and urban contexts.
The chapters are organized first thematically and then chronologically, with both areas
intimately related to each other. With some exceptions, the historical span of the twen-
tieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is bracketed by two technological
frames: the machine age at the start of the twentieth century, which spans the period from
1900–1933 and the post–World War II computation age, encompassing the period of
1950–1970 and from 1970 to the current time.
This historical continuum between the mechanical and computational is intentional.
Although, as you will soon discover, technology as device and world maker has always
been immanent in artistic performance, the beginning of the machine age of modernism
marks a unique moment in which rapid changes of the entire politico-socio-cultural
fabric in Europe, Russia, and North America resulted in artists materializing their fascina-
tion with technology through new forms and processes. As the historian Stephen
Kern wrote in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, technologies of mechanization
inspired entirely “new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space,” trans-
forming “essential structures of human experience and basic forms of human expression”
(1991, 14).
In similar fashion, the transition from the mechanical to the computational paradigm,
or more precisely, the digital paradigm that began in earnest after World War II and has

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reached full force only more recently, marks a similar rupture that we are currently in the
throes of grappling with across all registers of life. The historical continuum between the
mechanical and computational presents us with the possibility of deflecting the overem-
phasis on the digital as if technology could be considered only from the standpoint of the
computer. Simultaneously, it also allows us to explore a range of techniques (electro-
mechanical, optical, acoustic, and computational) that have elicited radically different
kinds of perceptual practices.
In essence, then, each chapter of the book is a self-contained overview of performative
practices in one of the particular areas, allowing the whole to function as a reference work
and enabling us to quickly pick out specific areas of interest. This survey resembles some-
thing of a bricolage constructed from historical accounts gleaned from archival textual,
image and sound research, technical diagrams, descriptions and models, the close reading
of primary sources and accounts of projects by artists, critics and audiences, personal
interviews and discussions with living artists, as well as my own experience as both prac-
titioner and spectator.
Of course, what I propose here is ambitious—almost impossibly so. Entire books are
written not only about each of the areas I endeavor to describe, but also restrict their
time frame to a few years. Still, because this is a broad survey, my aim is to cover as much
territory as possible within the constraints that have been laid out. As you will soon
discover, although the practices discussed could also be described by disciplinary con-
structs like theater, architecture, sound art, music theater, and visual and media arts, the
notion of discipline is quite limited. Artists, projects, works, technologies, and contexts
will jump between the different chapters and defy neat boundaries. Some creators will
appear only once, yet others will cross several chapters, revealing different facets of their
practices. Technologies will become completely mixed up in projects that purposefully
shatter the well-defined theatrical and architecturally determined roles of performer and
spectator.
Where, for example, do we place the pioneering work of the British architect Cedric
Price, who worked with Joan Littlewood, a politically motivated Marxist theater director
in order to create a “Fun Palace” that was neither completely architecture nor theater
but an interactive, technologically driven public play space for performances in every-
day life? How do we classify something like 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering using
traditional artistic disciplines like theater, dance, or visual art? Where is one to place the
range of performative works from artistic collectives that arose in the 1990s, inventing
computer-based interaction techniques that straddled the research lab, the media arts
festival, the academic conference circuit, and commercial industry?
In order to make the book easier to navigate, as well as to enable the work to reveal
its structure, I have created several devices that will help you find information. First, you
will find many specialized (especially for the technologically uninitiated) terms, some of
which may be familiar and some of which may not. In order to not get bogged down in

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too much jargon (although, admittedly, there will be some), I have included a detailed
glossary in the back of the book and have italicized those specific terms in the text. Because
this is a book focused on technics, I feel it is essential to work at this level of technical
detail, particularly as many books discussing performance and technology describe the
technology incorrectly in the first place.
Second, in order to avoid a sense of “we’ve seen this before,” I have created a cross-
referencing system that includes in brackets previous chapter and section numbers of
artists, genres, or practices that have already been referred to in the text (e.g., [Tatlin,
chapter 3]). This system functions as a kind of extremely simplified hypertext without
the computer, allowing you to discover artists working across multiple genres as opposed
to being slotted into the traditional categories of “scenic designer” or “director” or “visual
artist.”
Finally, although I strongly acknowledge that technology within artistic practices is a
cross-cultural phenomenon, a large emphasis of what I explore focuses on European,
North American, and Japanese contexts. While I have made every effort to include
practitioners and works that do not originate in Western contexts, it is inevitable in such
a large project that there will be omissions, both intentionally (due to lack of space) and
unintentionally.

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 Acknowledgments

Writing a book like this is not only a labor for the author but also for loved
ones, partners, friends, colleagues, and associates as well. Despite the solitude that
is required to write, in many ways, those who are part of the community around
the writer are the ones who have to live with the work the most, whether they choose to
or not.
I first need to thank Todd Winkler. At a symposium on Video and Performance at
Brown University in spring 2004, Todd suggested that my talk on the history of video
on the stage be turned into a full book. Many pages later and with so many other histories
intertwined with it, Todd’s suggestion has materialized.
During the process of writing, I have talked with innumerable artists, designers,
researchers, curators, and practitioners. While it is impossible for me to name all of these
I especially want to thank Erik Adigard, Sam Auinger, Andreas Broeckmann, Dieter
Daniels, Scott deLahunta, Laura Farabough, Kathleen Forde, Karmen Franinovic, H. C.
Gilje, Heidi Gilpin, Kurt Hentschläger, Doug Kahn, Paul Kaiser, Chris Kondek, Martin
Kusch, Katja Kwastek, Armando Meniccaci, Sally Jane Norman, Bruce Odland, Joel
Ryan, Rebecca Schneider, Skip Sweeny, Helen Thorington, Woody and Steina Vasulka,
Manfred Waffender, Carl Weber, Arnd Wesemann, Robert Woodruff, and others.
Furthermore, this work is quite inseparable from artistic practice. My collaborators in
Sponge (Laura Farabough and Sha Xin Wei) as well as Marije Baalman, Yin Mei Critchell,
Bill Forsythe, Jayachandran Palazhy, Thomas Spier, Michael Schumacher, Lea Xiao, and
student collaborators Brett Bergmann, Daniel Grigsby, Nick Munoz, and Philip Viel,
have provided many hours of discussion and practice, wherever around the world I was
writing. Special thanks to Karen Nölle and Hans-Ulrich Möhring for the wonderful
hospitality at their home in Niederkleveez, Germany, which gave me peace and quiet in
the summer of 2007 to write.

Acknowledgments

xix
 Peter Sellars, who is most likely the busiest artist in the world, still managed the time
to write such an amazing foreword, even in the midst of flying to New Zealand, preparing
an Obama-era Othello, and giving talks across the world about the necessity of art and
culture in times of duress such as these. I want to thank my anonymous reviewers from
the MIT Press who provided me with so much helpful advice as well as the numerous
artists, designers, researchers, archive directors and assistants who provided me such fan-
tastic images for the book. You are all too numerous to mention by name, but I owe much
gratitude to you all for your help.
The intellectual and artistic community in Montréal has been a great atmosphere to
nurse a work balanced between theory and praxis. In particular, I want to thank Ana
Cappelluto, Tom Lamarre, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Michael Montanaro, and Alain
Thibault, among so many others, as well the group of graduate students at Concordia
University who have been collaborating with me, especially my PhD research assistants
Christoph Brunner, who spent many long summer days and evenings in 2008 in the
libraries and on the phone to Germany, Switzerland, New York, and who-knows-where-
else tracking down references and image rights, and Harry Smoak, who spent many an
hour working on the superb glossary at the back of this book. Also, architect and PhD
researcher Patrick Harrop was invaluable in giving strong feedback on the architectural
angles in the text. I need as well to acknowledge my colleagues in the Department of
Design and Computation Arts at Concordia as well as the Faculty of Fine Arts for their
support. I would also like to thank Louise Dandurand, VP of Research at Concordia, who
provided Seed Funds enabling me to acquire the reproduction rights on the large amounts
of photos in the book, and Associate Dean of Research Lynn Hughes for her general
support.
Of course, there are those at the MIT Press who made this project possible in the
first place—in particular, Doug Sery. It has been Doug’s unwavering belief in bringing
a performative perspective to new media studies that has seen this book through its long
gestation period and ultimate materialization. MIT’s crack team of editors, including
Kathy Caruso, Nancy Kotary, and Marcy Ross have been incredibly responsive and patient
as I have assembled this behemoth.
I wish to thank my parents Alice Salter and my father, the late Lloyd W. Salter, for
so many years of encouragement, support, and belief. Finally, this book would have not
been possible without the love and support of Anke C. Burger, my wife and companion.
Danke Liebste. Ich schulde dir Hunderte Stunden von Quality Time und Abwaschen.

Acknowledgments

xx
 Introduction

Performance as practice, method, and worldview is becoming one of the major paradigms
of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also the sciences. As euphoria for the
simulated and the virtual that marked the end of the twentieth century subsides, suddenly
everyone from new media artists to architects, physicists, ethnographers, archaeologists,
and interaction designers are speaking of embodiment, situatedness, presence, and mate-
riality. In short, everything has become performative.1
Theater, dance, music, and—increasingly—the visual arts have long been occupied
with the embodied, material characteristics of performance, while emerging forms like
digital media have emphasized technology and tools as their holy grail of innovative cre-
ative expression. Obsessed in the 1990s by the ocular and the inscribed, the screen and
data, now even the new media arts are discovering (or recovering) felt experience, situated
context and polysensory affect that cannot simply be reduced to text, code, or photons
aimlessly floating on the screen.2
This move seems like a logical step as the new media embrace the dynamic, real-time
event that has always differentiated performative practices from the static objecthood of
the visual arts. Yet with the spurt of work in areas such as laptop computer music, sensor-
augmented dance, responsive architecture, video-saturated mise-en-scène, network-
controlled robots, and performative urban spaces, it sounds like new technologies have
suddenly created a horizon of aesthetic experiences with no previous historical precedent.
Even a cursory glance at the technological history of performance on and off the stage,
however, reveals a story strangely similar to our present one. From the transfer of electric
light into the theater, the introduction of optical apparatuses like the video camera that
shattered the purity of the live event or wraparound, transmutating image and sound
environments, this story is populated with the same utopian hopes as that of our forebears,
namely, that technological invention could be harnessed to create unparalleled aesthetic,

Introduction

xxi
perceptual, and ontological experiences. What these histories so fundamentally reveal is
that the performing arts are really an unstable mixture amalgamating light, space, sound,
image, bodies, architecture, materials, machines, code, and a perceiving public into unique
spatiotemporal events.
“Technology,” writes performance studies scholar Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “is
integral to the history of performance” (2002, 48). Undeniably, we see this integration
materialized in the endless metaphors used to describe the stage itself: mechanism, clock-
work, construction, system, apparatus, and even computer. Whether through the inven-
tion of perspective and its subsequent transfer to the stage, the assimilation of newsreel
films into the theatrical mise-en-scène in the Russia of the 1920s or the deployment of
sensing systems to turn dance and even architecture into a play between humans and
electronics, the history of performance has always been caught up in our machine
fascinations.
As a microcosm of the world, technology already revealed itself on the fifth century
Athenian stage as machinae intimately bound up with the fate of human beings. Like an
omniscient god, the cranelike deus ex machina emerged in the final moments of Greek
tragedy to solve the moral quandaries created by human mistakes.3 Using the civic plat-
form of the stage to showcase the sociopolitical world of Athenian society, the Hellenic
theater already plays out dramas between human and machine—technology’s transcendent
embodiment as the gods and, simultaneously, its immanent4 demonstration of the con-
structed mechanisms of the human world.
Likewise, the origin of the word “theater,” the Greek word theatron, which translates
as the place of seeing, was both a physical and perceptual space ordered by technology: an
architectural zone where the spectator sat to watch the drama unfold, and a perceptual
one that mediated the visual and acoustic relationship between the worlds of stage and
audience. In other words, technology in the performance arts reveals itself not only in the
machines that descend from the heavens by their own will, but also in how—through
craft, skill, construction, or making (what the Greeks called techne)—it orders the world
(logos).
But technology is not rooted in just the Western stage. Although it does not explicitly
feature discussions of machinae, the Natyasastra (the science of dramaturgy), the great
poetics of Indian music, dance, and drama written somewhere between 200 BCE and 200
ACE, spans thirty-six detailed chapters in laying out the mechanics of Indian performance
forms, much like a software manual.5 Making no distinction between the performing and
visual arts, the Natyasastra articulates the vast systems that give life to Sanskrit perfor-
mance traditions, from vocabularies of gesture (mudras) and the construction of stage
architecture to the analysis of melodies (raga) and rhythmic cycles (tala) and the composi-
tion of the aesthetic theory of rasa: rules for the generation of affect between performer
and spectator. Similar to the spatial theatron, the literary Natyasastra is also composed of
ordering systems; technologies in the form of plans, schemas, descriptions, and rules for

Introduction

xxii
the construction of performance events that bring the spiritual universe of the gods to life
through the fragile techne of humans.
Our focus on the technological in performance does not demonstrate just how we order
the world through artifice, however, but how such artifice orders us. As Kirschenblatt-
Gimblett claims that technology is integral to the history of performance, she also states
“performance is integral to the history of technology” (2002, 49). Devices, machines, and
tools may perform in terms of their efficiency or benchmarks, but they also perform by
expressing things through material transformations that do things to the world.6 It makes
sense that we can put the artifice of technology on the stage to show the workings of the
world and that humans can act out or present something in front of a spectator surrounded
by that technology, but how can machines and substances, materials, and spaces perform,
especially when they have no consciousness or intention? Why should we grant the human
right of performance to inanimate things, especially ones that we have created? How can
we confuse artistic performances with the performances of machines, not only in terms of
their function or efficiency, but also through the attribution to them of embodied
expression?7
If we are then to rigorously examine how technology transforms performative practices,
we might start with the word “performance.” To arrive at a cogent definition, however,
is not going to be a trivial task, and it will be slow going. In fact, we are only following
in the footsteps of countless others who have already created volumes dedicated to uncov-
ering performance’s fluctuating meaning.8 In his Performative Science and Beyond: Involving
the Process in Research, the physicist Hans Diebner states quite correctly that “due to many
different approaches and divergent developments, the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performa-
tivity’ lack conceptual clarity . . . deriving from various artistic fields and from linguistic,
sociological and philosophical discourses, which are rooted in the second half of the twen-
tieth century” (2005, 21).
Even if it may be conceptually unclear, as Diebner states, I want to argue that there
are certain characteristics of performance that distinguish it from other forms of knowl-
edge making, namely: (1) an interest in enaction or doing, (2) real-time, dynamic processes
over static objects or representations, (3) engagement with the temporal moment of the
present, (4) embodiment and materiality, (5) immanent experience, (6) the effect of both
human and nonhuman presence, and (7) transmutation and reconstitution. To make sense
of this story, therefore, it is first necessary to broaden our inquiry and examine a number
of different theoretical and disciplinary registers in order to provide some lenses for under-
standing what takes place in the technological transformation of artistic performances.

Performance in the Arts and Beyond: Culture, Speech, Material

In its commonly understood artistic context, the label performance was a strategy used to
describe actions, happenings, and time-based events emerging out of the visual arts during

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the 1950s through the 1980s. Predominantly but not exclusively in North America,
Europe, Japan, and Latin America, artists and movements as varied as Yves Klein, Fluxus,
the Japanese Gutai (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai or Collective for Concrete Art) group, and Laurie
Anderson, among others, invaded or bypassed the white-walled gallery with temporal and
body-based practices, “dematerializing” the art object.9 As described in critic Rose Lee
Goldberg’s 1976 landmark study Performance Art: From Futurism to Present, which located
performance’s origin in the early-twentieth-century Western European avant-garde of the
Futurists, Constructivists, and Dadaists, performance art practices aimed above all to
distance themselves both from the static objects of the visual arts and the dramatic, text-
based theater of the stage (Goldberg [1976] 1988).
The contamination of the sanctified, self-sufficient art object by way of the flux of
temporality, the artist’s body, and the viewer’s unstable perception, was not met with
universal enthusiasm, however, particularly from art historical critics like Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried, who already claimed that static minimalist art and the
encroaching world of performance represented a creeping “theatricality” that would
destroy the essence of the individual arts. In what Fried saw as a movement away from
the artwork as an independent unity and toward its eventual dissolution in the hands of
viewers—or worse, participants—the survival of the visual arts would depend in part, as
he notoriously wrote in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” on their “ability to defeat
theater” (1967, 21).
The concept of performance received a more radical reconceptualization in the 1970s.
In what is now known as the performative turn in anthropology and sociology, scholars such
as the cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, theater director and
theorist Richard Schechner, and later, performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood
and the sociologist Erving Goffman, attempted to wrestle performance away from its
purely artistic-bound connotations. As early as 1973, Schechner already called for using
the theories and methods of the social sciences to understand the nature of performance,
and not only the kind occupying the traditional stage environment or the avant-garde of
the art world. Schechner wrote:

I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts and the creation of
performance theory is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement
will be more iconographic than iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on
sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the
political sense of the late sixties but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots. (1973,
4; emphasis added)

Turning its focus onto the kinds of events studied by ethnographers, anthropologists,
and sociologists, such as rituals, festivals, games, play, sports, interaction rituals, and
performances within quotidian life like social work or gang violence, performance theory

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xxiv
sought to “combine aspects of the scientific method with some of the traditionally intui-
tive methods of the arts,” analyzing what Dwight Conquergood later described as “the
fabricated, invented, imagined and constructed nature of human realities” (1989, 83).
Harnessing Victor Turner’s work in social drama (Turner 1974), Johan Huizinga’s (Huiz-
inga 1950) and Roger Caillois’s notions of play (Caillois 1961), Goffman’s studies of
framing and co-present interaction (Goffman 1959, 1963), and Ray Birdwhistell’s theories
of kinesics and gestural communication (Birdwhistell 1970) among others, the performa-
tive turn not only took performance as the subject of research but also, more radically,
the method by which research would be conducted. Performance as method thus aimed
to challenge traditional understanding that saw the transmission of knowledge
strictly through textual form and described with a critical, objective distance “from
above,” instead focusing on the tacit, nonverbal, embodied, and immanent act of doing
research; particularly, ethnographic research—what Conquergood eloquently described
as the difference between “knowing that” or “knowing about” versus “knowing how”
(2002, 312).
The emphasis on performance as an act or doing also finds its roots in linguistics, and
in particular the speech act theories of the British linguist John L. Austin. In his 1955
Harvard lecture entitled “How to Do Things With Words,” Austin defined what he called
a performative or performatory as an expression or utterance that does not just describe or
represent an action in language but actually performs or activates something. Whereas
normal statements in speech or what Austin labeled “constatives” are considered to be
either true or false, performative utterances, such as saying “I do” in a marriage ceremony or
“I christen thee” when inaugurating the maiden voyage of a ship, are words that “are
doing something . . . rather than reporting something” ([1955] 1975, 12–13). “The
issuing of the utterance,” Austin wrote, “is the performing of an action” (6). Austin’s
“questioning [of] an age-old assumption in philosophy—the assumption that to say
something . . . is always and simply to state something,” suggests that language does not
just represent statements but is an inherently material practice in the way it can change
the course of an event in the world or create a new one (12).
After Austin’s student John R. Searle broadened the discussion to include all speech
acts as performatives, the label performativity reemerged with a vengeance in cultural
studies, most notably in the work of philosopher and cultural theorist Judith Butler.
Butler’s 1990 work Gender Trouble interpolates multiple meanings of performativity,
coalescing them into a critical exploration of how the gendered female/male subject comes
to be. In suggesting that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from
which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time,” Butler’s
concept is critical of the notion that one has a fixed gendered identity (1988, 519). Gender
is performative not through the metaphor of playing an imaginary role as Goffman used
the term, but as an act, a temporal constitution of identity or event that is not yet given
in the world. Although at times the theatrical and linguistic meanings blur, Butler’s use

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of Austin’s word “performativity” over “performance” advocates the active creation of a
reality “that is, in some sense new, a modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated
into the pre-existing categories that regulate gender reality” (527). Through Butler, the
notion that the materiality of the human body and its gendering is not ontologically
pregiven as a fixed essence in a fixed human subject, but instead performatively produced
in and over time, has had strong repercussions for the productive understanding of power
relations and human subject formation than goes beyond Austin’s use of the word as a
linguistic turn of phrase.
Spanning a wide range of seemingly disconnected disciplines, what is at stake in all of
these accounts is how performance as a mode of being in the world radically differs from
representational forms of knowledge. In general, representation assumes a split between the
representation, whether an image on the canvas or in the brain, a description in text or a
line of code, and a thing or world to be represented—a referent. Variously translated as
“imitation” or “mimicry,” Aristotle’s use of the term mimesis in the Poetics already suggests
that the thing or act on the theatrical stage stands in for or represents someone that is
not present but that we nevertheless should identify with through an act of empathy
(1967, 17–18).
Within a stage context, representation is hotly contested. The French actor and theater
theorist Antonin Artaud railed against the concept that the stage was a place of stand-ins
and imitators. By harnessing the means of spectacle, of light, space, sound, gesture, and
forsaking the dominance of text, the theater would no longer copy life but instead, through
the vibratory effect of its media, emerge as life itself, in all of its unstable, shifting
materiality.10
But there is another more fine-grained notion of representation that goes beyond imita-
tion and yet still manages to address the same problematic. In the context of the cognitive
and computational sciences, the word “representation” denotes a correspondence between a
mental image or symbol (a representation) in the brain or machine and an object or world
that the symbol corresponds to. What this definition assumes first of all is that the object
outside the brain is fixed and that the role of cognition is to recover the representation, as
it exists a priori, that is, before experience. In other words, what representationalist forms
of knowledge suggest is that a stable reality exists independent of the knower’s actions,
and that this reality can be captured and described purely through the representation,
whether a set of abstract symbols manipulated by the brain, descriptions in text or code,
or more generally, culture itself.
In contrast, what performance as method/worldview suggests is that there is not a
reality pregiven before one’s experience but rather that the world is enacted or actively
performed anew. The word “enaction” here has a specific meaning, derived from psycholo-
gist Jerome Bruner and later, the work of Franciso Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan
Thompson.11 Enaction, in Varela’s sense, describes the performance or action of “bringing
forth of a world” based on the fact that we are a sensorimotor-based embodied agent in

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which meaning emerges through a continually historical process of “active living.” We
bring about this world through a history of structural coupling between us and the dynami-
cal environment, “not as a representation system, but as constrained imagination (which
the name enaction evokes)” (Cohen and Varela 2000).
Although Varela’s theory of enaction focuses on the embodied and dynamic interactions
between the neural–cognitive system of an organism and its environment, there is never-
theless a curious resonance to the connotations of performance found in cultural theory.
If representational accounts privilege a demarcation between subject and object or self
and world, performative ones imply a world in which subjects and objects have not yet
come into being and, even if materialized, are always in a constant state of flux and trans-
formation that is unstable and difficult to repeat.12 “The move towards performative
alternatives to representationalism,” as Karen Barad writes, “shifts the focus from ques-
tions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or
culture) to matters of practices/doings/actions” (2003, 802). Like Butler’s use of the word,
which proposes an active practice, a doing that constructs gender, “performative” implies
that the world emerges over time, continually transformed through our history of interac-
tions with it.

Performative Science: The Battle of Agencies

Given its important contributions, performance studies has largely been a human-centered
affair, remaining, with a few exceptions, conspicuously silent on issues of machines, tech-
nologies, objects, and matter, and increasingly proving inadequate for wrestling with the
complex human–machine relationships that mark not only contemporary artistic practices
but also scientific ones within technoculture.13 In fact, in an ironic twist of fate to
Schechner’s original declaration that the arts should integrate more social science methods,
the arena of STS (Science and Technology Studies or Science Technology and Society) has
taken up his call in an inverse way, appropriating performance for the sciences while
leaving the arts behind.
The areas researched by STS are certainly not new. For the past twenty-five years, its
adherents have been trying to understand the complex entanglements among natural,
social, technological, and corporeal forces that help shape the world. A mixture between
the naturally given and the culturally constructed, scientific knowledge has become an
object of study by those seeking to understand, as sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina argues,
“the strategies and policies of knowing that are not codified in textbooks but do inform
expert practice” (1999, 2).
Proliferating a language focused on laboratories as the site where science is created and
practiced while examining the bizarre imbroglios, as the French anthropologist Bruno
Latour anoints them, of “human and nonhuman collectives,” those working in STS have
effectively displaced humans as the sole producers of knowledge, the expressers of agency,

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or the only performers worthy of study in scientific dramas.14 Instead, STS explores the
ways the nonhuman, things like bacteria, yeasts, scallops, bubble chambers, rarified tech-
nological instruments, and cultural artifacts, act and how competing materialities of
humans and things or matter itself might be reconciled.
What is more revealing in the STS landscape is how often the word “performance”
appears, used to describe the actions of such entities like lactic acids, failed utopian trans-
portation systems, or piezoelectric crystals that transcend the neat social/natural binaries
that we are wont to divide them up into.15 Part of this new performative turn is an attempt
to understand the role that material practice plays in scientific creation: how things are
done rather than how they are described, once again marking out the territory between
representational versus performative knowledge. For example, in numerous articles,
sociologist of science Michel Callon discusses the performative properties of economics,
arguing that economics, like any social scientific discipline, partially engages in the
constitution of the reality that it attempts to describe; that any discourse acts or performs
on the object of its discourse and changes it.16
Performance is even more explicit is the work of Bruno Latour. In his anthropologically
oriented ethnographies of laboratory practices, Latour seeks a symmetrical relationship
between humans and nonhumans in a move away from the earlier school of the Sociology
of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) that emerged in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh.17
Unlike SSK’s human-centered focus on scientific construction, Latour seeks to give an
equally important performative role to the nonhuman.
In Latour, Woolgar, and Salk’s 1986 milestone study of the Salk Institute Laboratory
Life, for example, the authors assert that the practice of science is not to provide facts or
representations about nature but rather to perform it. “Interpretations do not inform as
much as they perform” (Latour, Woolgar and Salk 1986, 285). Arguing that the animism
of nonhuman systems has been patently ignored by social theories of knowledge that
conveniently attempt to separate nature and culture, Latour’s notion of performance stems
from his development along with fellow sociologists Callon and John Law of what has
been termed the sociology of translation but more commonly, and perhaps erroneously, as
Actor-Network Theory (ANT).
In order to cope with the monsters produced by contemporary technoscientific society,
the weird jumbling of disciplines, ideas, instruments, and formations ranging from geneti-
cally modified foods to ozone holes, digital expert systems, and RFID-tagged animals that
are simultaneously social, technical, cultural, and natural, Latour, Law, and Callon invent
what they label actor-networks. In this network model, the agency of actants (rather than
just human actors) is spread out among multiple associations (the network), connected to
each other in a skein of relations and transforming each other through such relations
(Latour 2007).
Studying “how a given element becomes strategic through the number of connections
it commands and how does it lose its importance when losing its connections,” ANT as

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xxviii
a method examines the co-constitutive processes by which actants come to perform in
relationship with each other within technoscientific practices—“the attribution of human,
unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman, characteristics; the distribution of properties among
these entities; the connections established between them; the circulation entailed by these
attributions, distributions, and connections; the transformation of those attributions,
distributions, and connections, of the many elements that circulate and of the few ways
through which they are sent” (Latour 2005).18
In another vein, sociologist of science Andrew Pickering also engages with the perfor-
mative modes of science. For Pickering, performance is a method that breaks with the
representational modes of sciences—the concept that knowledge can be encoded only in
the minds of scientists or in the documents, theories, papers, texts, or other forms of
inscription they produce to disseminate knowledge. Rather, the “performative image” of
science is of “a field of powers, capacities and performances, situated in machinic captures
of material agency” (Pickering 1995, 7).
As demonstrated by the invention and deployment of instruments, devices and
machines, the material aspects of scientific practice come to the fore; practices arising from
the intertwining of human and nonhuman forces (like the weather) or what Pickering
calls the dance of agency. Pickering’s dance of agency, however, is not fixed in time but
depends on what he calls “temporal emergence.” Particular performances of agency arise
only in the process of “doing science”: the processes of building instruments, watching
those instruments resist and fail, readjusting or re-accommodating to the performances
of the instrument, running the experiment again, and so on. “Scientists,” writes Pickering,
“are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture with
machines . . . reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle” (1995, 21).
Despite the fact that their ideas go far beyond performance studies’ human-centered
approach, the theorizing by Callon, Law, Latour, and Pickering about nonhuman, material
agency has come under fire by others working in the field, most notably in the work of
physicist and feminist cultural theorist Karen Barad. Interested in what she labels “a
post-human performativity for matter,” Barad asks similar questions as the Actor Network
theorists, such as “Why did language become to be more trusted than matter?” and “Why
are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is passive
and immutable?” But she is also highly critical of the political emptying out of perfor-
mativity from theorists like Pickering, in which “questions of meaning, intelligibility,
significance, identity formation, and power,” are ignored (Barad 2003, 807).19
Influenced by Butler’s politically charged notion of gender performativity as well as
physicist Niels Bohr’s philosophical work on quantum mechanics, Barad proposes a
replacement of the atomistic notion of nonhuman “things in themselves” with what she
terms agential realism. Things in and of themselves that maintain their own separate
identities continually place us back into the territory of representation, precisely because
they are imagined to exist as bounded entities that can be described and represented in

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xxix
language. In her reading of Bohr, things in the world do not have immutable boundaries,
but rather are continuously reconfigured based on cultural, political, and material con-
straints and relations (Barad 2006).
According to Barad, if we are going to ascribe agency to nonhuman things we must
not see agency as a property of things as ANT and Pickering’s material dance do but as
a performance in and of itself, much like Butler depicts the performance of gender. As an
“ongoing reconfiguration of the world,” writes Barad, “agency is a matter of intra-acting:
it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (1999, 7). The enact-
ments of human, nonhuman, or hybrids such as Donna Haraway’s cyborg and simian
entities shape their constantly emerging and transforming agencies rather than treating
them as a priori subjects or objects.
Whereas the performances described in the science studies landscape emphasize the
actions done within human–machine entanglements, the performative science described by
Hans Diebner has more in common with one of performance studies’ central, albeit more
anthropocentric, tenets: an emphasis on the “emergent, temporal, contingent, provisional,
indeterminate, dynamic, destabilizing” (Conquergood 1989, 83).
Diebner’s notion of performance is intimately bound up with his research into complex
dynamical systems whose behavior becomes unstable over longer time evolutions. Just as
performance is a time-based, nonrepeatable (in the sense of the exact same situation)
practice, so too is the behavior of fluid flow dynamics or cognitive systems that defy
the scientific cornerstone of exact reproducibility due to their continual variance over
time. The stability of a fixed research object suggesting an objective observer from a
distance, something clearly challenged by both performance studies and STS paradigms,
breaks down as the researcher becomes actively involved in the “moment in which the
action is taking place”; a moment not altogether controllable or repeatable (Diebner
2005, 21).
Furthermore, the scientist working with such complex phenomena is actively manipu-
lating the parameters of the various mathematical and computational models she is using
and thus, engaging, as Callon also describes it, in a performance with the very systems
being studied. Performative science, for Diebner, is thus articulated as “an uncircumvent-
able and constituent element of concrete practical investigations,” which involves not only
the performances of systems under investigation but also a general strategy in creating
public interfaces between science and art (2005, 25).

The Cut

Despite the different connotations of performance in the technosocio-scientific context,

the move toward agencies, collectives, and networks articulates a common thread: that
humans, things, and matter are not fixed but always in a process of change and becoming.
In contrast to stable systems with variables that can be measured and observed from

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without, culture is dynamic, “transacted through performance,” or what Conquergood
aptly labeled the shift from mimesis to kinesis (Conquergood 1989, 83). Variously described
as posthumanist, what so many of these nonhuman performances hinge on are hylozoic
tendencies, the sense that all matter is animate, that lie beyond our human experience,
whether embodied in rocks, trees, microbes, or digital computers.20
This animism of the nonhuman must at first seem altogether strange, but as Latour
continually reminds us, the cuts between the inanimate and the animate are the results
of modernity’s artificially constructed great divide between nature and culture. In contrast,
premodern societies mix everything up: signs and things, the social and the natural and
the human and nonhuman. Such concepts arise not only from those investigating socio-
technical phenomena. In his controversial work The Spell of the Sensuous (1997), the ecolo-
gist and magician David Abram discusses how shamans and sorcerers in traditional
cultures act as intermediaries between humans and the larger community of beings, ensur-
ing that the relationship is “balanced and reciprocal.” “Along with the humans, the mul-
tiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and
the myriad animals . . . that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds
and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms—
forests, rivers, caves, mountains—that lend their specific character to the surrounding
earth” (Abram 1997, 10).
In fact, Abram details an entire list of Indonesian, Native American, First
Nations, and Aboriginal cultures who make no cut between the animism of the human
and the world (Abram 1997, 69). According to anthropologist Richard Nelson, vast
spiritual power is imbued upon the natural landscape surrounding the Koyukon of
northwestern interior Alaska such that an unspoken code of morality toward nature exists.
The forest “watches like a sea of eyes,” and demands respect while the “interpenetration
of human and nonhuman utterances” in the Koyukon language act as an embodiment
of a distant time when common languages were shared between humans and
animals (147).
Likewise, in the Alcheringa or Alchera (loosely translated as “Dreaming”) creation story,
indigenous Australians describe the seamlessness that connects the inner human world
with the landscape; a space in which there is no distinction between human, plant, and
animal. More attuned to our own neurotic culture of Western modernism, even Sigmund
Freud in The Uncanny (1920) addressed debates around how uncanny, strange or even
dread-like feelings are unleashed: “Intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether some-
thing is animate or inanimate, and when the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the
living” ([1920] 2003, 140–141). Whether these anthropological accounts or Latour’s
celebration of premodernism serve to reify the exoticism of non-Western culture to our
technocratic West is another question beyond the scope here. What these accounts do
convey, however, is the possibility of imagining a world without cuts between living
phenomena and matter.

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 Artistic Performances with Humans and Nonhumans

With anthropologists exploring the performances of rocks and birds and scientists finding
agency in scallops, missile systems, and particle accelerators, I want to return to the central
question of this book: how have technical objects or beings historically come to have been
entangled with artistic performance practices? How can we understand the construction
of artistic processes and events in which the human may no longer be the sole locus
of enactment but performs in tandem with other kinds of beings: a tangle of circuits,
an array of sensors, shape-changing materials, or a “space thundering with images and
crammed with sounds” (Artaud 1958, 87)?
Consequently, artistic performances that integrate technical systems into their intended
strategies of artifice are as hybrid as Latour’s natural–cultural imbroglios, fusing multiple
concepts of performativity simultaneously: as real-time actions played out in front of a
spectator alongside the agency of machines trying to equally effect changes in the material
conditions of the world. Watching what the twentieth-century playwright and director
Bertolt Brecht called the apparatus of the stage from a distance, one in which things
mechanically go up and down in the fly space of a theater or rotate on a turntable may be
easy enough, but what are we to say about the Gordian territories that jumble together
performers and spectators, spectators and scenographic environments, computers and
actors, theater and urban space, architecture and machine, the research lab and the tem-
porary festival?
Still, Latour’s call for a symmetrical anthropology that gives things their due lands us
in a dualistic framework between the human and the not. This may be forgiven when
dealing with scientific practices that utilize nonhuman forces, but it is a much trickier
territory when dealing with the all-too-human arena of performance, as such a split gives
a convenient locus to theorists for where or where not to locate agency.21 Instead, my
appropriation of the term entangled from its anthropological connotations suggests that
human and technical beings and processes are so intimately bound up in a conglomeration
of relations that it makes it difficult, if not impossible to tease out separate essences for
each.22 When the cultural anthropologist David Howes writes that objects should be seen
as bundles of sensory properties and interconnected experiences that activate the human
senses in complex and culturally varied ways, he is also invoking a space that refuses to
make a demarcation between inanimate technology and human interpreter (2006,
114–115).
Another useful formulation closer to our context is the notion of machinic as articulated
by the late French psychotherapist Félix Guattari: “Common usage suggests that we speak
of the machine as a subset of technology. We should, however, consider the problematic
of technology as dependant on machines and not the inverse” (1995, 33). Critical of both
mechanist (the machine is a construction of parts) as well as vitalist/anthropomorphic (the
machine is a living being) tendencies, Guttari’s notion of the machine is not simply a

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technical device but a bundle of heterogeneous forces perpetually criss-crossing and trans-
forming each other in a constant state of becoming.
A panoply of “materials and energies,” “semiotic or algorithmic” components (like
calculations, programs or equations), and “individual or collective representations and
information,” Guattari’s machinic entangles “social bodies, industrial complexes, psycho-
logical or cultural formations, such as the complex of desires, habits and incentives that
create particular forms of collective behavior in groups of individuals, or the aggregation
of materials, instruments, human individuals, lines of communication, rules and conven-
tions that together constitute a company or institution” (Broeckmann 1999).
Furthermore, as a “heterogeneous assemblage of components” that are co-constitutive
with each other, the machine is also productive, specifically by way of its power to enunci-
ate—to make “statements” through forces. “For each type of machine,” wrote Guattari in
his last work, Chaosmosis, “we will pose a question, not about its vital autonomy—it’s not
an animal—but about its singular power of enunciation” (1995, 34). Guattari’s invention
and use of terms like collective assemblages and collective enunciations suggest that the machine
is unique precisely because it has such enunciative power, not only in its ability to speak
through the medium of language, but through all kinds of materials of signifying expres-
sion. “Just as social machines can be grouped under the general title of Collective Equip-
ment, technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of
subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility,
affects and unconscious fantasms” (4). Guattari’s machine is, in fact, the apparatus that
has this enunciative power—the ability to engender new forms of subjectivity and experi-
ence, making marks in and on the world.
If one of the hallmarks of performance is its material embodiment in the world, whether
that body is defined by human form, a sound that rattles the chest, or a machine trying
to decode the nuance of a choreographed gesture, then why should we make a cut between
ourselves and the technologies we design to create sheer artifice and, at the same time, a
world that is not represented but lived? What would it mean to examine a history of
artistic performance practices using technologies as machinic performances in the spirit
that Guattari used the term: as an immanent, collective entanglement of material enun-
ciations that operate on, shape, and transform the world in real time?

Entanglements

The theories of performance and performativity all too briefly surveyed here nevertheless
provide a fruitful set of conceptual frameworks for comprehending the history of practices
that makes up this book. Although the work presented does not advocate for a reading
of such practices through a single theoretical frame (e.g., “Actor Network” or agential
realism), what the exploration of the performative turn in STS gives is more nuanced ways
of understanding machinic performance beyond the tired dichotomies of digital versus

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analog, real versus virtual, or networked versus local. In this way, this book reverses
Schechner’s original dictum to bring the tools of social science to analyze the arts and
instead employs concepts from philosophy and technocultural studies to understand how
technology has been used in experimental artistic practices of performance that take place
on the stage as well as in clubs, stadiums, festivals, research laboratories, and urban
space.
Contrary to the idea that performance has so many significations that the use of the
word becomes meaningless, I want to set out specific contexts by which to view machinic
entanglements. First, although the work here spans diverse areas such as architecture,
electronic music, theater, and urban interventions, the common thread that links such a
polyphony of practices together is their physical, real-time situatedness involving collec-
tive, co-present spectating, witnessing, and/or participation within the framework of a
spatiotemporal event.23
Emerging from learning theory and anthropological studies of human-machine interac-
tion, the term situated denotes actions, whether originating in human beings, machines,
or materials, that occur in a concrete real-world context at a particular time and place
versus an anytime, anyplace simulation, such as what takes place in online environments.
In what anthropologist Lucy Suchman almost twenty years ago termed situated action, situ-
ation suggests “simply actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances”
(1987, viii). “The coherence of situated action is tied in essential ways not to individual
predispositions or conventional rules but to local interactions contingent on the actor’s
particular circumstances” (27–28).
In contrast to many existing studies of performance and digital technologies, I thus
will eschew a focus on such forms as MOOs, MUDs, CD-ROMs, solo-based computer
gaming, purely Internet-based performances, online meta-verses and virtual communities
such as Second Life, and similar examples of what has been branded with the monikers
of digital performance, “cyber performance,” or “cyber theater.”24
Furthermore, despite such a technocultural phenomenon as screen-based computer
games, there is already a growing body of existing and forthcoming literature that
focuses on the dramatic aspects of this work.25 With regard to gaming, I wish rather to
explore situated models emerging in the form of flash mobs or location-based media
that strategically aim for an embedding of performances into the urban context, thus
transforming the city into a temporarily demarcated event space. If the focus on the physi-
cally situated event might thus appear at first to be rather restricted, I hope to compensate
by broadening the sites of performances focused upon from the theater and the concert
hall, to the academic research laboratory, the club, temporary festivals, the interior of the
human body, the exterior skins of buildings, public spaces, urban streets, and even the
desert.
Second, existing works that deal in particular with technology and stage-based perfor-
mances principally understand technology as media technology, and mainly, image-based

Introduction

xxxiv
projected media.26 This has the effect of quickly bringing us back to well-trodden post-
modern oppositions between live versus mediated or presence versus absence.27 Conse-
quently, the discourse invoked becomes the same (mainly) ocular-centered one of image
representation, thus ignoring other senses like touch, hearing, taste, or smell. I propose
to use the word “technology” in a broader and more critical sense. Although one facet of
classical philosophy of technology has come to understand it as a constructed tool, object,
or—better yet—process that participates, through human action, in either unmasking
(Karl Jaspers) or revealing/framing (Martin Heidegger) the world, I want to use technology
in the spirit of what Latour calls mediation.28
Technologies are not simply inert or neutral artifacts that are, as Heidegger termed it,
ready to hand: waiting for human presence to activate them and thus extend human action
into the world, revealing and framing it in a particular manner. Instead, technologies are
similar to Guattari’s machine, constructing and ordering social-cultural-political rela-
tions.29 Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations
and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in
which all are deeply entangled. “Techniques are . . . not means,” declares Latour, “but
mediators, means, and ends at the same time; and that is why they bear upon the
social fabric” (1999, 197). In this spirit, then, I will not focus on what philosopher of
technology Andrew Feenberg has called “the hermeneutic understanding of technology”
(2000) or what technology means, but rather explore what it does, how it does it, and what
the repercussions are across the artistic practices that utilize it. More to the point, the
question I ask is how technology has mediated and scrambled meanings and categories
among artists, events, and spectators, and in what specific contexts it has done these
things.
Third, one could argue that any performance practice that utilizes some kind of con-
structed instrument or procedure deserves to be discussed in the pages that follow. For
the most banal example, consider the fact that most forms of modern theatrical perfor-
mance involve the use of woodshop tools designed to cut materials for scenery or the
employment of computer-controlled lighting and sound equipment in works that are not
in the least interested in thematizing or embedding issues of technoculture into their
making. Of course, though this is true, it would also require many more volumes than I
can write. In order to restrict the focus, therefore, I narrow in on performance practices
that consciously and intentionally entangle technologies so that they are inseparable from
the form and operation of the work.
Fourth, the long history of technological entanglement with performance practice has
been ignored or downplayed not only in theater and dance histories—even ones purport-
ing to study such issues as the death of character (Fuchs 1996) or post dramaturgy (Lehmann
2006)—but also in the recent surge of writing about the new media.30 Upon mentioning
the fusion of performance and technology, one is immediately directed to Brenda Laurel’s
much-lauded work 1991 work Computers as Theatre, which focuses on the dramatization

Introduction

xxxv
of narrative models of computer interaction anchored in Aristotle’s Poetics (1967) but says
little about the issues of performance as an embodied practice.31 In fact, interestingly
enough, Computers as Theatre uses the mimetic, representational idea of theater as its prime
model and Aristotle as its ironic father, leaving the antirepresentationalist stance of many
performance artists working with machine systems in the twentieth century behind in
the dust.32
Moreover, many analyses of technology with stage practices set machines aside as so
much dead matter or, to bring up the tool model again, like a pencil wielded in the genius
artist’s hands. If writers do get down to the nitty-gritty details of describing techniques,
they are usually mystified or misunderstood, something that is mostly overlooked in aes-
thetic theory and criticism but would never be accepted in the detailed studies of scientific
laboratory practices conducted by ethnographers of science and technology. Besides not
giving a voice to Latour’s fabled nonhumans, such technical sloppiness is all the more
problematic in the fact that creators working on developing and/or co-opting techniques
in the construction of performances do so in sophisticated and nuanced ways and are quite
aware of how the underlying technological specificity of tools and processes can be utilized
to larger effect.
Finally, my approach does not aim to reinforce teleological myths of progress or nar-
ratives of influence, for example, the tendency to argue that the fantasies of earlier move-
ments like Futurism or Constructivism have finally reached their apotheosis in our
superior hardware and software of the twenty-first century. Each episteme is certainly
influenced by past ones in refashioning its techne, but this tendency is perhaps more due
to our need to find continuity within what we experience as a history of ruptures and
violent breaks with the past that we feel technology imparts on us. I want here to inves-
tigate how certain practices that attempted to materialize technological ideas arose due
to their specific contexts. Whether such ideas were realized purely in their (imagined)
material form is irrelevant. The important point is that such concepts could already be
imagined through the social-technical-cultural-economic networks of their time.

Structure and Organization

Given the ground rules just outlined, I can now describe the general structure of what
lies ahead. Chapters 1 and 2 set out a detailed basis for examining the dynamization of
theatrical and architectural space and the transformation of stage environments into new
kinds of spatiomechanical, electrotechnical apparatuses. Chapter 1, “Space 1: Scene/
Machine (1876–1933),” surveys the machine-age influence on the practice of defining
theatrical-scenographic space, starting with composer Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in
Bayreuth, Germany, in 1876. As a harbinger for the directions that theatrical scenography
would take over the twentieth century, Wagner utilized stage technology to create a
degree of unprecedented control over the perceptual experience of his spectators. I then

Introduction

xxxvi
pursue this machine transformation of scenography in the classical pre–World War II
European performance avant-garde from the early Italian and Russian Futurists and
Russian Constructivists to Weimar Germany and the Bauhaus, the Swiss and French
schools of Dada, and the work of Antonin Artaud.
Chapter 2, “Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–),” covers the period running roughly
from 1950 to the present, beginning with the work of Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda
in the mid 1950s. The chapter continues with analysis of the increased role that electronic,
audiovisual practices played in non-text-based theatrical work in the 1960s through the
1990s, from what theater critic Bonnie Marranca famously labeled the Theater of Images
to the new formalist aesthetics of media generation artists from New York, the West
Coast of the United States, Europe, Canada, and Japan. Chapter 2 concludes with a dis-
cussion of how contemporary architects brought with them to the stage not only new
materials and construction technologies in the last decades of the twentieth century,
marking a return to the machine aesthetic, but also new impulses originating from archi-
tectural discourse.
Taking chapters 1 and 2 as its starting point, chapter 3, “Performative Architectures,”
focuses on the visionary fantasies of creating ephemeral, transformative, and kinetic
architecture. Specifically, I argue that architecture must be seriously taken into account
due to its ongoing fascination with movement, event, duration, action, and material
transformation. The chapter is divided into three separate conceptual threads (kinetic
architecture, event, and screen/scene). The first thread considers the continued desire
for machine architectures: dynamic, kinetic structures that would liberate construction
from its monumentality and stasis. The second thread discusses architectural experiments
using strategies arising in the sociopolitical volatility of the 1960s and 1970s that
turned away from construction and toward ephemeral actions. The final thread ponders
the twenty-first-century move toward mediatechtures, architectures of “pixels and light”
(Tschumi) that transform the entire surface of buildings into huge media displays,
and ends with an analysis of the tension between architecture as embodied material
(scene) and digital representation (screen) contained in the paradigm of the urban
screenscape.
Chapter 4, “The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen,” investi-
gates the ways in which televisual and projected media have influenced the perception of
the physical site of performance in stage based as well as the visual and media arts. The
televisual discussion surveys the impact of television, both as a sociocultural phenomenon
as well as a distinct sculptural object, moving between performance practices in the visual
arts world to the video monitor’s use in theater, opera, and live spectacle. The second
section focuses on the architectonic use of film and large-scale projection technologies in
stage performance that challenged the live performer’s position as the center of the stage
universe, forging him into one element among many in a much larger mediated space.
Chapter 4 ends with the territory of audiovisual performance, shifting the locus of

Introduction

xxxvii
performance away from the stage and toward the club, the international exposition, and
the media festival and replacing the human performer on stage mostly or entirely by the
screen surface.
Chapter 5, “Sound,” discusses the impact of technologies in the areas of music and
sound, particularly how new instruments and processes changed the experience of musical
performers and audiences, shifting the concert hall from a passive arena of listening to an
interactive zone of improvisation between sound-making technical apparatuses and their
players. Beginning with the appearance of electromechanical instruments like the Tele-
harmonium and the theremin in the 1920s, it continues with the application of studio-
based electronic technologies to live musical performance in the work of European and
American composers in the 1960s, exploring indeterminacy, music-theater genres that
expanded the concert hall, and finally, real-time computer-based interaction. In particular,
I analyze the early impact that microcomputers had on live musical improvisation and
collective musical composition, moving into the increasing interest in software environ-
ments as musical instruments in the 1980s and then surveying more recent digital genres
like laptop- and network-based music. The chapter concludes by examining gesture-based
music performance that attempts to augment bodily-based instrumental practices with
digital tools.
Chapter 6, “Bodies,” appraises the long history of technology’s influence in dance,
theater, and body-based performance art practices. With origins in early chronophotog-
raphy and the machine obsessions of choreographers, dancers, and directors in the 1920s,
I propose that mathematical and architectural rules, body-based conditioning techniques
(e.g., biomechanics, choreutics, eurythmics, eukinetics), and procedural systems pursued
in the 1960s by the proponents of postmodern dance should be equally seen as technolo-
gies alongside the more accepted devices of sensors, cameras, and computer imagining
techniques. The chapter then segues into the performance practices of a diverse range of
artists in the 1960s through the 1990s who sought to alter, resculpt, or transform the
body by using both primitive and sophisticated technologies and ends with an in-depth
analysis of the impact of digital technologies on dance and performance in the 1990s and
after.
Chapter 7, “Machines/Mechanicals,” focuses on the genre of mechanical or robotic
performances in which such constructions are given the same performance status as
humans. Based on curator Jasia Reichardt’s argument that the characteristic of liveness
in machines can be attributed less to their appearance and instead to their behavior, the
chapter surveys the machine performance, Schrottkunst/industrial art scenes, and machine
sound art of 1990s European and American subculture. The second half, on performing
machines, focuses on the shift from human-based operation toward machine autonomy
involving self-organizing behavior based from environmental input, processing, and
control by way of computational models. Taking up art historian Jack Burnham’s notion
of system aesthetics, the chapter finishes with the phenomenon of autonomous, cybernetic

Introduction

xxxviii
sculptures and robotic performances that have taken place in galleries or theaters without
the need of human actors.
The book’s final chapter, “Interaction,” considers the impact of computational tech-
nologies on artists and researchers creating environments that blur the distinction between
performer and spectators. Here, I extend Myron Krueger’s notion of responsive environment
to include the creation of hybrid media spaces that, although working with similar tech-
niques, go far beyond the traditional performing arts frames of theater, dance, or visual-
based performance art. The immersive and interactive participant-activated environments
of the 1960s form the conceptual and historical basis to discuss responsive environments
in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed the line between art and research, while challenging
purely screen-based interaction that denied the existence of the participant’s body.
The chapter then transfers to the urban realm, where I detail works that try to recon-
ceptualize the urban space into a post-Situationist enterprise of play through the advent
of new networking and mobile technologies. Taking into consideration works that attempt
to turn spaces in the city into new sites of public performances by way of architectural
and media strategies, mobile systems, and pervasive games, I conclude the book by exam-
ining the ramifications of the performative transformation of the everyday through increas-
ingly sophisticated and hidden pervasive technologies.

Introduction

xxxix
 1

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

“What distinguishes modern architecture is surely a new sense of space and the machine
aesthetic.”
reyner banham, theory and design in the first machine age1

Wagner’s Theater of the Future

Our story begins not in the age of the CPU, but on August 13, 1876, the opening day of
German composer Richard Wagner’s fabled Festspielhaus (festival theater) and Bühnenfest-
spiel (theater festival) to which thousands of Europe’s and America’s royalty, artists, and
critics made their pilgrimage to witness a spectacle of historical proportion. Descending
on the small, rural town of Bayreuth in northeastern Bavaria, the audience of luminaries
included Tchaikovsky, Edvard Greig, and Mark Twain. The Viennese music critic Eduard
Hanslick announced “an extraordinary musical theatrical experience and much more! This
four-evening-long music drama is a remarkable development in cultural history, not to
mention the construction of a special theater solely for its production and the pilgrimage
of thousands of persons from half of Europe to this remote, half-forgotten little town whose
name is now indelibly recorded in the history of art” (Hartford 1980, 72).
The catalyst that brought both elite and bohemian societies together in Bayreuth that
summer was none other than the world premiere of Wagner’s colossal fifteen-hour opera
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)—the music-theater work for which the
entire theater building and festival had been conceived and constructed. Beginning its
composition around 1851, Wagner knew early on that The Ring would be the epiphany
of his compositional genius; a work so vast in musical and theatrical ambition that it
could not be staged in any conventional theater but required a new kind of space of
illusion to cradle it. Even if Wagner was not an unknown composer for his day (the
commission for The Ring came from King Ludwig II of Bavaria), the development of the
opera and endless pursuit to create a theater specifically designed for its presentation
was to lead him through a twenty-five-year odyssey of failed attempts, exile, and even
bankruptcy, until its completion in 1876.
Wagner’s penning of The Ring emerged as a response to what the composer perceived
as a deep decadence plaguing nineteenth-century culture. Torn away from its Greek
origins in the festivals of Dionysus, where the stage served as the “expression of public
conscience,” drama itself had become severed from both its civic and sacred origins and
split into discrete artistic components: rhetoric, sculpture, painting, and music. In Swiss
exile after participating in an aborted 1849 revolutionary uprising in Dresden, Wagner
set out in writing his theoretical counterparts to The Ring: “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft”
(“The Artwork of the Future,” 1849) and “Oper und Drama,” (“Opera and Drama,”
1850/1851). In “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” a text that already explored the perceptual
experience of the spectator in relationship to the dramatic event, the eye perceived not
only the visual setting but also the inner life of the performer, while dramatic action drove
the need to bring all of the arts together in a total synthesis of elements: staging, image,
music, and text.
The synthesis of art forms, what Wagner labeled the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total
artwork) was “to include all phases of art and in doing so to consume, to destroy each
one, so to speak, in favor of the total purpose of them all” (Wagner 1912, 115). For
the composer, reason, intellect, and a rational worldview played no role in the audience’s
experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk’s utopian synthesis. Instead, the fusion of artistic
forms would communicate directly to the senses and through them, exclusively to the
emotions.
Based on the Romantic notion of the artist as a conveyer of the sublime, Wagner’s
interest in appealing to the deepest emotions by way of a fusion of media elements is also
surprisingly contemporary. In a strange way, Wagner already had command over what
many contemporary creators are still trying to sort out: the design of media carefully
choreographed within a specifically defined architected space to create a complete and
total immersion of the spectator’s senses, literally sweeping them into an emotional,
hypnotic vertigo; what Wagner scholar and editor Albert Goldman so aptly called a theater
of narcosis (Wagner 1964, 29).
We need not, however, dwell on Wagner the composer or as the theorist of the
Gesamtkunstwerk, although obviously such a concept plays a key role in making sense of
our utterly confusing, multisensory, audiovisual media society of the present. I want here
to focus on Wagner as an experience architect of a machine that utilized the technologies
of the time to create unprecedented control over the perceptual and affective experience
of his spectators.
The illusion technologies of the stage arts form a history in themselves, ranging from
the Greeks’ deus ex machina, the moving wagons of the mystery cycles of medieval times

Chapter 1

2
and the mechanical birds and fountains of Byzantine court spectacles to Serlio’s theatrical
perspective in the mid-sixteenth century and Inigo Jones’s elaborate masques for the
Stuart royalty in the seventeenth century. But Wagner’s Festspielhaus included the first
full-scale use of modern technologies of lighting, acoustics, and architectural transfor-
mation specifically manipulated to create a powerful and cumulative effect on the senses
that would “place you in a new relation to the play you are about to witness” (Wagner
1964, 358).
The architectural plan for the theater that would place the spectator into an unheard-of
relationship with the onstage spectacle was nothing short of radical for its day (figure 1.1).
Resorting to a Greek amphitheater-like arrangement for the seating configuration, Wagner
first and foremost removed any trace of stage machinery that would shatter the spell of
illusion. By sinking the orchestra pit below the stage and partially covering it, Wagner
guaranteed that the spectator’s eye would not be distracted by stray light and movement
from the “mystical abyss” filled with conductor and musicians between the theatron and
the stage. “With a dramatic representation, on the contrary, it is a matter of focusing the
eye itself upon a picture; and that can be done only by leading it away from any sight of
bodies lying in between, such as the technical apparatus for projecting the picture”
(Wagner 1964, 365).
To further enhance the seamlessness of the effect, Wagner took an idea from his earlier
collaborator on the project, the architect Gottfried Semper, in creating a second, wider
proscenium frame that served to distance the stage even further from the spectators. The
construction of this double proscenium created a kind of “mystical gulf” between the
audience and the stage in which “the stage image was reduced to the form of a
‘picture.’ . . . Between him [the spectator] and the picture to be looked at there is nothing
plainly visible, merely a floating atmosphere of distance, resulting from the architectural
adjustment of the two proscenia; whereby the scene is removed as it were to the unap-
proachable world of dreams” (Wagner 1964, 366). To complete the distancing effect,
Wagner plunged the entire house into almost total darkness by way of gas lighting during
the performances.2
If the framing of the stage image was reduced to the equivalent of a two-dimensional
screen, Wagner’s precise acoustic shaping of the auditorium had the opposite effect,
enveloping the spectators in a continually transforming sea of sound. Slightly fan-shaped
to reduce standing waves and with a reverberation time of just under 1.55 seconds, both
auditorium and structural interior of the building were constructed of wood, allowing the
space to become an efficient receiver and diffuser of acoustic energy. Additional innova-
tions, such as hollowing out the space beneath the ramped seating area to serve as a low-
frequency resonator and the addition of numerous columns running along the walls to
create irregularly shaped surfaces, all enabled Wagner to carefully compose and tune
The Ring and his last work, Parsifal, to the exact acoustics of the Festspielhaus in a manner
unheard of at the time.3

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

3
Figure 1.1 Longitudinal Perspective Drawing, Bayreuth Festival House, George Izenour Collection. Repro-
duced with the permission of the Special Collections Library, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

The overall vision of Wagner’s theater of illusion set an important future precedent for
later attempts at synthesizing architecture, drama, music, and technology in utopian
spaces dedicated to the performance of singular works, including the Russian composer
Aleksandr Skryabin’s proposal for a cathedral in the Himalayas to exclusively house his
spiritual, seven-day synesthetic music-theater work Mysterium (1903); Le Corbusier’s,
Iannis Xenakis’s, and Edgard Varèse’s Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels
World’s Fair; or the custom-constructed theaters for Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas
spectacles O and Ka in the 1990s. With the shaping of space by artificial means and
the construction of architecturally controlled aural and visual perception, the event
of Bayreuth marked a first at the dawn of modernism that the ontology of performance
was transformed not only because of its dramatic content but also by its technoarchi-
tectural setting.

Chapter 1

4
 Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space

As the monumental event of Wagner’s Bayreuth rippled through the cultural structures
of Europe and North America, perhaps no other artist was as influenced at the time by
the “master of hypnotic tricks” (Nietzsche 1967, 166) than the Swiss theater designer
Adolphe Appia. Born in 1862 in Geneva, Appia ostensibly studied music in Geneva,
Paris, Leipzig, and Dresden, but increasingly became absorbed with stagecraft by his early
twenties. Attending Wagner’s Parsifal, the composer’s last production at Bayreuth before
his death, Appia was left deeply disappointed, convinced that Wagner’s greatness as a
composer was severely marred by his clunky design, particularly in the use of pseudonatu-
ralistic, tromp-l’oeil scenery—flat, pictorial representations that contradicted the symbolic
and sonorous intensity of Wagner’s unparalleled musical abstraction. “The master,” Appia
later wrote in 1925, “set his work into the conventional framework of the period; and if
everything in the auditorium at Bayreuth expresses his genius, on the other side of the
footlights everything contradicts it” (Bablet 1982, 67).
Returning to Switzerland in 1890, Appia commenced an artistic quest to articulate
his own scenic interpretations of The Ring cycle. In La mise en scène du drame Wagnérien
(The Staging of Wagnerian Drama, 1895) and La musique et la mise en scène (Music and Stage
Setting, 1899), he swept away centuries of staid scenographic practice by shifting emphasis
from the pseudo illusionism created by two-dimensional, painting-based representation
toward spatial arrangements of abstracted, rhythmic forms: simple geometric scenic ele-
ments such as raked stairs and platforms (figure 1.2). The key to a true realization of
Wagner’s vision, Appia claimed, lay in the musical score; the mise-en-scène was already
embodied in its tone color (timbre), rhythm, duration, and other abstracted sonic ele-
ments. Second, and more important, the plasticity of both performer and stage objects
could emerge only through their interaction with light.4
Appia’s vision for a living, responsive space constructed by the materiality of the human
figure and the immateriality of light and shadow was not to remain the stuff of theory
but instead given physical life through the artist’s acquaintance with the Swiss composer
and music education teacher Emile Jacques-Dalcroze. An accomplished composer by the
age of twenty-seven, Dalcroze had developed a unique series of physical whole-body exer-
cises borne out of his frustration in teaching musicians who had little sense of rhythm or
expression.
A series of postures and études intended at structuring better eye/hand/body coordina-
tion, Dalcroze’s rhythmic plastiques, named eurhythmics, caught Appia’s eye in 1906,
providing the missing link for his new conception of the stage. Through eurhythmics,
the body would become the organizer of a new kind of rhythmic space, one sculpted by its
movement through such a space and subsequently, shaped and expanded by the technol-
ogy of light.

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

5
Figure 1.2 Adolphe Appia, “Escalier en face,” 1909, Charcoal on drawing paper. Inventory IV, Nr. 749.
Courtesy of Deutsches Theatermuseum München.

Dalcroze’s enthusiasm for Appia’s ideas of rhythmic spaces staged through eurhythmics
led to an invitation for the designer to help conceive a new kind of artistic institute for
eurhythmic exploration in the German garden city of Hellerau, outside of Dresden.
Financed by the young German industrialist and German Werkbund (Work Federation
society) member Wolf Dohrn, Hellerau would become a major center of research into new
concepts of the body.5 In arguing for the new school, Dalcroze wrote that rhythm should
become the basis of a new society and raised to the status of a social institution; an idea
that clearly was being played out through the increasing interest in Körperkultur (body
culture), in general, and new performance possibilities with such trained, perfected
bodies.
Between 1910 and 1912 under Appia’s direction, the theater space at Hellerau
was to become as aesthetically and technologically groundbreaking as Wagner’s reforma-
tion of opera at Bayreuth. Collaborating with the architect Heinrich Tessenow and the
Russian painter and lighting whiz Alexander von Salzmann, Appia designed what
he called a hall of syntheses: a massive 50 m s 16 m s 12 m open space in which both

Chapter 1

6
performers and spectators occupied the same spatial volume, without any barrier between
them.
In direct collaboration with Salzmann, Appia began implementing his lighting con-
cepts. Working with the principle of space projecting light rather than using it to directly
highlight the performers’ bodies, the team installed massive, cedar-oil-covered white linen
drops on the ceiling and walls, behind which were hung thousands of instruments whose
light was diffused through the almost transparent fabrics. Centrally controlled from a
console that functioned like a light organ, light became active and responsive, a trans-
former of space. “Light is conveyed through the space itself,” wrote Salzmann, “and the
linking of visible light sources is done away with” (Beacham 1987, 67).
Taking full advantage of the new technical possibilities, Appia and Dalcroze’s staging
of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Hellerau in 1913 met with similar astonishment as
Wagner’s The Ring premiere some thirty-six years earlier. In a continual series of coup de
théâtre, the two artists created sweeping scenochoreographic effects, and in one case rep-
resented the God Amor only through a sharply focused beam of light, causing a theatrical
sensation that Paul Claudel called “a union of music, the plastic sense and light, the like
of which I have never seen” (Beacham 1987, 78). In Appia’s hands, light had successfully
created an environment that both amplified the human body in sculptural form and
became itself “a creation animated by an unencumbered vitality” (78).
Abruptly interrupted by the start of World War I in 1914, Appia’s short-lived experi-
ments at Hellerau already anticipated the many mise-en-scène of transformable media and
bodies that would repeatedly haunt the twentieth century. Moreover, Appia’s interest in
artistic and social reform materialized in the design of a performance environment in
which stage and spectator were united, transforming the audience from passive onlooker
to active participant. “Sooner or later we will come to what will be called simply the hall
(salle), the cathedral of the future, which, in a free, vast, and variable space, will play host
to the most diverse activities of our social and artistic life. This will be the ultimate setting
for dramatic art to flourish in—with or without spectators” (Bablet 1982, 88; emphasis in
original).

Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance

At the same time as Appia’s experiments at Hellerau, the radical cultural and socioeco-
nomic change wholeheartedly embraced by the Futurist movements, first in Italy in
1909 and slightly later in the twilight of Czarist Russia, was fomenting, transforming
infatuation with technology into full-scale aesthetic-political programs. Announced with
cataclysmic intensity in 1909 on the front page of the French daily Le Figaro by the
wealthy, Sorbonne-educated Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the artistic movement and
ideology of Futurism would claim a new world where “time and space died” (Marinetti
1973, 22).

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

7
 It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the Italian Futurist movement, which
ran from 1909 into the early years of World War I, when the group’s desire for war bru-
tally materialized into reality, was the first artistic movement in the twentieth century to
exaltedly embrace the coming machine technologies. Since much has been made of the
Futurists all-out rapture with automobiles, airplanes, electricity, and other machines, it
is important to understand the roots of such ecstatic reaction. In his seminal Theory and
Design in the First Machine Age, architectural historian Reyner Banham discussed how the
historical context of the early twentieth century, where “the sense of the overriding of an
old, tradition-bound technology unchanged since the Renaissance,” met with new inven-
tions “without tradition,” particularly in Italy where people were suddenly confronted “on
the doorsteps of their ancestral palaces” with technologies that radically reshaped urban
environments (Banham 1960, 100–101).
For younger, radical intellectuals like Marinetti and his artistic acquaintances, simul-
taneity, noise, speed, and rupture catalyzed a new poetics of the day through the recently
pervasive technologies of radio, electricity, telegraph, and telephone. These wireless inven-
tions were rapidly assimilated as telephonic technologies that, as the social theorist Paul
Virilio described, already succeeded in creating “presence at a distance” (1997, 16). Long
celebrated for their work in painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, the Futurists
were also one of the first movements in twentieth-century industrial modernism to explic-
itly acknowledge the total impact of machines in transforming performance environments
into dynamic, sensory-technical apparatuses.
Early Futurist performance between 1909 and 1914 was largely driven by Marinetti’s
concept of the serate, a kind of public, guerilla-like provocation designed to break down
the separation between stage and audience space.6 Gradually intoxicated both by the
newfangledness of the technomachine age as well as by influences from the music halls,
circuses, cabarets, burlesque reviews, and variety shows that he had experienced in visits
to Paris, London, and Berlin, Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Variety Theater” (1913) declared
his disgust for the contemporary theater and his interest in a variety theater “born . . . from
electricity . . . having no tradition, no masters, no dogma and it is fed by swift actuality”
(Marinetti 1971b, 179). Attempting to articulate a theater of speed and effects utilizing
the tools of the day to create “the futurist marvelous produced by modern mechanics”
(179) it was not until teaming up with Bruno Corra and Emilio Senttimelli that technol-
ogy for Marinetti became an explicit material instrument for shaping the experience of
performance.
Declaring that “the only way to inspire Italy with the war like spirit today (of Futur-
ism) is through the theater,” Marinetti, Corra, and Senttimelli’s “The Futurist Synthetic
Theater” (1915) was a rant against the deadliness of Western dramatic traditions since
the Greeks due to theater’s mimetic/representational role (Kirby and Kirby 1971, 41–65).
The manifesto, however, also imagined a new kind of performance that would produce
astonishing relationships between the event and the spectator through deployment of

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technical apparatuses. Describing a new Futurist performance of “dynamic, fragmentary
symphonies of gestures, words, noises, and lights” (Berghaus 1998, 8) as a labyrinth of
sensations, the theater would become life itself through scenic events that, in the words
of the Futurist theater critic Günter Berghaus, “were unique and unrepeatable aggregates
of energy and sensations that closed a circuit between stage and audience” (179).

Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance—Scenodynamics

The largest conceptual shift followed World War I, when the Futurists finally sought to
transform scenographic space directly through electrical and material means. Already in
1917, the painter Giacomo Balla undertook an early attempt at realizing what would soon
be labeled the scenodynamic stage—a five-minute audiovisual choreography of objects and
lights for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice
(Fireworks) at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome. Having translated concepts of speed and
dynamism into painting and eventually sculpture, Balla turned to directing a large-scale
synesthetic media-performance event that would embody Stravinsky’s music through
strictly abstract geometries of 3D shapes and light. Constructed from wood and lit from
inside, Balla’s forms generated a formal landscape of cones, half disks, triangles, pyramids,
and prisms.
To set this landscape in motion, Balla composed a detailed score of fifty lighting cues,
made possible by the recent introduction of electrical lighting systems into theaters.
Balla’s experiment proved to test the technical limits of the Teatro Constanzi, particularly
when disputes between him and the theater’s technical crew left the creator himself alone
to run the lighting console for the last 2.5 minutes of the work.7 Despite the production
being neither an artistic or commercial success (after its two Rome performances, Diaghi-
lev subsequently dropped it from the Ballets Russes’ repertoire), it nonetheless material-
ized the Futurist’s theoretical notions of dynamism.
It is also almost certain that the then-twenty-year-old Enrico Prampolini influenced
Balla’s ballet of objects and light. Originally trained as a painter but moving to architec-
ture and scenic design, Prampolini had real-world performance experience, having painted
sets and built costumes to support himself. Establishing contact with Balla in 1913, he
was under the influence of Wagner, the Symbolists, and Wassily Kandinsky’s theories of
the total artwork as expressed through a synesthetic relationship between sound, color,
form, and movement. An exhibition of the Futurist Boccioni in 1913, however, led Pram-
polini away from Kandinsky’s interior world of expression and toward a more external
plastic and dimensional paradigm.
Upon reading the manifestos “The Futurist Stage” and “Futurist Scenography,” we
might first get the impression of a mind subsumed by electronic fantasies, but we should
remember that Prampolini was partially reacting based on his practical theater experience.
Prampolini’s concept of scenodynamic architecture attempted to embody the way artists

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

9
such as Balla painted speed and motion onto the 2D canvas in 3D and 4D space, concen-
trating on the three-dimensionality of performance space rather than the representational
aspects of the picture frame that had troubled theater spaces since the sixteenth
century.
Directly energized with the modern technologies of electricity and mechanics, Pram-
polini banned fake, painted scenery and in place of “a colored backdrop” imagined a new
kind of “colorless electromechanical architectural structure, powerful vitalized by chro-
matic emanations from a luminous source” (Prampolini 1971b, 204–205). Such a struc-
ture would erase centuries of representational baggage in the form of so-called realism
from the stage and, more important, imbue performance with the same dynamism now
rendered real by machines.8
Despite numerous attempts, it would be several years before Prampolini had the oppor-
tunity to realize his scenic ideas, which finally occurred in 1918–1919 when Prampolini
arranged for a demonstration of his theories at the Teatro Odescalchi in Rome.9 The pro-
duction of Albert-Birot’s Matoum et Tévibar was described by Prampolini as a proof of
concept of his “plasto-dynamic scenographic system, of the dynamism of colored lights
that create a stage architecture, with the stylization of the plasto-dynamic marionettes”
(Berghaus 1998, 283). Although this prototype project could by no means be called a
commercial success (it ran for a mere two days), it finally secured Prampolini’s interna-
tional reputation, helping him to become one of the main forces in the world of avant-
garde European scenography at the time.
The scenographer’s 1924 “Technical Manifesto for Futurist Scenic Atmosphere”
repeated the principal themes articulated in earlier writings, but also delved further into
the concept of a polydimensional scenic space—the breaking up of the horizontal plane and
the introduction of rhythmic plastic shapes or polydimensional forms. But Prampolini now
wished to go much further, calling for the total elimination of the human actor–performer
and her replacement with what he called “a personification of space . . . as a dynamic and
interacting element between the scenic environment and the public spectator” (1971a,
230). Like so many Futurist writings, this elimination of the human was in the service
of a much larger spiritual quest that rapidly approached the level of mysticism. By remov-
ing the human form, the audience would no longer be distracted by the banality of the
everyday and be liberated to enter into a world of spiritual abstraction—one where the
dynamics of space itself ultimately would transcend matter.
The other major voice in the Italian Futurists scenographic revolution was Fortunato
Depero. Working at the same time and competing with Prampolini, Depero went even
further with his concept of a totalized mechanical, synesthetic mise-en-scène. In the 1916
“Notes on the Theater,” Depero already described a stage embodying the characteristics
of film as a fluctuating space composed of mobile scenery, oscillating objects and moving
architecture: “everything turns-disappears-reappears, multiplies and breaks, pulverizes
and overturns, trembles and transforms into a cosmic machine that is life” (Depero 1971,

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208). Although Depero’s as well as Prampolini’s visions went largely unrealized, their
work paralleled a common theme that would continually arise in Europe during the early
part of the twentieth century: the construction of a stage machinery where the human
element was integrated into, made equal with, and ultimately subordinated to a technical
apparatus.

Stage/Machine: The Origins of Russian Futurism

As an artistic and political movement, Futurism had an even larger impact in Russia with
the publication of Marinetti’s Le Figaro manifesto there, creating a buzz among an entire
generation of writers, painters, poets, playwrights, and eventually, performance practitio-
ners. Distinct from its Italian counterpart, Russian Futurism further elevated artistic
forms such as painting, sculpture, literature, the graphic arts, and poetry over the perform-
ing arts as media in which to force new radical links with other modernist movements.
Influenced by post-Impressionist experiments like Cubist painting over the Italian Futur-
ist’s dreams of war machines, the crucial players of Russian Futurism sought to distance
themselves from the Italian’s overarching fetishism for technology, and sought instead to
brand the movement with a distinct Russian stamp.
If the Russians claimed conceptual and ideological distance from their Italian counter-
parts, their first manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of the Public,” jointly written in 1912 by
the playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, and the painters
David Burlyuk and Benedikt Livshits, sounded in tone and argument suspiciously like
Marinetti’s opening salvo just three years before. Similarly, Mayakovksy’s brief manifesto
“Theater, Cinema, and Futurism” ([1913] 1980) published in the periodical Kine-zhurnal,
posed the question of whether theater made sense in a world increasingly dominated by
the cinema. Even though it distanced itself from Italian Futurism, Mayakovsky invoked
the same kind of argument as Marinetti’s and Prampolini’s early writings against the
enslavement of performance’s dynamism brought about by the actor by the “dead back-
grounds of (theatrical) decoration” (Mayakovsky [1913] 1980, 182). Here, cinema’s con-
centration on movement would eventually force performance space to become dynamic as
well.

Futurism Performed: Victory Over the Sun

Victory Over the Sun, the first highly organized, multimedia performance event that would
test the hypotheses of Mayakovsky and other Futurists, was also their most notorious.
Premiered at the Luna Park in St. Petersburg in 1913 and billed as “The First Futurist
Spectacle in the World,” this cubo-futurist opera—with a libretto by Khlebnikov and Alexei
Kruchenyk, settings and costumes by the painter Kazimir Malevich, and an atonal score
by the composer Mikhail Matyushin—elicited such a strong reaction from the public

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

11
during its sole two performances that according to reports, it was difficult to separate the
music from the loud rioting of the audience. Deeply misogynist in tone and employing
a dizzying variety of theatrical shock effects, Victory Over the Sun was set in a dystopian
future and told the story of a group of Strong Men (i.e., Futurists) who kidnap the sun
and imprison it inside a concrete lock box in order to destroy the past. The opera ended
with a coup de théâtre: the crash of an airplane into the stage.
The opera itself was, at the very least, a significant sonorous experience. Consisting of
quarter-tone arias, Matyushin’s score was banged out on an out-of-tune piano and accom-
panied by an equally out-of-tune student choir, while Kruchenyk’s libretto was written
in what he and Khlebinikov dubbed zaum, a nonsensical, transrational glossolalia com-
posed of decomposed, purely phonetic Russian stripped down to its fundamental sonic
substructure to reveal the primitive essence of the actual sound of the language itself.10
What is more intriguing is how Malevich’s visual environment consisting of large,
abstractly painted backdrops and geometrically constructed costumes already presaged the
black-and-white minimalism of his early Suprematist paintings.11
Costs prevented Malevich from realizing his originally intended 3D sculptural scenog-
raphy, but he innovatively compensated with the use of flat 2D backdrops contrasted with
the sculptural volumetry of his wire and cardboard costumes—worn constructions that
engendered particular kinds of physical movements from the performers who wore them.
The backdrops themselves acted as a kind of introduction to the fragmented chaos of an
increasingly technologically transformed but just-begun twentieth century: Cubist shapes,
a singular black-and-white square within a square divided in half, a painted iconography
of symbols, words, signs depicting images of bombs, pieces of machinery, architectural
T-squares and bits of airplanes.
If Malevich’s painted backdrops were not real 3D, they were certainly enhanced and
transformed by his cutting-edge lighting design that took full advantage of the Luna
Park’s existing technological infrastructure. Large mobile spotlights were used like
weapons, sweeping the stage space and randomly picking out objects and performers. As
described by witness Benedikt Livshits, the lighting distorted the performers’ bodies and
painted backdrops beyond recognition, giving the impression of “figures cut up by the
blades of lights and deprived alternately of hands, legs, heads, etc. . . . out of the primor-
dial night the tentacles of projectors seized on parts of this object, now of that and satu-
rating them with colors” (Baer 1991, 105).
Victory Over the Sun marked a high point in the Russian avant-garde of the time, its
early vision of depersonalized, mechanized humanity later reaching an apogee in the
influential artistic movement of Constructivism. The opera’s overall emphasis on physical-
ity also introduced a new concept to Russian avant-garde performance: that movement
was as essential as voice and scenic atmosphere in the “creation of a three-dimensional,
kinetic, interactive totality” (Baer 1991, 41).

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 Artists like Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Aleksandr Rodchenko began to look toward
performance as a vehicle to explore their ideas of three-dimensional materials that assisted
in the formation of dynamic space. Furthermore, Malevich saw the possibility of using
the stage as a 3D, real space realization of the principals of cubist painting. “Art is the
ability to create a construction that derives not from the interrelation of form and color
and not on the basis of aesthetic taste in a construction’s compositional beauty, but on
the basis of weight, speed, and direction. Forms must be given life and the right to indi-
vidual existence” (Bowlt 1976, 122–123).

Tatlin’s Transformation of Space

Another major figure that emerged from Futurist circles at first but quickly turned toward
the rapidly developing movement of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin. Trained in
painting, sculpture, and architecture and deeply influenced by Picasso after a journey to
Paris in 1914, Tatlin began to develop what he called counterreliefs, which were architectural
objects made of real materials such as metal, wood, and iron that hung inside wall corners
or were suspended in space, appearing to defy gravity. Like Malevich, Tatlin too wished
to explode painting from its flat, 2D surface—to recover the lost connections between
painting, sculpture, and architecture through the discovery of a new volumetric art with
its objective basis in “materials, volume, and construction” (Zhadova 1984, 239).
In technologizing space through the use of real material in his counterreliefs, Tatlin’s
work pointed to a major cultural shift away from composition and toward construction.
“It is a respect for the faktura (texture) of material itself that makes the difference,” wrote
the modernist critic Marjorie Perloff, in that “the material dictates the form” (1989, 69).
Given his utter fascination with the material essences of real objects that could transform
space, it only makes sense that Tatlin quickly turned to performance contexts in which
to realize his ideas. Becoming occupied with stage projects on and off throughout his
career in addition to unrealized and monumental architectural commissions [Movement,
chapter 3], none of his original designs remain except for a single production.
In 1923, long after Constructivism had become the de rigueur movement of the avant-
garde, Tatlin staged, designed, and performed in Khlebnikov’s science fiction play Zangezi:
A Supersaga in 20 Planes for a single performance at the Museum of Artistic Culture in
Petrograd. Described by Khlebnikov as “construction units . . . an architecture composed
of narratives,” Zangezi tells the story of the prophet and speechmaker Zangezi, who under-
stands the languages of both humans and birds and who descends to humanity to translate
these transrational languages to the masses (Khlebnikov 1990, 191). Staged in memory
of Khlebnikov’s premature death a year earlier, Tatlin’s production amplified the primitive
acoustic materiality and deeply embedded spirituality of the poet’s transcendental zaum
language in architectural form.

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13
 Even though little visual record of the production remains with the exception of two
photographs (figure 1.3), a set drawing, and one woodcut, we can still glean a sense of
the direction that Tatlin was heading in; one where “different surfaces of different physical
materials which have been treated in different ways” would incarnate Khlebnikov’s
sonic architecture of zaum (Lodder 1983, 209). “Parallel to his (Khelbnikov) word
constructions, I decided to make a material construction. . . . I have had to introduce
machinery which by its movement forms a parallel to the action and fuses into it” (Tatlin
1988, 248).
For the scenography, Tatlin erected an impressive, tower-like structure composed of
over-dimensional shapes poised on an acute axis such that the edifice appeared to be frozen
in the moment of toppling over. At the top, representing Khlebnikov, Tatlin himself
appeared while a piercing light focused attention on the scene “to guide the attention of
the spectator, the eye of the projector leaps from one place to another, creating order and
consistency. The projector is also necessary to emphasize the properties of the material”
(1988, 248–249). Thus, in Tatlin’s work, construction and texture were set into motion
through the dynamic medium of light.

Figure 1.3 Vladimir Tatlin. Stage Model for Zangezi. Petrograd 1923. Whereabouts unknown.

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14
 The October Revolution and Constructivism

Even with the basic tenets of the growing movement of Constructivism already planted
before 1917, they received a major push in the October Bolshevik revolution. With
the total economic and social chaos that followed the final deposition of Czar Nicholas
II’s regime in Russia, the revolution began to instantiate Vladimir Lenin and the
Bolsheviks’ dream of a proletarian revolution while sympathetic artists searched for
new aesthetic vocabularies, techniques, and forms that would serve to express the revolu-
tion’s spirit.
What exactly Constructivism was and who was in charge of it is still a major debate
among historians, particularly as there were several movements that labeled themselves
with the word. It is undeniable, however, that the movement in its various facets marked
an unprecedented break with Russia’s political past. From 1913 onward, a group of
experimental artists from theater, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, and cinema
sought new ways of materially expressing rather than representing life’s meaning and
situations through a regenerated culture seeded by industrial production that unified the
disparate arenas of science, industry, and art under the banner of socialism.
The Constructivists’ initial goal was precisely the implementation of the ideals of the
new Bolshevik state through its own creative agendas, incorporating cultural production
into daily life. One group of artists led by the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, his partner,
and painter Varvara Stepanova, and artist Alexei Gan argued for a new breed of revolu-
tionary cultural worker whose site of practice would no longer be the studio but the
industrial factory. Articulated in the manifesto of the First Working Group of Construc-
tivists in 1921, Rodchenko and company declared war on “art for art’s sake” as well as
on work that primarily focused on the sensory or mystical life of the individual, instead
proposing a new, objective form of cultural production—a form of anti-art that would
mirror the new technoindustrial reality of socialism.
With the triad of tektonika (techniques of construction), faktura (material texture),
and konstruktsiia (the process of structuring and organizing the materials), Rodchenko’s
group sought the transformation of reality through the expression of material elements
where such characteristics as line, color, space, volume, plane, and light formalized
their use. “Construction,” wrote Rodchenko, “is the system by which an object is
realized from the utilization of material together with a predetermined purpose” (Lodder
1983, 27).
Developing after 1921, a second group led by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine
Pevsner transcended the narrow confines of art entirely, focusing on much broader areas
of societal production. The shift away from purely artistic applications led to a break
between the group represented by Tatlin and Rodchenko and by that of Gabo. Partly the
result of debates among party functionaries, bureaucrats, critics, and artists on how pro-
letarian cultural production could mirror the parallel transformation of social-economic

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

15
structures, the central question of how radically formal avant-garde movements could
express the role and position of the working class became a topic of heated debate through-
out the twentieth century.

Constructivism’s Technologizing of Performance Space: Meyerhold and Popova

The Constructivists had the ambitious aim of a total transformation of the post-1917
society through design and architectonic fantasies but one of the few arenas that pragmati-
cally connected to such visionary experimentation was the “synthetic” realm of theatrical
performance. In her well-known book The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922, historian
Camilla Gray noted that “deprived at first of their natural field of exploration in archi-
tecture, the Constructivists turned to the theater” (1971, 265). Not unlike the new
media’s shifting interest from the screen to physical, media-augmented space, the stage
too offered the Constructivist’s machine imagination the possibility to explode the surface
of the easel and the painting’s frame.
Constructivists who entered the performance arena perceived the stage as a micro labo-
ratory to test out social experiments and disseminate new formal ideas within a totalized,
artificially designed technological environment. Following the dictates of Rodchenko’s
First Working Group, the Constructivist approach to the stage focused on a functional,
utilitarian model of theatrical space, dismantling the trappings of traditional theatrical
décor such as curtains or painted scenery and nakedly exposing all technological mecha-
nisms to the audience.
Erected in its place were stage environments announcing the birth of a new industrial,
mechanized age by way of their material constitution—skeletal frameworks of exposed
wood and steel, freely suspended staircases and precipitously perched girders, hanging
projection screens and searchlights, ladders, cranes and ramps, jungles of blinking dis-
plays, signs, posters, slogans and text, moving walls, wheels and gears, and, in some cases,
real cars, motorcycles, and trucks.
Theater artists problematized the cultural divide between stage and street, audience
and event, with stage action invading the sacredness of audience space, suspending the
passive role usually attributed to spectators and placing them in an oscillating position
between observer and performer. In its stage context, Constructivism intended no less
than a radical architectonic and material reimagining of volumetric space, theatrical event
and social life by bringing the political urgency of the street inside and onto the
stage.12
Although many theatrical experiments of the period between roughly 1918–1928
featured such architectural tropes, the most notorious work originated in the productions
of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Arguably one of the most influential
twentieth-century directors, Meyerhold’s work from the period between 1919 and 1927
radically transformed stage performance. The controversial director had already achieved

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fame as early as 1909, directing and acting within a large number of formally conventional
productions, but it was not until after 1920 that his work would become infected with
Constructivist techniques.
A devout socialist who had been further ignited by the October revolution, Meyerhold
wanted to construct the ultimate participatory experience, perceiving the stage environ-
ment as a necessary site for the creation of new aesthetic methods and a new public to
carry the political revolution into the staid annals of cultural contexts. As early as 1913,
he began developing a suite of techniques such as the use of lighting and fluid, dynamic
staging that would result in what he called a cinefication of the theater. This proclamation
foreshadowed a wave of experimentation that was to later take place, particularly at a time
when the cinema itself was a primitive art form, being little more than a filmed version
of the theater.13
Meyerhold’s earlier work already attempted to experiment with formal techniques that
had little historic precedent. The German theoretician Georg Fuchs’s 1905 Die Schaubühne
der Zukunft (The Stage of the Future) had a major influence on the young director’s aesthetic,
prompting him to explore a theater where the actor would be only one part of a larger
scenic picture (Fuchs 1905). For Fuchs, acting was the expression of a much broader cho-
reographic environment; a rhythmic exploration of organizing stage space with the human
body as one crucial but not singular element. Such an expressive approach demanded a
completely different type of performer, physically agile and equipped with split-second
timing; something that motivated Meyerhold’s interests in the gestic qualities found in
Asian performance forms and low-brow entertainment genres such as circus, vaudeville,
music hall, and mystery/pageant plays.
With Meyerhold’s lead, an entire generation of successive directors including Sergei
Eisenstein, Aleksandr Tairov, Nikolai Evreinov, Nikolai Foregger, and Yevgeny
Vakhtangov would contribute to what was seen as one of the most remarkable develop-
ments in the Russian theater after 1917: the expansion of performance to include cinema,
cabaret, vaudeville, circus, and public spectacle.14
Despite the fact that Meyerhold’s earlier work contained the seeds of his subsequent
formal theatrical experimentation, the 1917 revolution marked a radical break with
previous productions. After serving in the Red Army during the Crimean Civil War in
1920, the director turned with a furious zeal toward transforming the theater into an
instrument of political propaganda and media communication. Taking over the dilapi-
dated Zon theater in Moscow, he assembled a young company of performers dubbed
Theater R.S.F.S.R. No. 1.
His first production, a controversial interpretation of the 1920 Belgian symbolist
play The Dawn, was more akin to a political meeting with the performance continually
interrupted by real-time news reports from the Crimean front brought by messengers.
Like earlier projects, The Dawn transformed the audience space into a participatory event,
exposing the entire theatrical apparatus in plain sight. Using ramps to connect stage to

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

17
auditorium, designer Vladimir Dmitriev’s set attempted to create a space that was non-
representational, referring to nothing other than its own material form.
More likely, the Constructivist theatrical revolution reached its apex with Meyerhold’s
and stage designer Lyubov Popova’s 1922 production of a little-known boulevard farce,
The Magnanimous Cuckold, by the Belgian writer Fernand Crommelynck. As one of the
few women involved in the history of technoscenographic practice, Popova is critical to
an understanding of the machine transformation of theatrical space. Trained first as a
painter, she moved to stage design upon meeting Meyerhold. Hired by him as teaching
staff in the State Higher Theatrical Workshop (later renamed GITIS) after seeing her
painting work in the legendary 1921 Moscow Constructivist exhibition 5 s 5  25,
Popova’s set for the Crommelynck production was a textbook example of Constructivism
in situ.15
Aesthetically, Popova’s interest in machinism strongly resonated with Meyerhold’s
approach—a joint quest for a functional model of scenographic space that embraced the
machine but reduced it to its most essential, skeletal form. In a purely pragmatic sense,
such a skeletal, freestanding set could be moved from the confines of the theater into the
open air so that the results obtained in the stage laboratory could be transferred into
everyday life without relying on the institutionalized theatrical machinery.
Popova’s stripped-down installation machine for The Magnanimous Cuckold exemplified
the best features of Constructivist architectonics for the time (figure 1.4). Gone were the
painted backdrops and fake scenery of the past. In their place, Popova erected a labyrinth
of ramps, steps, ladders, painted wheels with the words CR-ML-NCK (for Crommelynck,
the author’s last name) and sails that at times appeared as windmill blades and at other
times, as abstracted mechanized forms. Dressed in everyday workers’ overalls, Meyerhold’s
acrobatic actors executed a set of technically precise movement exercises labeled biomechan-
ics [The Machine Body, chapter 6]. Biomechanics enabled Meyerhold’s actors to use
Popova’s installation as a kind of performance instrument—what the Russian Meyerhold
expert Konstantin Rudnitsky later called “Popova’s keyboard for the performers” (1981,
290).
Popova’s environment (and Crommelynck’s text) were essential catalysts for Meyer-
hold’s theatrical inventiveness, with the scenography enlarging the choreographic possi-
bilities of the performers and thus fulfilling the desire to create a “workplace for the actors”
and not a space of decoration. By opening the door for Constructivism to exert its influ-
ence in the realm of performance, the painter and designer were forever banished from
the theater, with the engineer and the constructor taking their place.
Later, Meyerhold claimed as much when he stated that Popova’s construction
effectively attempted to create a situation that would not be different from the technolo-
gical phenomena of real life. “The play (Cuckold) develops in close interpenetration
with that which permeates our contemporaneity: technological achievements” (Baer
1991, 102).16

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Figure 1.4 Vsevolod Meyerhold’s and Lyubov Popova’s production of Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous
Cuckold, Moscow. Meyerhold State Theater, Revival, January 1928.

Meyerhold’s numerous subsequent projects also mapped out new performance territory.
His 1923 production of the Russian revolutionary writer Sergei Tretyakov’s Earth Rampant
or The Earth in Turmoil, continued the dream of bringing an advanced technologized
society into the theater. Also designed by Popova, the centerpiece of the production was
a massive wooden crane crowned with a hanging projection screen (dubbed by one critic
as a “machine-photo poster”) onto which revolutionary slogans and titles announcing scene
changes were projected [Cinefication and the Stage, chapter 4]. In a production that stood
theatrical conventions on their head, real cars, motorcycles, and trucks were continually
driven onto a large-scale gangway built directly through the audience space (Rudnitsky
1981, 314). Furthermore, Meyerhold took full advantage of new lighting technologies,
including centralized dimmers, using large spotlights to create cinematic close-ups—the
stage equivalent of camera movements.
His next production entitled D.E. (1924), an amalgam of several sources, featured
projections of signs, slogans, and “comments from the director” onto three hanging pro-
jection screens, as well as a remarkable series of lacquered wooden screens with casters
which the director choreographed into a ever-shifting sequence of complex scenic changes.
Although Meyerhold’s greatest theatrical works were still to come, the period of his

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19
intensive preoccupation with Constructivist stage principles and their technologies
effectively ended after D.E.

El Lissitzky’s Electromechanical Peep Show

Together with Meyerhold and Popova, no other figure sums up the radical direction of
Constructivism’s reach into performance practice better than that of Lazar (El) Lissitzky.
Born to Jewish parents near Smolensk, Russia, he was trained in architecture and
engineering in Darmstadt, Germany, between 1909 and 1914 and later in Moscow. After
working in several architecture bureaus, Lissitzky met Malevich and became deeply
influenced by Suprematism but later—by the mid 1920s—he too shifted to Constructivist
ideologies. With his command of the German language, working experience in several
different disciplines, and frequent travels, Lissitzky became the main artistic conduit
for avant-garde thought between Russia and Western Europe from the mid to late
1920s.
Like many other artist–designers of the period, Lissitzky was strongly influenced by
the proposed unity of art and technology embraced by socialist ideology and the fusion
of science, technology, and the machine. The transformation of society through the
utopian, potentially democratic possibilities of a new kind of human molded by socialism
helped drive the development of Lissitzky’s practice and potent impact in the more than
half a dozen disciplines in which he worked: architecture, graphic and product design,
typography, theater, exhibition design, photography, and painting.
Like other Constructivists, Lissitzky also viewed the stage as an ideally controlled
aesthetic milieu in which to rehearse the birth of a New Man within an artificially
constructed technological environment. Even if his contributions to performance were
relatively few, Lissitzky’s theoretical treatise on “the electromechanical peep show” as well
as an unrealized set design for Meyerhold were important landmarks in the history of
technoscenography (Lissitzky [1923] 1967, 351).
With solid technical and artistic training, it only made sense that Lissitzky would
eventually collaborate with Meyerhold. Asked by the director between 1926 and 1928 to
design the scenic environment for a proposed production of Tretyakov’s propagandistic
I Want a Child, Lissitzky’s stage design aimed at what Meyerhold had only described
in rhetoric: a radical transformation of the inherent relationship between spectator and
event. “If Meyerhold needs the stage settings for a new play—then I design the lay-out,
transforming the whole interior architecture of the theater with its traditional picture
frame stage” (Lissitzky 1967, 330).
Interested in creating new democratic possibilities for interaction between people and
their spatial environment, Lissitzky’s architectural surround amounted to a complete
transformation of theatrical space, progressing beyond the rickety, wooden and mechani-
cal, erector set–like environments of the other Constructivists. Lissitzky fused stage and

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Figure 1.5 El Lissitzky. Set model for Sergei Tretyakov’s I Want a Child, Meyerhold Theater, 1929
(unbuilt).

audience space by constructing a kind of amphitheater in which a ring of concentric circles

rising out of the floor in the center would serve to create a new acting area directly inside
the audience space (figure 1.5).
With the audience surrounding the performance on all sides, the performers would
enter and exit the space by coming out of the depths of the floor below the concentric
circles. The floor would be constructed out of transparent glass and lit from below, while
lighting and props would enter and exit the space by manner of a system of pulleys
and ropes. Attempting in architectural and spatial form to embody what the playwright
Tretyakov was trying to do in written form, Lissitzky sought to create a performance space
akin to a debate, where different members of the audience could intervene during the
course of event, ask questions and suggest solutions to the contemporary issues of utopia-
nism posed by the play. Like many of the Constructivist projects, however, the complexity
of the design coupled with the fact that the play itself had to be revised numerous times
because of censor complaints, prohibited the work from ever being realized.17
Lissitzky’s theoretical ideas on the merging of electromechanical technologies and
performance were expressed much earlier in a short 1923 essay entitled “The Plastic
Form of the Electro-Mechanical Peep Show: Victory Over the Sun.” Written in German
to accompany his lithographs for a children’s puppet show–like version of Victory Over

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21
the Sun, Lissitzky described the construction of a new kind of event that he termed the
electro-mechanical peep show (Lissitzky [1923] 1967).
The imagined performance would involve a series of artificial bodies becoming
animated within a completely transformable environment—a stage offering “the bodies
in play” all possibilities of movement. Lissitzky’s choreography of both these machine-like
bodies and the environment itself would be conducted from a central control table in
the hands of a master director or “show creator” who through electromechanical means
orchestrated not only the direction of movement but also sound, image, and light.
The electromechanical peep show would also feature such technological innovations
as “beams of light, refracted through prisms and mirrors, following the movement of
bodies” as well as acoustic transformations of the show creator’s voice, which would serve
as the voice of the mechanical bodies and triggers for lighting (Lissitzky [1923] 1967,
351–352).
Certainly Lissitzky’s vision of choreography between mechanical figures and media
elements was far beyond the possibility of technical implementation, yet he had already
laid down (albeit symbolically) the conceptual groundwork for thinking about the mapping
or transduction of input from one media domain (e.g., voice) into another (light). Specify-
ing that the realization of such an environment was a task that should be left to others,
his idea of the electromechanical stage had a major impact outside of Russia, particularly
in Germany with the later formation of Bauhaus performance practice.

Constructivist Performance: Beyond Meyerhold

It is widely accepted that Meyerhold’s The Maganimous Cuckold was the only realized
production that singularly embodied Constructivist principles in toto. The deification of
the machine aesthetic, however, surfaced in the work of other artists as well. Aleksandr
Tairov, who as director of the Kamerny Theater ranks along with Meyerhold as one of
the key theater artists of the era, also experimented with Constructivist ideas, albeit in a
far more aestheticized and representational manner. In his 1923 production of G. K.
Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the architect and scenic designer Aleksandr
Vesnin constructed a towering scaffolding incorporating platforms, moving conveyer
belts, flashing signs, and projections that attempted to outdo Popova herself.
An equally influential director was Nikolai Foregger. After a brief apprenticeship
with Tairov in 1917, Foregger became acutely interested in the mechanization potential
inherent in the human body. Simultaneously influenced by circus, commedia dell’arte and
the Soviet revolution, Foregger’s MASTFOR STUDIO, a workshop founded in 1921,
pioneered new forms of mechanized performance. Counting among its students the former
apprentices of Meyerhold and future filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich,
one of MASTFOR’s legendary productions was the 1922 theatrical review Be Kind to
Horses. With costumes designed by the twenty-two-year-old Eisenstein, the scenography

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concocted by Yutkevich created a “mobile ‘urban’ environment:” a spectacle of new
mechanization replete with moving escalator-like steps, suspended trampolines, flashing
electric signs, spinning sets, and a treadmill (Baer 1991, 49).
Foregger’s 1922 production of the old melodrama entitled The Kidnapping of Children
went even further in combining the frenetic pace of circus and music hall with Foregger’s
own technological interventions. Here, Foregger introduced his own notions of cinemaza-
tion and electrification of performance through the transformation of static space into a filmic
space, achieved by placing rapidly spinning disks in front of spotlights to give the impres-
sion of running film projectors in the live performance environment.18
This “circusification” of the theater was carried to its extreme by one of Foregger’s
foremost apprentices: Sergei Eisenstein. Before going on to define cinema history, the
young Eisenstein developed a theory of what he labeled a montage of attractions in an essay
of the same title. For Eisenstein, performance did not consist of a linear narrative, a self-
contained illusion of reality, but rather an assemblage of images designed to elicit specific
affective responses from the audience. An attraction constituted the molecule of a theatri-
cal event—”any aggressive aspect of the theater; that is, any element of it which subjects
the spectator to a sensual or emotional impact” (Carlson 1993, 356).
The montage of attractions would liberate the theater from “the weight of the
illusory imitativeness and representationality,” because one would no longer experience
performance solely as an unfolding of a given narrative but as a “construction that has
impact”; a free montage of arbitrarily selected independents . . . effects (attractions) with
a view towards establishing a certain final thematic effect” (Eisenstein 1974, 79). In this
sense, the attraction was like a shock to the spectator’s system, jolting them into
action.
In search of methods to construct this fragmented yet narrative assembly of attractions,
Eisenstein turned toward circus and film techniques. His 1924 production of Ostrovsky’s
Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man, adapted by Tretyakov, materialized the theory of
attractions, featuring tightropes, the raising and lowering of performers by means of har-
nesses, clowning, somersaults on an imaginary horse, and general circus pandemonium.
Assembled out of series of twenty-five attractions or scenes, the production also debuted
Eisenstein’s first film: the short (four-minute) Glumov’s Diary.
The show ended with the final astonishment of an actor crashing through the projec-
tion screen holding a reel of the actual film. Here, this culminating attraction encapsulated
Eisenstein’s theoretical aim to fracture and distance any sense of illusion that might have
been produced in the audience’s mind. Soon to abandon the stage entirely for cinema,
Eisenstein’s 1937 essay “Through Theater to Cinema” detailed his film theory of montage
claiming that Wise Man’s circuslike framework and composition of “separate numbers”
formed “into a single montage according to the image and likeness of a music hall,” where
the theater moved down to circus and “was brought to the brink of cinema” (Eisenstein
1949, 8).

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23
 Constructivism’s “The Ideological End”

As Foregger stated in 1926, “A future historian of art will call our years the years of
prophecy,” yet the visions of the Russian avant-garde were alas only to be realized in the
realm of performance, and for only a brief flash (Foregger [1926] 1975, 77). By 1932, as
Josef Stalin consolidated power as the head of the Communist Party, Constructivism and
other avant-garde movements accused of “formalism” were outlawed in the wake of the
newly defined aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. The experimentalism that had once
prevailed was now banned and art was required to submit to a program of political con-
formity to help support the Communist Party’s goals of industrialization and collectiviza-
tion with the task of “ideological transformation and education of the working man in
the spirit of Socialism” (Londre 1999, 547).
The shift implied suggested that technology no longer was sufficient as an aesthetic
instrument but rather should be put to quotidian use, harnessing it to construct the
industrial infrastructure of the new Communist society. In the climate of Stalinist Russia
in the late 1930s and 1940s, artists who were former aesthetic revolutionaries were either
silenced, or in the case of Meyerhold and others, machinated into the Stalinist show trial
spectacle to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed for their formalist sins.
It is undeniable that Constructivist principles are still at work today in our quest for
performances in which stage and spectator disappear in a blur of technological wizardry.
Still, a kind of blatant irony existed in the Constructivist endeavor to present sophisticated
technology within the comfortable isolation of the theater when the Soviet economy was
in shambles. Furthermore, during its heyday there was a sense that the theater had become
technologized not for the sake of the greater society but for the fetishism of technology
itself. The emphasis on mechanical systems, structures, gadgets, and organization was
ultimately seen to be the work of artists removed from the political realities of the world
outside of the theater: “so absorbed in the creation of systems that for a long time he
gave no thought to those he was creating for—to the people of the future” (Brodsky 1987,
81).

Weimar’s Machine Aesthetic

With the political-aesthetic revolution making its way through Russian society after the
October revolution, the fledgling German Weimar Republic was also paving the ground
for a similar cultural transformation, under very different political circumstances. The
bitter aftermath of the German defeat in World War I, the unstable economy and con-
stant political fighting between left and right political factions, the unfulfilled hopes
among many for a similar Bolshevik Revolution as in Russia and the devastating human
impact left by the war all contributed to a fractured climate of overwhelming uncertainty
and, simultaneously, frenzied creative output between 1919 and 1933. The question of

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whether a post–World War I Germany would retain traces of its former monarchial past
in the form of a bourgeois, albeit democratic republic or move instead toward socialism
or communism on the Russian model provided the backdrop for an almost endless
continuum of aesthetic exploration—a laboratory for a future technoculture.
After aborted attempts at establishing a socialist government in the revolution of
November 1918, the years following the founding of the Republic were singularly char-
acterized by an increasing politicization of aesthetic expression by way of formal explora-
tion across architecture, design, urban planning, visual art, music, and performance.
Between 1919 and 1923, the greatest change in the cultural climate was the shift from
Expressionism, the dominant artistic force in the periods immediately leading up to and
after World War I, toward the machine-age utopianism predicated by Cubism, Futurism,
and Constructivism.19
The predilection toward what the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement Theo von
Doesburg called “the mechanical aesthetic” in 1921 was already operating full force in
certain cultural millieus. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation)—a state-
supported federation founded in 1907 by architect Hermann Muthesius—coupled artistic
and design activity with industry in an effort to ensure a competitive role for Germany
in the mass industrial production of the early twentieth century against the encroaching
economic dominance of the United States. Embracing socialist ideals, the Werkbund
attempted to establish a feeder system for artists to be trained as craftsmen in the context
of mass production, exerting a major influence on the establishment of the Bauhaus, an
institution that sought the ultimate machine-age fusion of artist and craftsman in the
service of industry.
The growing mechanization of the visual and performing arts was also deeply affected
by Weimar’s art and industry mix.20 Underwritten by the new ideology of art’s fusion
with engineering, the transformation of stage into machine accelerated in the 1920s as
directors and designers rapidly incorporated hydraulics, revolves, screens, moving parts,
and complex lighting and projection apparatuses into their mise-en-scène. As the machine
dreams of practitioners quickly outgrew the outmoded theater infrastructures of the nine-
teenth century, artists and architects began to reimagine the apparatus of the theater
building itself, integrating new projection, light, and material technologies to catalyze
the mediated spectacles predicted to arise in the future.
In what the historian Stephen Mansbach called visions of totality, the utopian imaginings
for total theaters—particularly those influenced by Constructivism—were part of a general
social-cultural desire for the creation of worlds, where the aesthetic and the social, the
extraordinary and the everyday would fuse into a gigantic quotidian Gesamtkunstwerk.21
Finally, as a means of communicating political propaganda, performance based on
machine-age aesthetics and cinematic principles would serve documentary and infor-
mational functions. The technologizing of the stage would thus animate the so-called
masses to political activation and media would rapidly be incorporated into the spectacle,

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25
something that the National Socialists would turn on its head for even more mass effect
after 1933.

Reinhardt’s Expressionist Spectacles

In contrast to the call for electrification in the face of industrial age modernization, Expres-
sionism was resolutely opposed to contemporary technology’s encroachment into cultural
forms. Driven by an anarchistic individualism, it sought to expose subjective internal
emotions and mystical inner experience, rather than focus on constructing an accurate
representation of the outside world.
Although not driven by technology at a formal or conceptual level, it is still critical
to note the work of the expressionist Austrian director Max Reinhardt, one of the leading
theatrical creators of the time. The Vienna-born Reinhardt, whose interpretations of clas-
sical Western dramatic texts were staged as mass spectacles in unusually proportioned
spaces involving hundreds of performers, was also acutely interested in exploiting the
most sophisticated advances in contemporary lighting and stage machinery to achieve a
total spectacle in which the lines between event and spectator would dissolve. As early as
1905, he began to explore new reflective lighting techniques developed by the Italian light-
ing inventor Mariano Fortuny [Architectonic, chapter 4] as well as to utilize the mechani-
cally driven revolving stage, a technique derived from Japanese Kabuki theater (mawari
butai) in the mid eighteenth century. With scenery built on a turntable, Reinhardt could
choreograph a theatrical spectacle in which not only could new scenographic perspectives
be achieved, but also, more important, actor and stage environment could be seamlessly
united, flowing into and out of each other.
Owing much to Wagner’s techniques at Bayreuth, Reinhardt’s theatrical work fluctu-
ated in scope and ambition between mass theatrical illusion and the use of machinery for
the express purpose of spectacle construction. This formula is no better exemplified as in
the example of the immense Grosses Schauspielhaus built for Reinhardt by the architect
Max Poelzig on top of a former circus in Berlin in 1919. Originally named The Theater
for 5000, but in actuality seating “only” 3000, the Grosses Schauspielhaus was designed
with Reinhardt’s spectacles in mind through its wide, arena-like shape and its deeply set
thrust stage that literally jutted out into the audience space.
Berlin critics never accepted the space as appropriate for serious drama due to its
unusual interior of thousands of hanging plastic stalactites designed for acoustic dampen-
ing and the space’s gargantuan proportions (the proscenium itself measured some 24
meters across in width and 22 meters deep), but the theater was outfitted with the most
recent lighting equipment as well as a turntable: a technical apparatus constructed for
Reinhardt’s great theatrical pageants. Unfortunately, the combined attitude of unease
from critics and audiences alike toward the bizarrely decorated and colossal space

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led Reinhardt to leave Berlin and return to his native Austria and the theater was then
converted over to popular entertainments.

Bruno Taut’s Der Weltbaumeister

Derived from the mind of an architect and not a theater designer, another intriguing
example of Expressionist performance was the work of the German architect Bruno Taut.
Known for his large-scale social housing projects in Berlin in the 1920s, Taut’s utopian
imagination had arguably been shaped by his experience from the real world horrors of
World War I. Heavily influenced by the German writer Paul Scheerbart, Taut’s ideas
originated in concepts focused on the separation of man and nature and the encroaching
technologizing of humanity. In science fiction–like novels, Scheerbart imagined utopian
cathedrals of glass and performances that would take place at a scale unbeknownst at the
time to most performance practice. One of Scheerbart’s proposed events, the Oratory for
Balloon Gondalas (1910), suggested an almost Futurist scenario for an orchestra and chorus
in a series of gondolas attached to balloons that would float up into the skies above the
Germany city of Dresden.22
Like his mentor Scheerbart, Taut imagined transcendent architectures that would
unite normal, everyday people (Volk) with an infinite, mystical, transcendental reality
connected by way of spirit (Geist), seeking a new, spiritual role for architecture. But, the
stage, Taut wrote, would also provide a place where, if only for a short time, the ideal
Glanzwelt (literally, the shining world) of inner imagination and the real world could
come together.
In describing his ideal of an endless theater in the summer of 1919, Taut already
imagined the kind of theatrical space that Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus would soon
characterize. Taut’s theater would feature a constant interplay between stage and audito-
rium utilizing material technology such as glass in combination with colored light. The
proscenium arch, which Taut saw as preventing the fusion of the infinite stage with the
audience space, would be completely removed. “The auditorium,” wrote Taut in his essay
“Zum Neuen Theaterbau,” “through its articulation, extends itself into the stage, so that
during the performance one senses no division. The auditorium must already appear limit-
less, but the stage must be truly limitless, not simply in its spiritual multiplicity but
sometimes without an actual end” (Taut 1919, 208).
In order to fulfill these ideas, Taut resorted to the development of a theatrical work
called Der Weltbaumeister (The World Builder) or what the architect labeled an “architectural
drama for symphonic music.” Der Weltbaumeister was composed of a series of thirty black-
and-white drawings accompanied by music depicting the gradual emergence and trans-
formation of an architectural form traveling through infinite space—an architectural
performance without actors. Beginning in a kind of tinted ganzfeld, a space without edges

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27
lying beyond the realms of perception, the architectural form appeared and then shattered
into atomic pieces, dancing as particles through Taut’s mystical, cosmological universe
and then eventually coalesced into a sparkling glass cathedral—the ultimate embodiment
of the Glanzwelt.
Published by the Folkwang house in 1920, Taut’s drawings depicted his synesthetic,
cosmic architecture cum symphony drama; a theatrical experience where “colors and form
would sound and carry their tone as pure undisturbed elements of the infinite” (Taut
1920, xii). The disappearance of the human being is by no means an antihumanist gesture
but in typical Expressionist style, brought about a synesthetic fusion between the observer
and the spectacle itself. Like many utopian projects of the early twentieth century, Der
Weltbaumeister generated a metaphysical and spiritual experience for the spectators; an
experience radically distinct from the visions of an electromechanical stage yet, at the
same time, pointing toward future Bauhaus performances where the human figure was
only part of a larger play of media effects.

Dada

Dada (the French word for rocking horse)—the slowly growing movement in the latter
part of the 1910s—was certainly Expressionism’s direct antithesis. Influenced by Futurism
as well as the cabaret culture of pre–World War I Germany and Switzerland, Dada’s
official founding date was the opening of the infamous Cabaret Voltaire bar on the
Spiegelgasse in Zürich in spring 1916. With the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire and
the publishing of the first Dada manifestos, the movement’s participants quickly became
opposed to Expressionism’s mystical yearnings for inner experience and its factory of
interior illusions in the shadow of a World War I–shattered Europe.
Composed of a mix of Futurist shock techniques and genres ranging from cabaret per-
formance, sound poetry, absurdist manifestoes, live readings, spoken word, and in general,
events designed to shock the staid Zürich bourgeoisie, Dada took both a nihilistic and
ironic view of a world overcome by absurdity and meaninglessness. Having seen the
Futurist dreams of mechanization find their quintessential expression in the mechanized
horrors of the first World War’s trenches, artists like Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Richard
Huelsenbeck, and Raoul Hausmann embraced the mechanized, the artificial, the anti-
establishment, and the senseless.
There is no argument that the initial Swiss Dada group (as well as subsequent mani-
festations in Berlin, Paris, and New York) was a critical moment in the avant-garde of
the twentieth century. Yet, at the same time, Dada was never particularly interested in
the techno-utopias being established in Russian, German, and Dutch Constructivist
circles. Performance constituted a major artistic vehicle for the Dadaists, but its form
highly resembled the decidedly low-tech, prank-like street interventions and serate of early
Italian and Russian Futurism.

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 The connection to Futurism (which eventually Dada would also oppose, if not for
the simple reason of competition) is made apparent by founder Tristan Tzara’s comments
in his 1922 essay “Dadaism and the Theater,” which similarly called for the end of stage
illusionism. Here, Tzara opened the way for a new kind of spectacle in which its instru-
ments of effects (e.g., scenography and lighting) would be fully exposed to the spectators
and where the performers would be liberated from the “cage of the proscenium” (Carlson
1993, 343). Regardless of the fact that Dada acknowledged the machine aesthetic, par-
ticularly in the works of the Berlin Dada group formed around Georg Grosz, the move-
ment contributed little to formal spatiotechnical innovations.

Schwitters’s Merzbühne

Kurt Schwitters, another German artist influenced by Dada’s modus operandi, also
developed his own utopian imaginary blending architecture and performance. Branding
his own Dada-esque, lifelong artistic project in order to maintain independence
from Dada’s Zurich and Berlin manifestations, Schwitters’s Gesamtkunstwerk Merz
was more a total vision of the world than a specific work. Sprawling across multiple
media, from collage composed of newspaper bits and other material to sound and
concrete poetry experiments, its most famous component, Merzbau, was a massive, strange,
and grotto-like architectonic environment constructed from paper, cardboard, and other
materials that occupied the studios and room of Schwitters’s homes, first in Hannover,
Germany, in the 1920s and later in Norway and England during his World War II
exile.
In search of the ideal composite work fusing all branches of art into an artistic unity,
Schwitters also turned to the stage. His 1923 text Merzbühne (meaning “Merz stage”)
proposed a similar kind of total scenario to serve as a platform for the performance of Merz
drama, a nonliterary event that would be a Wagnerian fusion of set, score, and text. The
Merzbühne, however, went far beyond Wagner’s rather old-fashioned reliance on dramatic
narrative and music, instead imagining a performance of matter itself—a kind of living
Merzbau made of three-dimensional objects interacting with other materials. A “fusing of
all factors into a composite work,” the Merzbühne’s “actors” would range from liquid, solid,
and gaseous substances while the environment would be constructed from materials as
diverse as “white wall, man, barbed wire entanglements, blue distance, light cone” with
noise-generating materials such as “violin, drum, trombone, sewing machine, grandfather
clock, stream of water, etc.” (Schwitters 1989, 62).
Naturally, such a staged choreography of substances also involved a stage set that
moved, shifted, fell backward and forward into relief, and morphed. “Use is made of
compressible surfaces or surfaces capable of dissolving into meshes; surfaces that fold like
curtains, expand or shrink. Objects will be allowed to move and revolve, and lines will
be allowed to broaden into surfaces” (Schwitters 1989, 62). Here, the Merzbühne betrayed

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29
not just a passing resemblance to Tatlin’s ideas for his production of Zangezi but also to
the other Constructivist’s interests in matter becoming kinetic. On a stage where things
like strings, gasses, and space took on movement, matter no longer represented something
but was itself by virtue of its material constitution. The Merzbühne hence tried for no
less than the creation of a performance context where the inanimate could become
animate.

Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Stages

No one managed to articulate the utopia of a transformable stage within the technical
constraints of the time better than the visionary scenic designer and architect Frederick
Kiesler. Born into an Austrian family in Romania, Kiesler studied architecture, painting,
and printmaking in Vienna between 1908 and 1913. His entrance into the pantheon of
European avant-garde theater performance took place in Berlin in 1923, when—without
experience in stage design—the thirty-three-year-old created an unusual electro-optical-
mechanical scenography for Karel Čapek’s dystopian science fiction robot drama R.U.R.
(Rossum’s Universal Robots). From what is known of Kiesler’s set from two singular photo-
graphs and descriptive texts that remain, it appears to have been a massive, Rube Goldberg
contraption whose surface consisted of a dizzying array of painted and real objects: electri-
cal machinery, metallic forms, doors and screens that opened, wheels and gears, and other
abstracted techno-emblems.
Kiesler’s control wall apparatus featured a large, 3-foot (1 meter)-wide lead constructed
mechanical iris that when opened, revealed a flickering film projected onto its surface, a
kind of seismograph in the middle that moved back and forth, a system of flashing light-
bulbs, and a continually rotating turbine-like wheel. Most impressive was his inclusion
of the Tanagra device, a nineteenth-century optical illusion system installed mainly in
European Luna (theme) parks, which consisted of a series of concave mirrors that helped
to produce an almost television-like effect by reducing the size of the performers behind
the set and projecting them at micro sizes onto another mirror inset into one of the
mechanical frames in the wall.23 The Tanagra device allowed the audience to see what was
going on behind the scenery, albeit in spatially manipulated scale.24
Like many similar artists working in the stage arts at the time, Kiesler’s design sought
to rid the theater once and for all of painted backdrops and incorporate cinematic media
into the stage environment. “No more stage painting! . . . The stage,” wrote Kiesler, “is
not a buttonhole that should be decorated. It is a completely independent organism with
its own theatrical laws of its time” (Lesák 1988a, 42).
His next venture moved toward an even more extraordinary formulation of machine
scenic construction described as the Raumbühne (literally “space stage”) and realized in
prototype form at the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques in Vienna
in 1924. As artistic director of the exhibition, Kiesler curated a smorgasbord of the most

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Figure 1.6 Frederick Kiesler. General view of the Raumbühne (Space Stage), 1924. © 2008 Austrian
Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

radical mechanized European theatrical experiments of the day, from the Russian
Constructivist set designs of Popova, Moholy-Nagy, and the Bauhaus to Schwitters’s
Merzbühne and Prampolini’s Futurist scenographic concepts.
“The stage is space . . . the new need is to blow up the flat image on stage in order to
dissolve it into space . . . this creates the space stage, which is not an a priori space but
rather appears as space itself ” (Lesák 1988a, 43). Conceived as an element of a much larger
project that Kiesler called the railway theater, at first sight the structure, which was con-
structed as an open tower in the center of the Vienna Konzerthaus, invoked the competing
visions of a tower, a parking garage driving ramp, and a boxing ring construction: a
multistory set of platforms joined together by a spiral formed ramp traveling upwards
from the floor (figure 1.6). Each platform held a separate space for acting/performing areas,
of which the top area was made accessible to the performers only from ladders and steps.
Although not realized, Kiesler’s original plans also included the use of an elevator that
would travel up and down the center axis of the structure to transport the performers
through the structure’s eight various levels.25

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31
 Based partially on the overall success of the exhibition, Kiesler was invited to Paris
and then emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he became an American citizen
and began exploring multiple avenues for his creative output, including theater and
exhibition design, writing, cinema and theater design, as well as visionary architectural
projects, only one of which was eventually realized.26 While Kiesler’s later performance
projects researched the creation of a series of unique and utopian endless theaters (the
unbuilt Universal Theater and the conceptual endless theater), he also continued practical
work in the theater as a central avenue for his aesthetic philosophies.27 As head of the
Juilliard School Drama Division’s department of scenography from 1934–1956, for
example, Kiesler carried forth his radical experimentation in using the new media of the
time, such as lighting, film projection, and architectural materials, as well as his first
experiments working with biomorphic sculptural forms within a stage context.
In the same period, Kiesler also formulated a radical theory named correalism, a word
play on the statistical term correlation, meaning an interrelationship between two or more
sets of variables or observations. Essentially reinforcing ideas already developed in the
1920s by the Constructivists, Kiesler defined correalism as a theory of design in a 1939
essay entitled “On Correalism and Biotechnique: a Definition and Test of a New Approach
to Building and Design.”28 Correalism was seen as the “exploration into the dynamics of
continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments,”
specifically, the interaction between different built forms of matter and their interaction
with human beings (Kiesler 1939, 61). As founder and director of the short-lived Labora-
tory for Design-Correlation at Columbia University from 1937–1941 he explored con-
cepts of intuition, perception (specific work on a so-called vision machine), and dreams
as well as issues of human–environment interaction. A new scientific theory of design,
Kiesler wrote, was needed to understand how aesthetic practice could be harnessed to
create the conditions for a new kind of socialized human in constant contact with an
environment increasingly embedded with technology.
As increased technologization would bring aesthetic practice in line with the realms
of quotidian life, designer–artists like Kiesler saw a moral and ethical imperative inter-
twined with design, particularly in formulating new ways by which aesthetic practice
could deal with real-life problems. In bringing his performance background to bear on
new situations of interaction design, Kiesler thus sought to develop total and organic
environments where the separation and dualities between vision and reality, image and
environment could be dissolved, leading to experiences “where there are no borders
between art, space, and life” (Phillips 1989, 114).

Propaganda Machines I: Erwin Piscator

In contrast to Kiesler’s elevation of technology directed to creating a new kind of human,

other theater artists working in Berlin during the Weimar period utilized machine-age

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aesthetics for different ends. Born in Southern Germany at the tail end of the nineteenth
century, the German director Erwin Piscator became a staunch advocate of what he
dubbed “the proletarian theater”—an agitprop (agitational propaganda) theater fundamen-
tally preoccupied with raising class consciousness for the working class in preparation for
the coming socialist revolution. During the political unrest of the Weimar Republic,
Piscator rose to become one of its central theatrical creators, making his early reputation
with a series of politically uncompromising and outspoken productions, many of which
took place outside of the domain of the institutional theater in locations such as meeting
halls with amateur actors.
At the famous Volksbühne (people’s stage) in Berlin between 1924 and 1927, Piscator
made a name for himself with stagings that were as controversial for their novel use of
slide and film projections as for their explicitly political and ideological bent. His 1924
production of Fahnen (Flags), a second-rate propaganda play about a Chicago workers’
uprising by the German journalist Alfons Paquet, used the theater’s massive 20-meter
revolving stage, a large-scale projection screen placed behind the proscenium, and two
projection screens mounted on both sides of the proscenium at the same level as the
balcony. Because Piscator’s plans to use film did not materialize in Fahnen, projected slides
with the title texts of scenes were substituted to comment on the action of the play; the
director referred to these as blackboards.
His next production, a mammoth historical pageant entitled Trotz Allem (Despite Every-
thing) was produced for the German Communist Party’s first official convention in Berlin
and staged in Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. Here, Piscator progressed with his use of
media through the direct incorporation of film sequences with live performers. Essentially
a documentary pastiche of historical events in Germany between the years 1914–1919,
Trotz Allem’s greatest achievement was Piscator’s intersplicing of filmic sequences choreo-
graphed with live action, a first in the history of live performance.29
Acting as a formal device used to present what the director called “political and social
mechanisms,” the filmic sequences were also reported to have had a surprising and stun-
ning emotional effect on the audience’s experience. “The momentary surprise when we
changed from live scenes to film was very effective. But the dramatic tension that live
scene and film clip derived from one another was even stronger. They interacted and built
up each other’s power and at intervals the action attained a furioso that I have seldom
experienced in theater” (Piscator 1978, 97).
Piscator’s next Volksbühne production, Paquet’s play Sturmflut (Tidal Wave) advanced
further the use of film integrated into stage action. Specifically shot for the production,
Piscator diffused filmic sequences from a battery of four film projectors onto the main set
piece: a large hanging transparent screen termed a “living wall.” Here, the combination
of documentation footage depicting cities, forests, naval battles, strikes, and street fighting
once again reinforced Piscator’s use of film as “the theater’s fourth dimension . . . living
scenery” (Willett 1978b, 60). Like his Russian counterpart Meyerhold at the same time,

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33
Piscator appropriated the visual apparatus of cinema not only from a technical standpoint
but also a dramaturgical one—a way of reaching an audience whose visual vocabularies
were rapidly changing as a result of moving images.30
Piscator’s “phenomenal technical imagination” was to reach its peak, however, only
after he left the Volksbühne in 1926, founding his own series of short lived (1927–1931)
companies eponymously named the Piscator Bühne. Collapsing into bankruptcy after the
first season in 1928, the director’s eight precedent-setting productions would have untold
influence on the creative use of technological systems in theatrical performance later in
the twentieth century. Working with his set designer Traugott Müller, Piscator’s opening
project, a massive production of Ernst Toller’s political drama Hoppla, wir Leben! (Hurray,
We Are Alive!) featured an 8-meter high, multilevel, scaffolding-like structure: a cutaway
house divided into cubicle sections and integrated with transparent screens for rear
projection.
The Piscator Bühne’s next production, a documentary adaptation of Count Alexei
Tolstoy’s post-revolution Russian melodrama Rasputin upped the ante with a revolving
hemispheric dome set constructed out of iron pipe and divided into inhabitable sections
with hinged flap doors that opened to reveal distinct acting areas (figure 1.7). With the
constantly shifting architecture of designer Müller’s dome, as well as suspended but
flyable screens, Piscator essentially obtained a series of overlapping dynamic surfaces upon
which he projected a running visual counterpoint of around 6,000 feet of documen-
tary film footage acquired from Russia together with textual commentary during the
performance.
Piscator enhanced his reputation for technological innovation with his next two pro-
ductions, a new adaptation of the Czech writer Gustav Hašek’s comic antiwar novel The
Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweyk and the Berlin writer Walter Mehring’s inflation-era
drama Der Kaufmann von Berlin (The Merchant of Berlin) through the use of mechanically
driven treadmills that carried the main performers across the stage (Schweyk) and a
multitiered set on a revolve with two treadmills, flying brides, and catwalks raised and
lowered by gantry cranes and no less than four simultaneous projections designed by László
Moholy-Nagy. The 1929 Der Kaufmann von Berlin was to be a watershed in Piscator’s
career, his most complex and final mammoth production in pre–World War II Germany.31
After the second Piscator Bühne became financially insolvent due to insufficient funds,
Piscator directed several smaller, more traditional agitprop productions before leaving
Berlin entirely for Russia in 1931. Due to the takeover of the Nazis in 1933 and the
imposition of Stalin’s socialist realism cultural policy in Russia, Piscator fled to the United
States, where he remained until after World War II.
Accused of favoring technological apparatuses over dramatic storytelling, Piscator
continually maintained that technology was not an end but rather an instrument
to promote a revolutionary political agenda through a new kind of dramaturgy. Like
Meyerhold’s work, formal aesthetic practice and political activism went hand in hand; the

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Figure 1.7 Erwin Piscator. Stage Model for Rasputin (Scenography Traugott Müller, 1927.)

“technicality” of Piscator’s stage, with its integration of media machinery, would have
been “unthinkable” without his total and utter commitment to “revolutionary socialism”
(Piscator 1978, 220).32 As Piscator repeatedly made clear in his writings, technology was
as an instrument used to enlarge the sense of historical events themselves—to construct
a dialectical relationship with an audience in order to catalyze a Marxist political
revolution.
Deploying the latest machinery, Piscator’s technological–dramaturgical innovations
pushed the traditional theater apparatus to its technical and organizational limits. By
using technology to invoke a new form of revolutionary agency in the audience, politically
motivated artists like Piscator and Meyerhold helped generate the need for a radical mode
of cultural production within a formally experimental context. Nowhere is this goal more
apparent than in Piscator’s desire for a new kind of production environment, a goal that
he pursued with the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to build an audacious
but ultimately unrealized flexible and populist “total theater” that could be fully adapt-
able while incorporating the latest innovations.33

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35
 Such an ideal theater suggested a new kind of infrastructure, with all of the instruments
and apparatuses of the laboratory, a point made patently clear in a statement by Piscator’s
production manager Otto Richter that resonates perhaps even more in our present moment:
“Workshops should be attached to the acting and rehearsal areas to enable us to get
down to some real work, and they should be equipped with every possible machine:
for technical work behind the scenes is so complex and varied that it is impossible to
work without the very best machinery . . . Instead of luxurious auditoriums made of iron,
concrete, glass, and fine materials, build us workshops and a stage which is equal to
modern production techniques and much more money and precious time will be saved”
(1978, 193).

Propaganda Machines II: Bertolt Brecht

It was through one of his chief collaborators, the dramaturg, playwright, and director
Bertolt Brecht, that many of Piscator’s more radical notions were popularized, albeit under
Brecht’s own name. One of the most influential stage directors, and playwrights in
twentieth-century performance history, Brecht began to formulate his theories of the so-
called epic theater during his work with Piscator, incorporating ideas such as the use of
film and projection as commentary [Cinefication and the Stage, chapter 4], as well as the
creation of theatrical performances more akin to demonstrations.
In fact, Brecht’s greatest influence had less to do with the kind of technological wiz-
ardry practiced so successfully by Piscator but rather in his writing and directing, where
he further articulated technology’s role through the context of a political theater of action.
In a 1932 interview, Brecht pointed out the necessity of utilizing technology, even under
adverse conditions. “It’s an effort (to use technology), particularly when you come up
against such disastrous shortcomings on the technical side as Piscator and I did. The flies
collapsed when heavy objects were hung from them, the stage broke when we put weight
on it, the motors driving the various essential machinery made too much noise . . . [O]f
course we had to make use of complicated machinery if we were to show modern processes
on the stage” (B. Brecht 1978, 66).
For Brecht, Piscator’s advances in the use of media and the mechanization of the stage
were a critical development in the quest to bring theater into resonance with modern life.
The device of projected commentaries, for instance, operated as a “primitive attempt at
literarizing the theater,” making performance operate on a meta level of critical com-
mentary in which the audience became aware of the apparatus at play and were provoked
to take a critical stance about the technopolitical practices of modern capitalism depicted
on stage (B. Brecht 1978, 43).
Not surprisingly, Brecht’s model of performance was resolutely opposed to the immer-
sive aims of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, with Wagner’s all-encompassing fusion of
artistic elements becoming, in Brecht’s opinion, a nightmare come true that “degrades”

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the individual elements into a muddling soup. Whether visual, sonic, or textual, each
media element in Brecht’s model maintained its independence from one another by way
of a radical separation (Trennung).
Wagner’s theory, however, presented a far greater threat to Brecht’s instructive model
of performance, for the very immersion of the spectator in a torrent of sensations would
drastically mitigate her ability to take a critical stance to what she saw. “The process of
fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes
a passive (i.e., suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must be of
course fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce solid
intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up” (B. Brecht 1978, 38).

The Bauhaus: Preliminaries

Under the title Kunst und Technik—eine neue Einheit (Art and Technology: A New Unity), the
German Bauhaus opened its first public exhibition, the Bauhaus Week, in Weimar
Germany in 1923. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius as both a teaching institution
and ideology, the Bauhaus was a distinctly modern phenomenon and one of the first to
emphasize the conceptual and practical fusion of art and design, handicraft, and mass
industrial production. Gropius’s motto of “unity as diversity” focused on pragmatic,
hands-on learning in which architects, sculptors, and painters would abandon their
ivory-tower stance toward craftspeople and go back to the shaping of materials in the
workshop.34
As part of this direction, Gropius sought out master artists and craftsmen of the time
such as painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and the sculptor Oskar Schlemmer, in
addition to others. The central defining characteristic of the Bauhaus approach was a one-
year intensive Vorkurs (preliminary course), a kind of boot camp for all students involving
basic questions of material form. Initially under the leadership of the Austrian designer
Johannes Itten, the Vorkurs specialized in what we now take to be the fundamentals of
basic design education: studies in materials, form, color, and composition.
In a continual spirit of transformation throughout its fourteen-year existence from
1919–1933, much of the early Bauhaus work was slanted toward more mystical directions.
With its emphasis on individual artistic expression, Itten’s view of art did not ultimately
coincide with Gropius’s pragmatic, art-technology-industry direction, and in 1923, the
artist, theoretician, and educator László Moholy-Nagy took Itten’s place, retooling the
Vorkurs with a broader liberal arts approach emphasizing the intersection of art, technol-
ogy, and biology.
This direction was made even more manifest by the Bauhaus’s move from Weimar to
a specially designed building by Gropius in the German city of Dessau in 1926. As the
Bauhaus reputation was cemented in Germany and rapidly spread internationally, the
emphasis on the unity of art and technology not only demonstrated a shift in the Bauhaus

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37
pedagogical direction, but also reflected the larger transformations taking place across the
European cultural landscape.

From Material to Architecture: Moholy-Nagy’s Theater of Totality

Similar to El Lissitzky, the Hungarian artist, theoretician, and educator László Moholy-
Nagy also saw the future of mankind dependent on scientific and technological progress
and the necessary role of education as liberating the creative potential of the whole human
being. Appointed to the Bauhaus in 1923 by Gropius as part of the heightened interest
in Constructivism, Moholy-Nagy took over the metal shop from Paul Klee, seeking a
reform of the Vorkurs specifically based on Constructivist principles that combined the
exploration of materials with new technologically augmented forms of expression.
Although he remained at the Bauhaus for only six years, Moholy-Nagy’s impact as both
ambassador and policy creator put an undeniable stamp on the institution.
To get a sense of Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogical and artistic directions, one need only
look to his major 1923 book Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture) and
later republished in English as The New Vision, a work that functions like an encyclopedia
of early–twentieth-century avant-garde creation, from Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism,
Constructivism, and Surrealism to the beginnings of the so-called International Style in
architecture. The book also revealed Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with the aesthetic impulses
provided by the mechanized world, as well as his command of its visual vocabularies.
Illustrated with a dazzling narrative of images from his own as well as his students’
work combined with archival photography, Moholy-Nagy moved quickly from the struc-
tural, textural, material, and sensorial qualities inherent in materials to an exploration of
volumetric forms made manifest through sculpture and concluding with kinetic explora-
tions of light and space.
The book culminated in the exploration of space as a dynamic material through built
(i.e., architectural) form. It is here that he articulated his central concept of Raumgestaltung
(literally, the design or ordering of space)—an idea that encapsulated Moholy-Nagy’s
interest in the application of new materials for the exploration of kinetic form. “Space,”
he wrote, “is a reality of our sensory experience,” both a medium of expression as well as
a shapeable material (Moholy-Nagy 2001, 195). This almost Futurist-tinged, dynamic
vision of space perhaps explains why the book’s conclusion is preoccupied with endless
images of elevator shafts, conveyer belts, smokestacks, aerial street intersection shots, and
other building structures—images not only of the industrial transformations of spatiality
but also the modernist visions of overlapping materials and structures in the architectonic
shaping of the human environment.
The stage also provided Moholy-Nagy with a concrete example for his spatial explora-
tions that would take place during his time with the Bauhaus and afterward as a freelance
stage designer in Berlin before his exile to the United States. This transformation of static

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space into dynamic space was an idea that Moholy-Nagy began to explore over several
projects, one a model of a kinetic stage environment entitled Kinetisches Konstructives System:
Bau mit Bewegungsbahnen für Spiel und Beförderung (Kinetic Construction System: Building with
Conveyors for Play and Transportation) (with Alfred Kemeny) and the second, a larger
concept for a so-called theater of totality.
As a kinetic theater environment, Moholy-Nagy and Kemeny’s Kinetic Construction
System was envisioned as a huge, vertical cylinder in which audience and performers alike
would be kept constantly in motion by a series of spiral formed conveyer belts and escala-
tors mounted on the structure’s exterior and interior (figure 1.8). With a central elevator,
the performers could ascend and descend through the tube or slide from top to bottom
via a fire station–like pole. Additionally, through large rings, the entire structure itself
would turn in circular motion, thus providing several different simultaneously operating
dynamics. While an actual scale model appears to have been built by architecture student
Stefan Sebök in 1928, the intriguing aspect about Moholy-Nagy’s theoretical conception
was the shifting role of performer and actor enabled by the dynamic behavior of the build-
ing itself [Performative Architecture, chapter 3].
This concept of an electromechanical theater was further developed in Moholy-Nagy’s
article “Theater, Circus, Variety,” published in 1923 in the first Bauhaus book dealing
with stage work, alongside essays by Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, and the Hungarian
architect and teacher Farkas Molnár. “Theater, Circus, Variety,” laid out Moholy-Nagy’s
own vision of a machine age Gesamtkunstwerk: the theater of totality (Moholy-Nagy 1961,
49). Dissimilar to Wagner’s models, Moholy-Nagy’s totality deemphasized the role
of drama and poetry as well as the human being in favor of the mechanical—what he
labeled the mechanized eccentric. With total stage action envisioned as a great dynamic–
rhythmic process and constructed from “great clashing masses of media,” Moholy-Nagy’s
total theater also yearned for the disintegration of the line between spectator and
performer.
Moholy-Nagy was not interested only in the physical shaping of space through hard
architectural materials. With a “new action of light” involving “the potential of light for
sudden or blinding illumination, for flare effects, for phosphorescent effects, for bathing
the auditorium in light synchronized with climaxes or with the total extinguishing of
lights on the stage,” as well as acoustic phenomena, media could be perceived as that
which could define space and create volume (Moholy-Nagy 1961, 67). Equally incorporat-
ing the play of both material (mechanics, elevators, optical instruments, airplanes) and
immaterial (light, film, and projection) apparatuses, Moholy-Nagy’s vision would not only
catalyze the turning of passive spectator into active participant but also create the potential
for a creative transformation of the human organism.
With the stepping down of Gropius and the takeover by the devout communist Hannes
Meyer, Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus to make his living as a stage and com-
mercial graphic designer in Berlin until 1933. In the fading twilight of the Weimar

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

39
Figure 1.8 Lázsló Moholy-Nagy with Alfred Kemeny. Kinetic Construction System: Building with Conveyors
for Play and Transportation, 1922/1928. Courtesy of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Cologne.
Republic, it was in Berlin that Moholy-Nagy began to realize some of the ideas expressed
in “Theater, Circus, Variety” with a series of extravagant and experimental stage designs
that had been already articulated in the chapter on “Space/Architecture” in Von Material
zu Architektur (Moholy-Nagy 2001, 215–219).
His design for a 1928 production of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the
Staatsoper Berlin attempted to construct a space through the use of light and shadow
through a careful choreography of light against a series of translucent architectural
surfaces. The scenography for Piscator’s production of Der Kaufmann von Berlin operated
in a far more mechanical manner, deploying moving ramps, bridges, treadmills, elevator
stages, and a specially shot film directed by Moholy-Nagy himself. In the hands of
Piscator, all of this technical paraphernalia helped demonstrate the play’s chaotic portrait
of inflation-era Berlin, causing the critic Bernhard Diebold simply to state: “What an
apparatus!” (Willett 1978b, 100). Although Moholy-Nagy would work in a stage context
for only a short time, his ideas for the theater of totality were to be strongly influential
in his subsequent artistic and commercial design work in Europe and, after his immigra-
tion after the start of World War II, the United States.

Total Theaters of the Bauhaus

Both Moholy-Nagy and the sculptor and dancer Oskar Schlemmer [The Machine Body,
chapter 6] had a major impact not only on the development of new performance forms
in the Bauhaus stage workshop, but also machine-based performance environments, no
doubt due in part to the stage workshop’s interdisciplinary concentration, with the stage
design curriculum being one of the few programs in which students from across the
Bauhaus could come together in a collaborative research environment.
Picking up on themes from Moholy-Nagy, much of the Bauhaus research into total
theaters derived from four specific aims: (1) the removal of the line between spectating
and performing by shifting the relationship between stage and viewer, (2) the integration
of mechanical and media apparatuses to create a total sensory experience, (3) the exposure
of technology as part of the performance itself, and (4) the transformation of static
performance space into dynamic space by way of technical means.
Farkas Molnár’s concept for a mechanically changeable environment called the
U-Theater was a series of staging platforms that could be moved in both lateral as well as
vertical directions, depending on the staging requirements of a given work. Around these
platforms, a series of U-shaped rings formed the central amphitheater, with adjustable
and rotating seating for 1200 audience members dispersed across the orchestra and balcony
levels (figure 1.9, top left).
In the center of the auditorium, Molnár envisioned a cylindrically shaped elevator-like
apparatus upon which a long platform would be connected. As the elevator would ascend
and descend during performances, the performers installed on the platforms could be

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41
Figure 1.9 Four Bauhaus Theaters. (Clockwise from top left.) Farkas Molnár, U-Theater, 1925,
© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Heinz Loew, Model for a Mechanical Stage, 1927, © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
Walter Gropius, Total-Theater (designed for Erwin Piscator), 1927, © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn. Andreas
Weininger, Spherical Theater, © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn.

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immediately connected to the upper balconies of the theater space, which were to be
positioned over the main U-shaped seating areas. “Mechanical aids for the heightening of
various effects . . . machines for dispersing odors of various kinds” were also to be installed
in the space, along with a series of moving, hydraulically driven drawbridges, ramps, and
catwalks, all designed to link the stage with the amphitheater and thus break down the
separation between viewers and event (Gropius 1961, 74).
Student Heinz Loew produced a scale model for a completely mechanical stage without
the presence of performer or audience. Composed of a structure built on three tracks and
with two rotary disks, Loew’s mechanical stage set in motion a combination of three-
dimensional objects, rectilinear-static forms and translucent surfaces, all mechanically
controlled to achieve different compositional effects (figure 1.9, top right). More impor-
tant, performance in the age of the machine had to acknowledge the presence of the
technical operators, putting them on display before the public as performers—yet another
nail in Wagner’s coffin.35
Another equally utopian scheme was Andreas (Andor) Weininger’s plan for a massive
Kugeltheater (Spherical Theater), a gigantic globe-shaped room whose aim was to create for
the spectators a new relationship to space itself (figure 1.9, bottom right). By placing the
audience on the inner wall of the sphere (something that seemed certain to guarantee
a sense of vertigo) and transferring the normal flat plane of the stage onto a series of
corkscrew-like ramps that scaled up the central, vertical axis of the globe, Weininger’s
theater proposed to create a radical new set of “psychic, optical, acoustical relation-
ships . . . new rhythms of motion to new modes of observation” (Gropius 1961, 89).
The boldest performance environment to emerge was Gropius’s own Total-Theater.
Asked by Piscator to conceive of a new kind of completely flexible environment that would
accommodate his technical visions, Gropius responded with a “great space machine”: a
mechanically transformable space with seating for 2000, capable of accommodating mul-
tiple stage setups during the same performance, such as arena (audience concentrically
around all sides), picture frame (i.e., proscenium), and thrust (audience on three sides).
By way of gradually moving machinery, the total theater could transform the spectator/
stage relationship over the course of a performance by turning the large, revolving stage
180 degrees (figure 1.9, bottom left).
In order to accommodate different geometries as well as Piscator’s relentless use of film,
Gropius designed a complex projection system capable of rear-projecting onto a series of
cycloramas wrapped around the space. Through a series of mobile projectors and twelve
fixed rear film projectors fanned across the auditorium, Gropius’s integration of the pro-
jection apparatus directly into the space’s architecture would serve not only to “build with
light and project slides and movies of abstract or figurative material to create scenic illu-
sions which render real flats or stage props superfluous,” but also make it possible to
plunge the spectator’s directly into the center of real and filmic action (Piscator 1978,
183). Unrealized due to financial reasons, Gropius’s plans would nevertheless have a major

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43
impact on the technological transformation of performance environments into the late
twentieth century.36
Despite the advanced technological vision demanded of the project, Gropius made
clear that technology was not just a means to “accumulate a collection of fanciful technical
apparatus and gimmickry,” but rather a tool for “the most fantastic experimental creations
of a stage director of the future” (Piscator 1978, 183). Similarly, Oskar Schlemmer
reiterated the same sentiment of cautiousness in his writing, stating that technology
should be tempered first and foremost by aesthetic concerns: “Today’s technology already
has the necessary apparatus. It is a question of money—and, more important, a question
as to how successfully such a technical expenditure can meet the desired effect. How
long, that is, can any rotating, vibrating, whirring contrivance, together with an infinite
variety of forms, colors and lights, sustain the interest of the spectator?” (Schlemmer
1961, 88).

Beyond Construction: Dadaism and Surrealism in France

As the electromechanical vision of the Constructivists overtook the Dutch-, German-, and
Russian-speaking worlds in the period between the two world wars, Dadaism gradually
migrated from its Zürich roots to Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Geneva, and Paris. Not
particularly interested in the architectural-spatial questions that consumed people like
Kiesler, Meyerhold, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, or Gropius, the Dadaists still shared some-
what of a penchant for multimedia events. Indeed, the internecine battles between the
French Dadaists, led by Tristan Tzara, who had left Zürich for Paris in 1919, and their
antithetical successors the Surrealists, led by André Breton, resulted in one work: the
“instantaneous ballet” Relâche (translated as No Performance Tonight!), which marked the
closest that either movement would get to the total performance imagined by machine-
age adherents.
The pinnacle of the break between Dada and Surrealism came with former Dadaist
Francis Picabia’s collaboration on Relâche with the French composer Erik Satie. Along
with other denizens of the avant-garde, including Man Ray, the young filmmaker
René Claire, Duchamp, the choreographer Jean Börlin, and the director of the renowned
Parisian Ballets Suédois Rolf de Maré, Relâche was a theatrical lashing out against the
Surrealists. The result of this retaliation was a media spectacle that not only mocked
the pretentiousness and inauthenticity of the Surrealist’s sudden love for a classical per-
formance form like ballet, but would also become a landmark event in the history of
avant-garde performance.
The word “Relâche” was used in theaters to indicate “no performance tonight.” Without
a doubt, the audience that arrived for the scheduled opening on November 27, 1924,
found the theater closed, with a sign hanging on the door stating none other than
“Relâche.” This was not just another Dadaist performance but a reality, in that illness

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forced the canceling of the premiere. The audience that returned on December 3 then
encountered a media spectacle incorporating frenetic live action and film. Relâche, a
“BALLET INSTANTANÉISME IN TWO ACTS, ONE CINEMATOGRAPHIC INTER-
MISSION, AND THE TAIL OF FRANCIS PICABIA’S DOG” took place on a stage
whose scenic spatiality was reduced by Picabia to an enormous wall of 370 silver disks.
Appearing like oversized gramophone records, each disk was inlaid with a powerful light-
bulb, which had the effect of directly blinding the audience.
As the lights dimmed, the audience was greeted first by a film of Picabia and Satie
aiming a cannon at them. The first act, featuring Man Ray and Duchamp, was composed
of various simultaneously played-out skits in different quadrants of the stage, including
dressing and undressing, all the while accompanied upstage by the Ballets Suédois
performing in almost total darkness. Satie’s music ranged from a satirical take on a Chopin
funeral march to lyrical dances. Those who expected a quiet intermission were jolted by
the projection of the young filmmaker René Claire’s surrealist film Entra’acte, featuring
performances by Satie and Picabia as well as a frame-by-frame score composed by Satie.37
The second act opened with huge banners announcing Satie as the greatest musician in
the world (an obvious attack on Breton’s camp), more bizarre dances by the Ballets
Suédois, and concluded with Satie and Picabia driving onto the stage in a Citroën
automobile, smiling and waving to the already riot-prone audience.
Even with scandalized press and an extremely disquieted public, the performance of
Relâche ran for a year, its success partially attributed to the anarchic humor and madcap
antics that Picabia and company had carefully choreographed. As Hans Richter later
described it, “The word Instantaneism emphasized yet again the central experience of Dada,
as Picabia saw it, and as he wanted it to be: the ‘value of the instant’ ” (Richter 1965,
192). The use of multiple media, the rapid-fire spirit of the performance’s Futurist-like
leanings toward instantaneity, and its use of cinematic vocabularies finally marked a
crucial point in Dada’s history: its elevation into the age of the machine.

Artaud’s Cruel Performance

The interwoven threads of the experiments between the world wars emphasized the
tension between the language of theatrical performance as literary text versus a formalized
event of color, shape, form, light, image, sound, space, bodies, and machinery. If the
Futurists, Constructivists, and the Bauhaus tried to mechanize the stage as the rehearsal
room for a new kind of human being inhabiting a technologized environment, the French
poet, playwright, actor, and theoretician Antonin Artaud viewed performance from a
radically different perspective: a savage exorcism of the darkest latent forces inhabiting
human experience.
Wracked by lifelong physical illness, addiction, and chronic depression, Artaud’s even-
tual physical and mental deterioration shaped his existential, pessimistic worldview and

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

45
fueled his own creative energies. First through poetry and ultimately with theatrical per-
formance, Artaud searched for the total metaphysical transformation of the human self.
Performance, he wrote in a 1927 essay “Manifeste pour un Théâtre avorté” (“Manifesto
for a Theater That Failed”), would be no less than magic in which the “inmost motives
of the heart” would be laid bare; a place where human anguish would erupt inside the
spectator and produce a form operating beyond spoken language and directly on the
nervous system (Artaud 1976, 161).
Like others, Artaud dismissed the literary tradition of the theater that he blamed for
the public’s loss of interest in the art form. Reduced to psychology and drawing-room
narratives, the theater had lost its danger and efficacy, as well as “the sense of profound
anarchy which lies at the root of all poetry” (Artaud 1958, 42). The ontology of perfor-
mance lay instead in its direct and concrete physical manifestation; its confrontation with
“the revelatory aspects of matter.” Akin to the plague, the theater would liberate the
darkest, repressed desires held inside us, producing radical shifts of consciousness similar
to the heightened spiritual states undergone during trance and possession.
Artaud began to articulate such a theater as early as 1924, but it was Asian perfor-
mance, first his encounter with Cambodian dance in Marseille and then his seminal
viewing of Balinese dance at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which in his eyes
“restore[d] theater to its level of pure and autonomous creation, under the sign of hallu-
cination and fear” (Artaud 1976, 215). Transfixed by the elaborate gestural phrases of
Balinese movement, Artaud soon discovered a spectacle that replaced words with embod-
ied states of consciousness as a series of gestures in flux. Unfamiliar to Western perfor-
mance practices, a metaphysics of gesture transformed the dancer’s bodies into pure signs
and moving hieroglyphs.
Despite the fact that one can read Artaud’s trembling at the Balinese other as an
extreme form of European exoticism not uncommon for its time, there was something
deeper within the almost intoxicating effect of the choreographed spectacle that he wit-
nessed. The Balinese embodied a theater beyond representation, a “double of life, just as
life is the double of a true theater.” Artaud would pursue this emphasis on the double or
the chimera throughout his most famous work, Le Théâtre et Son Double (The Theater and
Its Double) (1958).
In an almost prophetic statement in “Le Théâtre alchimique” (“Theater and Alchemy”),
written in 1932 and included in The Theater and Its Double, Artaud described theater’s
relationship to alchemy, the medieval practice of transforming base metals into gold.
Whereas alchemy sought to use symbols as stand-ins or doubles for the real process of
transformation, the theater also engaged in a similar process of doubleness. The theater
was not a representation of real life, but in Artaud’s exact words, instead a la réalité virtuelle
(virtual reality), one that evoked the alchemical processes of transforming matter from
mind:

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All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And
this perpetual allusion to the materials and the principle of the theater found in almost all alchemi-
cal books should be understood as the expression of an identity (of which alchemists are extremely
aware) existing between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way
all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory
world in which the symbols of alchemy are evolved. (Artaud 1958, 49)

Ultimately rejecting alchemical, absolute, and metaphysical in describing his ideal theater
beyond language, Artaud settled on the controversial word “cruelty.” Yet, cruelty did not
signify external torture or bloodshed inflicted on the body from without, but rather the
unleashing of latent forces within or what writer Susan Sontag described as an “emotional
and moral surgery on consciousness” (Sontag 1976, xxxvi). Through its media phantas-
magoria “of pile-driven sounds, wildly stamped out rhythms, vibrations and resonances,”
“flowing and surrounding the organs” of the spectator, the “theater of cruelty” would act
as rite of purification of the soul (Artaud 1976, 243–244).
Even if Artaud did not prescribe the direct use of technology as did the Constructivists,
it is clear from The Theater and Its Double that the theater too should be conceived as a
laboratory to investigate psychosensory and spiritual states of consciousness. In arching
toward this goal, Artaud, like his predecessor Wagner, pursued the utter immersion of
the spectator through the entirely deliberate use of media to create an imagined totalizing
space of transformation, and in this sense, his importance in the history of the technolo-
gizing of performance space cannot be overestimated.
Distinct from Wagner, however, Artaud sought to break down the separation between
viewers and spectacle. The stage and auditorium were to be fused into a single site where
the spectator was placed directly in the middle of the action in order to forge a “direct
communication between spectator and spectacle” (Artaud 1958, 96). Theatrical action
would be diffused across an immense environment, with the audience made mobile
through movable chairs, enabling them to follow the spectacle. Space would also be
transformed by a media fusion of light, objects, music, and sound, all having the express
aim of evoking a sensory onslaught.
It is not an accident that Artaud’s totalizing vision of cruelty and transformation
developed during the abrupt end of machinic experimentation through the darkening
atmosphere of fascism spreading across Europe and Russia in the mid 1930s. The legacy
of Artaud would pick up steam only later, after the devastation of Europe in World War
II and the birth of an apocalyptic future in the shadow of the atomic bomb. With Brecht’s
theories of critical distance at one pole and Artaud’s immersion at the other, the conceptual
tensions of technologized performance and art in general established the roots for the
increasingly electronically mediated second half of the twentieth century.

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47
 2

Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

Kinetic Scenes

The early-twentieth-century vision of the stage as machine was most strongly carried forth
in the postwar period by the Czech designer and architect Josef Svoboda, who followed
the call of Meyerhold, Piscator, and Brecht for a theater incorporating the inventions of
the scientific era, and in the process, revolutionized production design in Europe.1 A fusion
of artist, scientist, and professional craftsperson, Svoboda began to experiment with stage
design while pursuing architectural studies. Svoboda’s work in small Prague theaters was
noted for its imaginative use of technology as early as 1942 and grew progressively more
elaborate under the fully subsidized structure of the National Theater where he assumed
the position of chief scenic designer and technical director until 1992.
Except for the period 1950–1956 when the ultraconservative aesthetic doctrine of
Socialist Realism was at its heyday, continual experimentation, research, and invention
coupled with a mastery of technical materials marked Svoboda’s scenographic practice
over the next forty years. Like Piscator, Svoboda not only technically advanced the field
of scenography but also reorganized the modes of institutional technical production,
transforming the infrastructure of the National Theater in Prague in the late 1950s into
what he termed a scenographic laboratory—an interdisciplinary, experimental research envi-
ronment with professionals from chemistry, engineering, optics, physics, and architecture
in order to create new technologies which potentially could be used on stage.
This emphasis on a laboratory model also was present in Svoboda’s concept for a new
kind of flexible performance environment, what he called the production space. Early
on, Svoboda articulated the idea of an adaptable environment equipped with the latest
lighting and mechanical systems and capable of simultaneously accommodating multiple
scenographic setups. Such a space differed from the visions of Gropius or the Bauhaus
through its emphasis on modularity: such modules “would be mobile and able to join in
various combinations so as to form a transformable, psycho-plastic space. Moreover, they
would also be self-contained energy sources (electrical) and function as lighting instru-
ments. And they would have the further capacity of carrying other objects on and off with
them” (J. Burian 1971, 34). This modular electromechanical apparatus may invoke the
visions of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, but Svoboda imagined the production space as a
hybrid between atelier and film studio, made almost endlessly reconfigurable by modular
technical devices.
Inspired from his architectural rather than theatrical or visual arts training, Svoboda’s
proposal of a psycho-plastic space aspired to restore a missing kinetics to the theatrical event,
one that he claimed lay at the roots of all performance. “Dramatic space is psycho-plastic
space, which means that it is elastic in its scope and alterable in its quality” (Svoboda
[1966] 1971, 2). With the phenomenon of kinetics beginning to help compose dramatic
action, Svoboda thus aimed to redefine scenography beyond visual scenic design. Scenog-
raphy or the creation of what Svoboda labeled scenographs involved the complete fusion of
dramatic action and stage time and space itself—a contrapuntal accord of media orchestrated
under the collaborative hands of the director and the scenographer working in close
tandem with each other. Creating most of his designs for dramatic stage works, Svoboda,
too, like the Futurists and Dadaists, availed himself to the possibility of choreographed
events of pure media. Thus, “a stage filled with vapor and a beam of light cutting a path
through it” could as easily constitute scenography alongside traditional theatrical presen-
tations (J. Burian 1971, 15).
Instantiating his claim that “modern technological progress belongs in the theater just
as an elevator belongs in a modern building,” Svoboda set about developing an entire
range of techniques and instruments for performance applications, spanning from new
lighting with low-voltage lamps to pneumatic controlled scenery (Svoboda [1962] 1971,
60). Pneumatic mirrors mounted on flexible surfaces capable of changing from convex to
concave based on changes in air pressure, for example, fractured the stage environment
into a kaleidoscopic arena while generating the potential for multiple games of kinetic
reflection and observation.
Svoboda also explored large, suspended mirrors hung at sharp angles above the stage
to divert spectator perspective to unusual spatial positions as well as gigantic fresnel lenses
that visually amplified stage events. Another favored set of instruments involved projec-
tion technologies that created dense, multilayered spaces: enormous cut-out forms con-
structed from architectural materials such as wire, glass, paper, and woven meshes
combined with multiple light, slide, and filmic projections that turned flat scenic envi-
ronments into interwoven visual spaces in motion (figure 2.1, top). Svoboda’s most
famous contribution to the use of filmic projections occurred in his Laterna Magika
productions, developed with the director Alfred Radok in 1957, and the Polyekran systems
[Czech Cine-Scenography II: Svoboda-Radok, chapter 4].

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Figure 2.1 Josef Svoboda. Scenography for The Firebird. Copenhagen, 1972 (top). Josef Svoboda. Hydrau-
lic stage platform for The Ring, Covent Garden/Royal Opera House, 1974. Courtesy of DILIA, Prague
(bottom).

Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

51
 Other techniques focused on mobile and modular mechanical and kinetic scenery,
exploiting the combinatoric possibilities of a reduced set of architectural components
whose seemingly infinite possibilities for rearrangement through hydraulics created the
impression of a continually evolving environment. A scenography for Wagner’s The Ring
cycle at Covent Garden in London in 1974 and 1976 consisted of a single set piece: an
11 m s 10 m hydraulic platform with multiple degrees of freedom that could be raised,
lowered, and laterally moved forward and backward and that featured a huge mirror
mounted on the underside of the structure to provide views of the performers below the
assembly (figure 2.1, bottom).2 Svoboda’s productions also made use of motor driven
wagons, turntables, screens and electronically controlled curtains whose movement created
dynamic scale changes within a particular scenic environment. Far ahead of their time,
such techniques were later incorporated into the mega spectacles of Broadway and West
End London-based musicals as well as large-scale theme park attractions in the late 1970s
and early 1980s.
Debatably, Svoboda’s most enduring scenographic contribution was the custom devel-
opment of specific lighting devices and unorthodox lighting techniques. Continuing in the
tradition of Adolphe Appia [Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space, chapter 1],
Svoboda’s invention of low voltage lighting instruments where each unit housed its own
transformer, gave him a finer degree of dimming control since each instrument contained
a smaller lamp filament. Employing parabolic mirrors rather than standard lenses, Svoboda’s
low voltage instruments thus achieved a whiter, more intense spectral differentiation
through beams with narrower degrees of spread. The Svoboda ramp, as these units would
later be called, generated one of his signature lighting techniques: literal curtains of light
that when used in combination with such materials as rows of vertically taught strings
or special electro-statically charged aerosol sprays created luminous light architectures.3
In his 1969 Hamburg production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers, Svoboda literally
divided up the stage space into five distinct planes by his deployment of light curtains
generated by the low-voltage instruments. The ability to construct kinetic space was thus
not only the territory of mechanics but also a purely intangible means. Speaking of Sicilian
Vespers, Svoboda remarked “the effect was that of light as a substance, light materialized,
resulting from the special new lighting instruments that we designed. I think that we
achieved a new level of lighting technique. And I think that Appia and (Gordon) Craig,
especially, would have marveled at the outcome” (J. Burian 1971, 65).

Theaters of Movement

Certainly the most well known, Svoboda was by no means the only artist to imagine
kinetic performance spaces. The Lithuanian-German scenographer Joan Brehms, who
studied at the original Weimar Bauhaus and worked with Max Reinhardt [Reinhardt’s
Expressionist Spectacles, chapter 1], designed and built a revolving auditorium for the

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open-air theater of the Český Krumlov castle in Southern Bohemia in 1958. With seating
at first for only sixty and then four hundred spectators, the spectator space—a huge,
slanted disc installed with chairs—revolved; at first, solely by human horsepower with
forty workers operating the mechanics from below the stage. Later versions of the stage
increased the spectator capacity to more than five hundred, with electric motors replacing
the manual human labor that was needed to drive the apparatus. Brehms also managed
to realize a unique swinging theater in the courtyard of the Karlstejn Castle in 1968.
Although he patented plans for a polydimensional theater featuring both rotating stage
and spectator spaces in 1974, the actual structure went unrealized.4
Similarly, in 1961 the Czech-born U.S. émigré sculptor Bernard Reder proposed
a “Theater in a Sphere,” a modern-day hybrid between Weininger’s Spherical Theater
and Moholy-Nagy’s Kinetic Construction system [Moholy-Nagy’s Theater of Totality,
chapter 1]. A transparent arena stage outfitted with equally transparent scenery mounted
in the center of the sphere, Reder’s spherical theater was surrounded by a single row of
seats on a moving conveyor belt–like track. Like the many theme park attractions that
would soon follow in places like Disneyland and EPCOT Center,5 the spectators in Reder’s
theater remained immobile during the course of a performance while the conveyor belt
system moved them spirally upwards to the pinnacle of the sphere and back down the
opposite side, giving them a continuously changing perspective of the event.6
The most extravagant manifestation of this trend was the kinetic performance spaces
of the French theorist, director, and scenographer Jacques Polieri. Polieri, trained in the
visual arts, had by 1963, together with Michel Oudin, formulated and patented the
concept of an electronic image scenography, in which he imagined colossal projection
screens broadcasting live video simulcasts in public spaces (figure 2.2). Interested in
bringing influences from painting, architecture, and scientific inquiry into the context of
theatrical performance, Polieri proposed diverse schemas for the creation of performance
environments that oscillated between reality and imagination, science and fiction, theory
and concrete space.
For Polieri, the shift in perception due to electronically enabled images from new visual
media like television in the postwar period suggested a wholly other form of human
experience. His vision entailed the tangible manifestation of space to a spectator, the
“whole of the pictorial, plastic, technical, and theoretical elements which allow the cre-
ation of an image, a bi- or three-dimensional construction, or the installation of a particu-
larly spectacular action” (Polieri 1971, 24). Most interestingly, Polieri’s inspiration for
such kinetic, transformable spaces came less from the arena of architecture, as in Svoboda’s
case, but rather through his attempt to translate “the mobility and three-dimensional
virtuality of the emission and reception of acoustic and visual data” into architectonic-
spatial form (23).
Polieri’s spatiodynamic translation of audio-visual media was already apparent in
his earliest schema to develop hexagonally shaped “geometric-hydraulic” matrices of

Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

53
Figure 2.2 Jacques Polieri. Electronic projections onto giant screens. Le Livre de Mallarmé at La salle du
Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, 1967. Courtesy of Jacques Polieri.

platforms that could form potentially infinite spatial possibilities by moving on the
vertical axis. This idea was carried further in his “Theater on Ball Bearings” (1960), in
which hydraulically actuated, cylindrical podiums capable of both vertical and 360-degree
rotational movement would be installed in a large room. In addition, individually rotating
seats mounted on select platforms would ensure a full panoramic view of the entire
performance space.
Polieri’s most ambitious visions were contextualized in his Théâtre mobile (Mobile
Theater) (1960) and Théâtre du mouvement total (Theater of Total Movement) (1957).
Inspired by photographs and a small model of sculptor Alexander Calder’s mobiles in a
Parisian bookshop, Polieri began to formulate his greatest dynamic system: the Théâtre
du mouvement total. In the first version, which already predated the Théâtre mobile, Polieri
called for a massive spherical theater mounted atop a concave pedestal with room for a
thousand spectators. The spectators would be seated on platforms jutting out into the
central space of the sphere by means of multiple, hockey stick–shaped armatures mounted
on rotating mass columns running vertically through the central axis of the sphere. As
Polieri stated in a 1999 interview, his translation of the Calder mobile attempted to create
multiple spaces of simultaneous movement.7
The sheer structural engineering complexity and financial outlay of this first vision
led Polieri to a second rendition of the plan that could actually be constructed. The

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second Théâtre du mouvement total revised the complexity of mounting suspended platforms
on the vertical axis by placing the spectators in rotating chairs on different-sized platforms
whose height could be raised or lowered by way of telescope-like armatures, while the
armatures themselves would be mounted on a large circular floor that could rotate.
This version also never materialized, but a number of different architects worked
during the 1960s to translate Polieri’s conceptions into built reality, culminating in
the construction of an actual version by the Japanese Mitsui group at Expo ’70 in
Osaka.8
The Osaka realization utilized three telescoping but immovable arms and adjoining
platforms, mounted on a rotating turntable with a single projection screen attached on
each of the stages. At first, films and images projected on the modular screens created the
impression of a series of self-contained theaters. Gradually, however, the individual screens
gave way to both surround images projected onto the walls as well as motion of the actual
platforms themselves, in synchronization with the media spectacle.
Whatever the success of such utopian projects was, it is clear that Polieri incorporated
in his work the essence of a world gradually becoming enveloped by electronic image
machineries; a literal electronic kaleidoscope. The future spatiokinetic media spectacle,
Polieri wrote in his 1955 text “Le Théâtre Kaleidoscope,” would be one in which the
“spectator of the future is in a frame of Plexiglas . . . Surrounded by sound, by light, by
colours, by forms, by shadows . . . the rails of the ‘performance train’ converge, cross, then
run parallel for awhile, then separate one from the other in perpetually renewing fireworks
and a perpetual festival” (Aronson 1981, 501).

Écriture Scénique

In a more explicitly political vein was the directorial and scenographic work of the French
theater and film director Roger Planchon and stage designer René Allio at the famous
Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in the working class Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne in
the 1950s and 1960s. Movement in Planchon’s and Allio’s work was seen as cinematic
and heavily influenced by Brecht as well as Piscator’s prewar use of stage machinery such
as turntables, mechanically driven treadmills, and precise choreographed lighting, as well
as the desire to address issues of social and political injustice through the display of such
machineries of capitalism.
Set against the turbulent cultural and political climate of the 1960s—in particular,
the 1968 student revolts—Planchon’s productions explicitly incorporated technosceno-
graphic and cinematic devices into traditional dramatic productions to create a popular
form of performance appealing to a broad, working-class audience. By means of focused
and angled lighting, Planchon was able to simulate the viewpoint of a film camera, divid-
ing space and reducing the broad focus of the proscenium stage to a series of close-ups
and long shots.

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55
 His 1961 production of Brecht’s Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Schweyk in the Second
World War) was in many ways both a tribute to and advance on Piscator’s 1929 Berlin
production. Like Piscator’s use of a mechanical treadmill to speed up the action of the
play, Planchon employed the similar device of a rotating turntable, which served to keep
the action of the production in continual movement, speeding up or slowing down certain
scenes.
But Planchon displayed his affinity to Brecht most notably in the concept that the
scenographic should be on equal footing with the dramatic text. In his notion of écriture
scénique (scenic writing), the contemporary realization of a theatrical event through director
and scenographer as auteur was on par with the theatrical text itself. Performance space
became the site of spatial textuality, in which multiple texts, both written and media,
came together to birth the theatrical event. “The lesson which we can learn from Brecht
the theoretician is that . . . stage language . . . has the responsibility equal to that of the
written text and, finally, a movement onstage, the choice of a color, of a set, of a costume,
etc., this involves a complete responsibility. The stage language is totally responsible, in
the same way as the text itself is responsible” (Daoust 1981, 15).
Similar to Brecht, Planchon saw the performing technical apparatus as a necessary
means to depict the political-economic-cultural condition of the historical moment,
framed through the use of a dramatic work. Technology was not to seduce or immerse
but bring the spectators into a critical decision-making process as it generated a curious
tension in the spectator’s experience or what René Allio termed avouer le théâtre (an
acknowledgement that what is being experienced is theater). Planchon constantly reminded
the spectator that they were both in the artificial world of the constructed event and,
simultaneously, an “actor” and decision maker immersed in a lived world beyond the
performance.

Performance in the Realm of the Technical Image

The increasing political-social turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s that stoked the work
of Polieri and Planchon also had a profound impact on a new postwar generation radically
transformed by the spread of broadcast media across all facets of daily life. With the
machine age swiftly being replaced by what media philosopher Villém Flusser has termed
the “realm of technical images,” the early-twentieth-century interest in the machine as
the potential aesthetic-political shaper of society shifted to an increased interest in the
products that such machines could produce: technically constructed, manufactured, and
disseminated images.9
Inspired by the proliferation of electronically generated images and political-social
experimentation, newly emerging synthetic forms of total art were created by a broad
range of artists trained in architecture, music, painting, sculpture, and other disciplines
outside of text-based theater. This new kind of “performance,” as art historian Rose Lee

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Goldberg tagged the movement, served as both refuge and context for a young generation
of visual and theatrical artists who wanted to “turn the stage into a laboratory for visual
and perceptual experiments” (Goldberg 1998, 22).
Transformed through pop psychology, non-Western music, Buddhist philosophy,
hallucinogenic drugs, and 1960s counterculture, the sheer diversity of forms arising
in the anti-institutional atmosphere of the 1970s in such disparate places as downtown
New York City, Berlin, London, and Paris sent critics scrambling for labels. A 1965
article in the avant-garde theater journal The Drama Review (TDR) by the late artist,
writer, and editor Michael Kirby described a New Theater, one whose origins owed as
much to Schwitters’s Merzbühne as it did to the work of artists like composer John Cage,
visual artist and “happening” founder Allan Kaprow, and the work of the Fluxus
movement.
Similarly, in his 1968 book Theater of Mixed Means, writer Richard Kostelanetz also
attempted to assess the shifting performance landscape. Classifying performance into the
four broad categories of (1) happening, (2) kinetic environments, (3) staged happenings,
and (4) staged performances, Kostelanetz announced a general trend that he labeled
“mixed means media,” where “the components generally function non-synchronously,
or independently of each other and each medium is used for its own possibilities”
(Kostelanetz 1968, 4).
Kostelanetz’s descriptive matrix proposed a continuum from observation to more direct
forms of participation, underlined by the scripting of space and time. Whereas happenings
were classified as the most “open” form with little intervention from the creators, kinetic
environments were seen to be spaces where the scripting of participants behavior within
the space was heavily predetermined.
This increasing image-technical mediation also led to a powerful backlash, ironically
from the realm of avant-garde theater makers. Under the guise of Artaud’s call for a theater
of cruelty and ignoring the potential role of technologies displayed in his writing, one
strain of theatrical practitioners sought complete liberation from the mediation of techni-
cal images. Instead, there was a call to return to a purely human-centered notion of the-
atrical performance by way of the ritualistic and shamanistic transformation of the
(sometimes literally) naked human body in front of a live audience. In a now legendary
1965 essay, the celebrated Polish avant-garde director Jerzy Grotowski ushered in an age
of poor theater, an approach to theatrical performance that renounced the use of technology
in favor of theatrical space occupied solely through the bodily presence of the actor. “What
is theater? What is unique about it? What can it do that film and television cannot?”
(Grotowski 1968, 19).
Obtaining almost mythical status, Grotowski’s essay and similarly titled book Towards
a Poor Theater attempted to answer these questions by presenting a theater awash with
technical poverty but replete with the live, direct communion between the spectator
and the performer.10 The consequences of Grotowski’s declaration that “no matter how

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much the theater expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologi-
cally inferior to film and television” were profound for the time (19).
In his guru status for an entire generation of theater practitioners, Grotowski had an
untold influence on one spectrum of experimental performance, particularly the work of
collectives such as the New York–based Performance Group under the direction of
Richard Schechner, the Open Theater, Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark, the
French actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the Living Theater, as well as the work of the illus-
trious English theater director Peter Brook, who all turned away from the so-called rich
theater of electronic technologies for the stage and instead, embraced an exoticized primi-
tivism of the body in all its shamanistic glory. Given this influence, it is also no surprise
that shortly after the 1960s Schechner shifted the editorship of TDR from Michael Kirby’s
earlier interest in technological experimentation and toward the anthropological and
sociological frameworks that would form the basis for the discipline of performance
studies.11
As theater artists created spectacles of body-centered liberation, the McLuhanesque,
post-Gutenberg world of “a generation of artists who grew up with television and movies”
clearly demarcated new performance practices from traditional literary theater (Marranca
1977, xi). Privileging écriture scénique over narrative construction, the perceptual elasticity
of this new “theater of images,” a term used by the New York critic Bonnie Marranca to
describe a particular New York-based manifestation of American artists that included the
celebrated theater director and designer Robert Wilson, the idiosyncratic playwright and
director Richard Foreman and the experimental collective Mabou Mines, founded by Jo
Anne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, David Warrilow, and Ruth Maleczech empha-
sized the sculptural, spatial and temporal qualities of performance over linear narrative.
The work of the Texas-born Wilson was paradigmatic for his intertwining of space-
time-image-sound in experimental performance practice. Overcoming a speech impedi-
ment that had a strong influence on his practice, Wilson’s earliest spectacles carried out
with non-professional dancers and actors in his Soho loft, were operatically scaled, stream
of consciousness meditations constructed of slowly moving visual tableaux. Moving his
performances into the alternative theater spaces of 1970s New York, such epic projects
as The King of Spain (1969), The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), and Deafman
Glance (1971) demonstrated Wilson’s interest in dance, music, design and architecture,
his penchant for grand scale surrealism and fervent belief in the hypnotic power of
a sustained temporal moment. Extending sometimes over twelve hours with casts
of hundreds, these powerful visual-aural works put Wilson onto the international theatri-
cal map.
The director’s Wagnerian scaled, human-object scenographies in motion employed a
choreography of performers speaking texts written by autistic children in precisely lit
landscapes whose iconographic qualities reached almost religious intensity; what Bertolt
Brecht’s son Stefan (who worked early on with Wilson) called a “theater of visions.”

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“Theater of vision is the staging, with live performers, movements and development in
such a fashion as to appear a world of reality or the representation of one by an individual
of images occurring to the individual and seeming personally important and significant
to him independently of verbal, intellectual or discursive analysis” (S. Brecht 1978, 9).
Increasingly supported by the European theater market, Wilson’s early work culmi-
nated with the legendary Philip Glass opera collaboration Einstein on the Beach. Originally
premiered at the Avignon Festival and then presented for two sold-out performances
at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in November 1976, Einstein on the
Beach marked a turning point in the development and almost mass appeal of the 1970s
avant-garde. Sprawling over four hours, the fusion between Glass’s hypnotic, ostinato-
driven minimalism and Wilson’s mystical visual landscapes resulted in a performance
more akin to a contemplative series of associational images rather than a historical
opera dealing with Einstein (figure 2.3). A series of disconnected visual themes resulting
in scenes with titles like Spaceship, Trial, Building, and Train all loosely linked by

Figure 2.3 Robert Wilson. Einstein on the Beach, 1976. Photo © Theodore Shank.

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musical interludes labeled Knee Plays, Glass’s and Wilson’s opera was a mesmerizing
spectacle of music-theater, light, motion, color, dance and architecture all driven by
the incessant, electronically enhanced and sung score [Live Electronics II: The Second
Wave, chapter 5].
Even though Marranca remarked that Wilson’s theater was a “spatially dominated one
activated by sense impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear nar-
rative” (Marranca 1977, xii), Wilson’s precise control of temporality is tantamount to a
critical understanding not just of the cultural moment of the 1970s media inspired per-
formance scene, but also the subsequent manipulation of time that electronic and digital
technologies would increasingly afford in the coming decades.
Einstein achieved a transformation of duration by simultaneously slowing down both
the staged event (in movement and speech) and the spectator’s perception of the event.12
The fusion between Glass’s repetitive modal pulse music and Wilson’s slow motion,
dreamlike archi-scenography created a performative event no longer dominated by the
unfolding of linear “clock” time or chronos, but instead by tempus—the spectator’s perceived
sense of “lived time.” Sped up, slowed down, and reversed, the manipulation of duration
to generate a trancelike state of motionless motion functioned much like the listener’s
experience of Indonesian Gamelan or the macro rhythmic cycles of Tala in Indian classical
music. This elasticizing of duration reached its pinnacle in a singular scene in Einstein
where, over the course of eighteen minutes, a horizontally suspended neon bar of light
gradually rose into vertical position in the air only to vanish into the flies: a luminous
Barnett Newman minimalist line set into mechanical motion.
Subsidized by the largess of European cultural machineries, the post-Einstein Wilson
increasingly turned to staging classic theatrical texts and operas. The sheer magnitude of
his Gesamtkunstwerk visions reached a pinnacle with the planned but only partially realized
1986 project the CIVIL wars, a massive-scale, twelve-hour multinational vision that was
to simultaneously take place in six countries and act as the centerpiece for the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. Incorporating extremely loosely structured ideas around
notions of civil wars and originally planned with more than five hundred performers,
only four of the six sections were eventually realized, due to logistical and financial
constraints.13
With Wilson’s scenographies in motion spinning out elaborately layered and highly
detailed multimediated imagescapes, the stage work of the iconoclastic playwright-
director Richard Foreman operated on a far rougher and denser philosophical plane.
Influenced by his studies in continental philosophy, Jewish mysticism, physics, and
literature, Foreman’s metaphysically dubbed Ontological Hysteric Theater (founded in
1968) constructed theatrical events that enacted the process of thinking itself and rendered
such mental acts into theatrical forms. Twisting the spectator’s perceptual experience
inside out, Foreman described his theater as “a kind of gymnasium where your perceptual
apparatus is forced to work out.”14

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 Foreman’s work announced the artifice of the stage event, severing the empathetic/
emotional relationship normally engendered by theater as a representation of life. Instead,
the event was that of an abrupt, sudden awakening of consciousness—a “granular widen-
ing, a spreading, a stretching of attention itself so that attention is a globular universe
on the verge of popping, fragmenting” (Foreman 1985, 192). In his displaying of “mental-
acts” that would take place “on the outside surface and not hidden away inside,” Foreman’s
almost stream-of-consciousness texts and aggressive staging materialized the phenomeno-
logical act of observing and spectating in its moment of taking place (189).
Foreman’s early work sought to achieve such Verfremdungseffekte (a German word coined
by Brecht signifying defamiliarization) mainly through actors delivering lines in machine-
like monotones, uninflected speech patterns and long silences.15 Yet beginning with his
play Hotel China in 1973 and later conditioned by the move to a loft with unusual spatial
dimensions (7 meters wide and 25 meters deep), Foreman began to augment his staged
theatrical koans with (low-)tech scenography, objects and systems. Chief among these was
the attempt to change the physical dimensions of his loft cum theater by employing a
series of sliding wall units that could be used to suddenly change the shape of the perfor-
mance space.16
Foreman also enhanced his Verfremdungseffekte with technological devices such as the
recording of and playback of actors’ voices on reel-to-reel tape recorders directly operated
by the director from the front audience row as well as blinding, high-intensity lights that
were periodically blasted directly into the spectator’s eyes. He also focused on the addition
of both static and mechanically controlled objects, such as a miniature house on a pulley
system, mechanical contraptions as well as the use of dolls, puppets, and other familiars,
lending an almost occult layer of mysticism to an already puzzle-like stage.
One of the most intriguing yet simple technologies that Foreman began to deploy (and
that is still used in his most recent productions) as an important perspectival framing
device were white and red color-banded strings tightly stretched across the stage space
(figure 2.4). Serving to carve up the stage environment into Cartesian coordinates, the
strings divided up the theatrical space and called attention to specific trajectories between
actors and objects, prop, furniture, and the architecture of the environment itself while
continually reminding spectators of the limits of geometric space.17
Foreman’s spatial defamiliarization coupled with his physical presence as auteur and
controller certainly recalled Bauhaus student Heinz Loew’s [Total Theaters of the Bauhaus,
chapter 1] prediction that a future technologically saturated performance form would
feature the technical operator at the center of the event. Yet such techniques also suggested
the use of machines of inscription (the use of projected text slides contradicting visual
action à la Brecht, the scattering of cut-out alphanumeric characters within the mise-
en-scène) to aid in Foreman’s aesthetic process of estranging the habits of perception.
For artists like Foreman, Wilson, and other American (specifically, New York) theater
makers in the 1970s, the position of technology in their productions had a markedly

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Figure 2.4 Richard Foreman. Book of Splendors, Part One, 1976. Photo © Theodore Shank.

different context and use from the avant-garde of the 1920s.18 The televisual, hermetic,
and spiritual theaters of the image superseded the prewar dynamization of space and the
theaters of machines and birthed a new kind of author, where the roles of director, chore-
ographer, designer, architect, and even performer were frequently rolled up into the guise
of a singular person. Undeniably, Stefan Brecht’s coining of the expression theater of visions
not only related to the content of such visions from Foreman and Wilson but also to the
reimagining of the role of director/designer in the transformation of theatrical space.
“Theater of visions is a stage designer’s theater, theater of the director functioning as a
stage designer,” wrote Stefan Brecht, “it relates to masques and pageants and to any theater
dominated by stage design” (S. Brecht 1985, 9).
It is fitting that Foreman and Wilson represent one extreme of theater auteur,
because their works again articulated the split between Bertolt Brecht and Wagner:
bodily immersion versus critical distance. As artificial events that operated like “the inside
of a camera” (Foreman) or on the plane of almost spiritual transcendence (Wilson), the
theater of images pushed the envelope of performance spaces that functioned less like
machines and more like alternate consciousness under the spell of electro-technological
mediation.

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 “Staged Spaces”

The first wave of the North American–dominated theater of images made its presence
known to the European cultural scene with the appearance of Wilson’s work in France in
the early 1970s.19 Simultaneously, a younger generation of European stage designers
indirectly took up the lessons of the NYC avant-garde. Creating elaborate and imagistic
architectonic environments, these spaces were inhabited by performers navigating their
way through vast spatial zones swelling with light, objects, grossly proportioned archi-
tecture made of real material (as opposed to the faux material of the standard theater),
projected images, and machine-like constructions.
Incubated by lavishly funded German state theaters, designers such as Wilfried Minks,
Karl-Ernst Hermann, Jürgen Rose, Achim Freyer, Axel Manthey, Hans Dieter Schall, and
Erich Wonder revived the radical tradition of German stage design that reached its height
in the 1920s. Forming collaborative partnerships with a series of adventurous stage direc-
tors such as Ruth Berghaus, Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Klaus Michael Grüber, Claus
Peymann, and Heiner Müller and charged by the political and artistic climate of the 1960s
and 1970s, this post-1968 generation moved stage design away from its representational
status and toward the creation of what was called Bühnenraum (stage spaces).
Signifying space and room, the German word Raum became the catchphrase for German
scenographers who created their own visual and aural layer of interpretation on top of the
classical texts of the Western theater canon. “The Bühnenraum should have the matter of
factness of a landscape,” wrote designer Wilfried Minks in 1970 (Riddell 1980, 39). The
first to elevate stage design to a new level of attention, Minks had already achieved fame
and controversy with his radical, antirealistic stage landscapes. Aggressively incorporating
Warhol- and Lichtenstein-esque Pop Art influences, real materials like AstroTurf, dirt,
sand, water, plastic, metal, and, most influentially, light as an architectural material,
Minks set the tone for up-and-coming designers like Hermann, Wonder, and Freyer who
would soon shock the German theater performance scene.
Both Achim Freyer, a Meisterschüler or master apprentice of Brecht, and the Austrian-
born Erich Wonder (a student of Brecht designer Caspar Neher) created an unprecedented
blur between theatrical stage design and art installation. Fusing visual motifs from the
barren industrial and urban street environments of Germany with inspiration from artists
like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Wonder’s perfectionist
theatrical environments appeared more like fantastic filmic spaces than sets for theatrical
plays or eighteenth-century operas (figure 2.5). Emphasizing a return to the real materials
so celebrated by Constructivism, Wonder’s phantasmagoric universes advanced the notion
that performance environments were erected not just to illustrate elements of dramatic
texts but indeed, to become texts in and of themselves.20
In the late 1980s, Wonder also began to direct his own “evenings of noise, light and
actions,” staged scenic environments that began with the project Rosebud in Düsseldorf in

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Figure 2.5 Erich Wonder. Scenography for Der Auftrag (The Task) by Heiner Müller. Schauspielhaus
Bochum, 1982. © Erich Wonder.

1979 and continued with Malstromsüdpol at the Ars Electronica and Documenta 8 festivals
and on the canals of Berlin in 1986–1987. Wonder’s promenade-like, sci-fi event Das
Auge des Taifun (The Eye of the Typhoon), staged on the Ringstrasse in Vienna in 1990 and
accompanied by the German industrial noise band Einstürzende Neubauten, was remark-
able for its Gesamtkunstwerk-like qualities in which a traveling, glass-enclosed tram accom-
panied by a mass crowd made a nightmarish procession around one of Vienna’s most
historic streets, flashing images and texts on moving screens and featuring artificial light-
ning and snow storms (Wonder 2002).
Featuring both Wonder and the designer Karl-Ernst Hermann, an exhibit in 1980 at
the Hamburger Kunstverein entitled Inszenierte Räume (Staged Spaces) further exacerbated
the fragile line between scenography and installation. Conceived as an event to “give
designers an opportunity to work without the demands of a text or a director,” Wonder
and Hermann created a series of disturbing “exhibition rooms as stages.” Involving wan-
dering viewers looking into a series of spaces, Wonder’s four meditation rooms combined
human performers inside bizarre scenic environments. One such space featured a seated
figure looking into a bubbling ocean of water, while another was a cinema-like setting
with a lone figure watching an endless fragment of Casablanca with rain pouring into the

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room and a gigantic windshield wiper cleaning the visitor’s peephole of rain (Riddell
1980, 50).
Collaborating with the young theater director Peter Stein at the prominent Schaubühne
in the 1970s, designer Karl-Ernst Hermann, another cutting-edge scenographer, created
mammoth walk-in environments that abandoned the restrictions of the proscenium
entirely and integrated spectators directly into the scenic action. Working in former
industrial buildings, union halls and abandoned film studios in Berlin, Hermann radically
reinvented the entire relationship between spectacle and spectators by creating scenic
spaces for Stein’s politicized reinterpretations of classical texts from authors such as Ibsen,
Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Gorky.
In Stein’s legendary production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in 1977, Hermann
created scenic experiences for the two different environments of the play: the court and
the Forest of Arden. Spectators at first entered a ghostly, narrow, but impossibly tall room
where the court scenes of the play took place with the actors moving only on the narrow
ledges at the periphery of the room. After the court scenes’ completion, the viewers moved
through a narrow, wet passageway covered in moss and trees and filled with the sounds
of birds, emerging into a warehouse-sized environment replete with a real lake, a forest
of 5-meter-high trees and dirt, hanging bridges, and bleachers for the viewers to sit.
Undoubtedly, the total effect of the environment was overwhelming enough to force
at least more than one German critic to dub the entire event a “Disneyland version of
Robinson Crusoe” (Patterson 1980, 46).
Known for its progressive artistic agenda, the Schaubühne advanced further in sup-
porting several other large-scale, outdoor scenic projects. In December 1977, for example,
Schaubühne director Klaus Michael Grüber and designer Antonio Recalcati staged a
deconstructed realization of the nineteenth-century poet Hölderlin’s Hyperion, dubbed
Winterreise (Winter Journey), inside the empty Berlin Olympia stadium. Restricted to an
audience of eight hundred (the stadium usually seated seventy-six thousand) and corralled
in one corner of the vast space, spectators were treated to an installation-like spectacle in
which actors played soccer and ran hurdles, speaking on wireless microphones that broad-
casted their voices through the dark, wintry Berlin air while watching text fragments
flashed onto large electronic screens at each end of the playing field.
Flanked on one side by the installation-like productions of Grüber and the large-scale
scenic projects of Stein-Hermann, the Schaubühne’s fancy for transforming theatrical
space into new kinds of scenic Raum culminated in 1980 in the lavish reconstruction of
a 1920s Erich Mendelsohn–designed cinema—costing dm 81 million ($43 million)—on
the glitzy Kurfürstendamm boulevard in West Berlin. Seeking to create the most advanced,
multiform and flexible theater space in the Western world, the new Schaubühne am
Lehniner Platz consisted of one enormous room that could be divided into a vast array of
different environments through hydraulically reconfigured platforms, thus enabling the
theater itself to run multiple productions and events simultaneously.21 But while some of

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the younger generation of German scenic designers like Wonder also became interested
in moving beyond traditional theatrical spaces and contexts like their American counter-
parts in the gradually burgeoning alternative performance scenes at the end of the 1970s,
most German scenographers remained deeply rooted within the established state theater
apparatus.

“New Formalisms”: From Mechanized to Mediatized

In the United States under the political shadow of Reagan America, the increased influ-
ence of media technologies, the impact of so-called postmodernism in fields as wide
ranging as architecture, literature, cultural studies, and visual art and interest in inter-
cultural modes of practice, a new wave of experimental performance practice dubbed New
Formalism by theater scholar Ted Shank arose in New York, San Francisco, and, to a lesser
extent, Los Angeles. Driven by collective practices as well as singular artistic visions and
transfixed by the photonic and electronic production of signs that cultural critic Fredric
Jameson so articulately depicted in his archetypal study of the late 1980s, Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), artists and designers sought the use of
digital imaging and acoustic technologies to mediatize performance rather than mechanize
it. From North America to Europe and Asia, the number of experimental performance
events and even popular Broadway-like entertainments incorporating electronic imaging
and acoustic technologies became the rule, rather than the exception.
When performance practice involving electronic mediation was not focused on the
site-specificity of found spaces, alternative galleries, and club environments, productions
incorporating audiovisual media technologies were preoccupied with large budgeted pre-
sentation within traditional, proscenium-based environments and within the context of
avant-garde supporting venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave
Festival, the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, the
Kaaitheater in Brussels, and the annual German-sponsored Theater der Welt festival.
Working in stage environments inhabited by modern technologies of inscription and
recording such as microphones, screens, and cameras, what new audiovisual media offered
New York–based experimental artists like Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, John Jesurun,
Squat Theater, and, perhaps most of all, the performance collective the Wooster Group,
was not only a new way of formulating narratives for a media generation, but more impor-
tant, also a set of techniques for further fragmenting the increasingly tenuous lines
between mediated and real space, fiction and reality.
In works like Lazarus (1972), Undesirable Elements (1992), Deshima (1990), and After
Sorrow (1997), for example, the Chinese/American director, designer, and choreographer
Ping Chong examined intercultural themes of marginality and otherness. Exploiting
large-format slide projections, amplified speech and electronically generated scores, video,
puppetry, film, and static installations, performers in Chong’s broad media canvases

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engaged in task-based actions (a favorite of such performance practices at the time), dance,
and narrative storytelling.
More conceptually and politically daring was the Hungarian performance collective
Squat Theater. Accused of obscenity and formalism by the Janos government and exiled
from Hungary, Squat immigrated to the United States in 1977 after a period working in
Europe and quickly settled into a decrepit loft building on 23rd Street in the Chelsea
district of New York City. Departing from the purely formalist concerns of the theater
of images, Squat’s controversial events masterfully harnessed the perceptual frames of
audiovisual culture to challenge the distinction between reality and fiction.
Having converted the bottom-floor storefront of their Manhattan loft/living quarters
into a theatrical hall of mirrors, Squat’s original plays, including Pig Child Fire (1977),
Andy Warhol’s Last Love (1978), and Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free (1982), involved spectators
seated in the back of the storefront gazing out into the front window at the street
beyond—a moving backdrop providing live, unscripted action from the street. With sets
of unknowing passersby staring into the bizarre actions of the Squat performances and
seated spectators inside staring into the gaze of both performers and the unintended audi-
ence on the street, Squat succeeded in mediating and estranging the border between the
exterior street and the interior performance. Squat’s use of visual mediating technologies
such as large mirrors and television screens reflected in the mirrors further supplemented
their kaleidoscopic distortions of reality, making the collective not only a secret success
in the downtown New York 1980s underground but also a regular fixture on the inter-
national festival circuit in Europe and Asia.22
Squat’s instrumentalizing of simple media and material technologies to destroy the
illusion of performance space was a common theme that resonated through much inter-
national experimental work for the stage during the same period. Within the United
States, the East Coast/West Coast hubs of New York and San Francisco, in particular, saw
the burgeoning of artists who sought to remain far removed from the traditional mecha-
nisms of theater performance.
Due to the Bay Area’s geographic separation from New York, many younger experi-
menters there began working in an image theater style inspired less directly by firsthand
experience of the work of artists like Foreman and Wilson but instead from seeing pho-
tographs of such visually arresting work that occupied the pages of such publications as
Artforum, High Performance, and TDR. Emerging from the visual, filmic, and sculptural
arts, a group of San Francisco Bay Area artists such as Laura Farabough (Snake and Night-
fire Theater), Chris Hardman (Snake and Antenna Theater), Alan Finneran (Soon 3), and
George Coates (George Coates Performance Works) produced technologically enhanced
performance landscapes that were more like extensions of live sculpture and film than
illusory theatrical pieces.
Sculptor Alan Finneran formed the experimental performance entity Soon 3 in order
to add performers to what were essentially kinetic sculptural environments. His dark,

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dystopian vision of human beings trapped within technologically augmented landscapes
resulted in works where the scenographic design in essence became the dramatic text
and narrative. Black Water Echo (1977), A Wall in Venice/3 Women/Wet Shadows (1978),
Outcalls/Riptides (1984), Magi (1986), Poison Hotel (1988), and Veer (1989) all involved
elaborately constructed yet austere environments featuring moving architectural pieces
(walls in Veer), specially constructed spectator spaces (portholes for spectator’s heads to
stick through in Poison Hotel), as well as film and slides projected onto moving scenic
elements while being inhabited by puppetlike performers mechanically executing ranges
of tasks, from hauling projection equipment around the stage to scaling constructed walls
(figure 2.6). Eventually, after having exhausted its specific flavor of visual theater, Soon 3
moved outdoors performing in San Francisco parks while continuing to explore the
relationships between surveillance and voyeurism through projects involving live closed-
circuit TV setups.
Director Chris Hardman also incorporated filmic elements and puppetry in his work
with Antenna Theater. Developing the notion of Walkmonology or the use of personal
listening devices and headphones for theatrical presentation, Antenna created walk-

Figure 2.6 Soon 3. Outcalls/Riptides, 1984. Photo © Theodore Shank.

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through, fun house–like environments with audio accompaniments that turned the viewer
into an audient or active listening participant.23 Antenna’s work was widely presented
in the 1980s, taken up not only by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s trend setting
Next Wave Festival but also by the then-emerging MIT Media Lab (a residency on the
1987 project Radio Interference to develop wireless headset technology), but the organiza-
tion would become most internationally known for Antenna Audio Tours, a spin-off
company that invented wireless broadcasting technology for museums and location-based
entertainment.
The most elaborate transformation of stage space into technological images took place
in the work of George Coates. In his cleverly titled performances like Areare (1982), Seehear
(1983), Actual Sho (1987), and The Architecture of Catastrophic Change (1990), among others,
Coates’s set out to construct mostly plotless performances with live singers, dancers, musi-
cians, and acrobats who were essentially reduced to human objects moving inside vast
projected backdrops. In fact, Coates’s interest in both architecture and Disney-like thrills
also resulted in the invention of Svoboda-like stage machineries. For Actual Sho (1987),
Coates and designer Charles Rose created an 8-meter pivoted, rolling circular platform
upon which both projections and performers balanced simultaneously. With the extreme
slope of the platform, this stage element in conjunction with Coates’s multiprojection
slide setups transformed the flatness of projected imagery into a three-dimensional, kinetic
environment.
Fueled by Silicon Valley funds, George Coates’s Performance Works set out to unite
the underground experimental theater avant-garde with Hollywood production values.
Coates’s self-promotion and salesmanship also attracted the attention of IT entrepreneurs
like Steve Jobs, who noticed the director’s interest in incorporating vast, computer-
controlled projection systems, stereographic film, real-time computer graphics, and later,
an almost opportunist use of the burgeoning Internet. After Jobs hired Coates to design
the opening event for Jobs’s NeXT computer launch in 1987, Coates increasingly began
to explore what he called “new forms of live art through innovative uses of emerging
technologies” (Shank 2002, 271). Having formed an organization called SMARTS (Science
Meets the Arts) and increasingly subsidized by Silicon Valley stalwarts like Intel, Apple,
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Silicon Graphics, and NASA’s Ames Research
Center, Coates began to explore the potential of live computer-assisted interaction within
his visual theatrical mise-en-scène.
Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho (1991) was cosponsored by DEC and premiered in the
Electronic Theater section of the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics confer-
ence in Las Vegas in 1991—certainly a first for work that a decade earlier could be seen
only strictly within canonic art-performance venues. Aesthetically puzzling to many of
the convention delegates, technologically, Invisible Site acted as an up-to-the-minute
advertisement for (then) cutting-edge Silicon Valley computer graphics systems. Featur-
ing stereographic images that required the audience to wear 3D polarized glasses, Coates

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also capitalized on the advanced capabilities of Silicon Graphics’ computer hardware at
the time by featuring live, real-time, computer-generated interaction between the on stage
performers and the projected graphics.
Touring internationally during much of the mid-1990s, Coates continued his forays
into Silicon Valley inventions (Telepresence through CU-SeeME broadcasts in The Nowhere
Band; live Web-based interaction during Twisted Pairs), but by the late 1990s, he had
essentially exhausted both his artistic vision and the sponsorship of the technology indus-
try. Turning to stripped-down, politically motivated theatrical work dealing with censor-
ship and government repression, by 2007, by all accounts, Coates had abandoned
stage-based theater completely and was the director of a video weblog (VLOG) entitled
“Better Bad News,” which sought to deconstruct political videos in blog format.24
Another haven for scenographic experimentation in the late 1980s and early 1990s was
Québec, most eloquently expressed in the work of director Robert Lepage. Raised within
the turbulent political context of post–Quiet Revolution French Canada, unlike many
other image theater makers Lepage came from a classical theater education. As co-artistic
director of the Québec ensemble Théâtre Repère in the 1980s, early works like Circulations
(1984), the six-hour epic The Dragon’s Trilogy (1985), Polygraphe (1987), and Tectonic Plates
(1988), focused on the continuous political tensions of growing up in multilingual Canada
while demonstrating an inventive affinity toward the visual spectacles of Wilson and the
multicultural leanings of Peter Brook.
Armed with a new company (Ex Machina), Lepage’s work in the early 1990s, however,
more deeply explored the potential of image technologies to augment his highly theatrical
vision. His sprawling Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994–1996), a paean to the conse-
quences of the catastrophic events of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the AIDS epidemic
during the twentieth century, was in many ways an exploration of the very construction
of the techno-image realities made possible by industrial and informatic production over
the twentieth century.
In addition to a cast of nine actors and one musician, the other central character in
the eight-hour production was a modular set by Carl Fillion, which was continuously
reconfigured throughout the course of the piece as an architectonic, three-dimensional
space inhabited by the performers as well as a façade of surfaces for the projection of
electronic (film, slides, computer graphic displays) and human-generated (shadow)
images.
Many critics thought that Lepage’s next production, a solo work based on Hamlet and
titled Elsinore, went much further in its “high-tech” exploration of the interaction between
performer and technologically augmented stage space. Fillion’s scenography featured a set
anchored by a motor driven moving floor, surveilled by infrared (IR) security cameras,
swept by DMX-controlled scan lights, and flooded by slide and video projection; Elsinore’s
technology was no more sophisticated at a technological level than that used in a second-
tier rock concert or urban club.25 Fittingly, Lepage himself never favored the word “tech-

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nology,” but much like Roger Planchon focused instead on the notion of “scenographic
writing” (écriture scénique). Contemporary media no longer competed with the live theater
but according to Lepage, actually resuscitated it from a petrified future.26
In Europe, the influence of Robert Wilson’s increasing appearances in Italian theater
and opera houses stimulated the development of an entire school of media theaters with
names like La Gaia Scienza, Falso Movimento, Studio Azzurro, Magazzini Criminali, and
later, Romeo Castellucci’s Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which became obsessed with the cre-
ation of mediated stage pictures. Similarly, in Scandinavia in the mid 1980s, noninstitu-
tionalized, free theater groups such as Billedstofteater (literally “picture-textile theater”),
which in 1986 became the experimental organization Hotel Pro Forma, as well as Tone
Avenstroup’s Baktruppen, pioneered what Hans-Thies Lehmann referred to as a post dra-
maturgical or visual dramaturgical form of performance where all theatrical elements,
including space, image, site locale, and sound were placed on the same hierarchical
plane.27
Kirsten Dehlholm’s scenographic performance company Hotel Pro Forma exploited
the nonhierarchized connection between image technologies, meant to be frontally viewed
on flat surfaces and complex spatial orientations that spectators needed to engage in to
experience the collectives’ performances. Normally realized in site-specific contexts, Hotel
Pro Forma’s work demonstrated a critical engagement not only with imaging technologies
but with how such technologies transformed habitual ways of experiencing scenographic
space.
Staged in a five-story room in Aarhus, Denmark, Why Does Night Come, Mother? Poetry,
Perspective and the Law of Gravity (1989) had spectators view the performance in a vertical
manner from a series of balconies five stories up and down into a long, narrow environ-
ment. Experienced as a top-down, bird’s-eye view, the floor of the stage transformed
for both viewer and performer as the actors performed their actions lying down while
spectators served as both voyeurs and observers engaged in a distant panoptic gaze as in
a laboratory (figure 2.7).
Spatial dimension was reduced to the flatness of a mediated, two-dimensional image
(in geometric terms, R2), yet from an odd and simultaneously volumetric and distant
perspective; a two-dimensional image that the brain constantly attempted to correct into
a three-dimensional (R3) one. Similarly, the group’s live concert–like oratorio House of the
Double Axe/XX: An Imaginative Oratorium (1998), was constructed on a stage composed
solely of black-and-white, op art–like, top-down projections that were interwoven into
flat yet oddly dimensional labyrinthine image spaces upon which singers interacted above
and almost within.
An even more unconventional exploration of new dramaturgies of scenographic space
emerged in the varied manifestations of the Slovenian theater director Dragan Zivadinov’s
Noordung Theater. One of the three central arms of the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue
Slowenische Kunst), whose other members included the mock neo-fascist industrial band

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Figure 2.7 Hotel Pro Forma. Why Does Night Come, Mother? Courtesy of Hotel Pro Forma.

Laibach and the conceptual visual arts collective Irwin, Zivadinov’s bizarrely titled Scipion
Nasice Sisters Theater (1983–1987), Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theater (1987–1990), and
the Cosmokinetical Cabinet Noordung Theater (1990–present) attempted nothing less
that what dramaturgs Eda Čufer and Emil Hrvatin called a “reterritorialization of the
theater landscape, which brings performer, spectator, and space into a particular relation-
ship” (Čufer and Hrvatin 1997, 102).
Named after the mythic Slovenian engineer and space scientist Herman Potocnik
Noordung and allied with NSK’s larger subcultural mission of creating an alternative arts
context fusing social and political criticism of reigning East Bloc–influenced, socialist-
realist Slovenian ideologies, Zivadinov’s current theater took the political relationships
inherent in the site of performance production (the auditorium) and spectating as a broader
(civil) societal model embodying the tension between individual and collective auton-
omy.28 Creating events where “the specific structures of spatial dramaturgy and the dra-
maturgy of the spectator” converged, Zidavinov and his collaborators’ works disrupted
the passive body of the spectator as witness to a (mediated) spectacle by radically frag-
menting the architectural power relationships between stage and viewer—what Čufer
called the separation of the eye and body (optical to topical) due to the Age of Enlighten-
ment (Čufer and Hrvatin 1997, 103).
In Marija Nablocka Retrogardist Event (1985) and Noordung Praying Machine (1993), the
total enclosure of the spectators’ bodies inside Malevich and Tatlin inspired architectural
structures with only their heads protruding served to integrate the perceivers’ embodied
perceptual faculties directly into the normally distanced performance event. This bizarre
scenographic sleight of hand not only rendered theatrical space into “the ‘first’ actor”
(Čufer and Hrvatin 1997, 104) but also removed the binary between the viewed and the

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viewer, the perceiver and the perceived; direct resistance against the dominance of social
realist aesthetic ideology.
The reimagining of the spectator’s body to formulate scenographic space was further
advanced with the Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung’s 1991 production The Kapital
Dramatic Observatory. Borrowing motifs from Futurist and Constructivist performance,
audience members were also placed into a kind of moving box that was spun around,
enabling the eye of the immobilized visitor to be greeted with a new scene at each
90-degree turn of the space—what dramaturg Emil Hrvatin identified as the “topical
and optical” guiding of viewing. “In topical viewing the viewer cannot see his viewing,
while in optical viewing he watches the impossibility of his own seeing” (Čufer and
Hrvatin 1997, 108).
The most extreme articulation of Zidavinov’s Noordung projects, however, was found
in his most recent work entitled Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical Theater. Through
a series of performances taking place in early 2000 through 2001 in a Russian cosmonaut
training aircraft owned and operated by the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility in
Star City (the Russian equivalent of a NASA training ground), Zidavinov sought out the
ultimate technologizing of performance space through the generation of momentary
weightlessness experienced in the zero gravity conditions of a parabolic flight.
During a series of between eighteen to thirty parabolic-shaped flights performed in the
skies above Moscow, spectators, critics, performers, scenery, and objects alike were set
into zero-gravity conditions, freely floating in the air for between twenty-five and thirty
seconds, directly in the middle of a fully staged theatrical play. In an obvious allusion to
Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises developed for actors with the dual goal of training
and mechanizing the human performer [The Machine Body, chapter 6], Zivadivov’s Zero
Gravity Biomechanical Theater not only theorized the kinesthetic and social transforma-
tion of the body through both socialist ideology and extreme physiological conditions
brought on by the onset of zero gravity, but enacted it in real time.
Zivadinov’s sequel, One versus One, inaugurated in April 1995, was a performance
planned to last until April 2045, with a new edition occurring every ten years. As each
of the performers dies by the effects of real mortality over the course of the work, their
bodies will be replaced by mechanical, puppetlike objects, which will take over their role
in the production, culminating in a performance in a zero-gravity capsule shot into space,
where Zivadinov will also perish.
Although slightly more conventional in comparison to Noordung’s far-flung journeys
into zero gravity, the technoscenographic manipulation of the societal body received one
of its most articulate expressions in the work of the Japanese collective Dumb Type.
Formed by a group of disgruntled art students at the Kyoto University of the Arts in
1982, Dumb Type forged an aesthetic negotiating the “static visual arts and performance
dependent on dialogue,” while charging the resulting work with a compelling strain of
political activism and cultural critique. Although members had studied the Japanese

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avant-garde post-1945 Gutai visual art movement, the group was much more influenced
by member and director Tejii Furuhashi’s experiences in the New York East Village per-
formance scene (Durland 1990, 33).
Originally a collective of six core members versed in theater, music, architecture,
graphic design, lighting, and computer programming, Dumb Type’s first projects were
marked by an interest in creating unique performances based specifically on specially
designed environments.29 One of the group’s earliest pieces, Order of the Square (1985),
took place over the duration of an entire year in a series of small, phone-booth-sized cap-
sules with peepholes for the spectators and arranged in site-specific locales dotting the
Kyoto cityscape. After 1987, however, Dumb Type began to work in a style that increas-
ingly led to international exposure in high-profile festivals (particularly in Europe), creat-
ing performance events whose scenographic environments invoked a contemporary Japan
run amok by technological systems.
036 Pleasure Life (1988) was created in two completely different iterations. The earliest
version, which premiered in Kyoto in 1988, was built around an environment that
appeared to be more like a game than a theatrical performance. A large game board–like
floor, rung with fluorescents and upon which performers and sculptural objects were
placed in almost mechanical style, was also used as a projection surface, while a cold and
minimal metallic wall embedded with monitors and featuring image ranging from LED
clocks and timers to television commercials invoked the dehumanized feeling of a waiting
room, a control booth, and an underground laboratory all at once (figure 2.8).
The second iteration of the piece, simply entitled Pleasure Life and far more amenable
to touring, was occupied by thirty-six metal, tubular constructed columns with fluorescent
fixtures that organized the stage environment into constructing grids, essentially trapping
the performers by dictating a limited range of movement. Dressed in clinical white, the
performers executed mechanical, almost robotic movements and banal tasks inside the
dystopian environment, all the while accompanied by a sound score of synthesized,
late-1980s ambient techno and sample pastiche and hypnotized by searchlights and the
random blinking of the fluorescents.
The international success of Pleasure Life and subsequent Dumb Type works lay in the
group’s ability to fulfill the spectator’s expectations and imagination of what a dystopian
future might actually feel like. As audiovisual saturation with a sterile yet seductive
technological sheen, Dumb Type’s projects did not articulate a future image of an urban
society where political and social control, order and technology would go hand in hand,
but rather created a critical image of current Japanese society obsessed with the new,
in general.30
Commanding stage, installation, and print, the group’s next work, pH (1989), advanced
the theme of technological dystopia. Inside a six-meter-long space that featured spectators
seated on both sides peering down into a courtlike environment, Dumb Type erected
something similar to a gigantic photocopier: two computer-controlled metal beams at

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Figure 2.8 Dumb Type. 036 Pleasure Life, 1987. Photo Shiro Takatani. © Dumb Type.

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feet and head height that moved endlessly back and forth on mechanical tracks spanning
the length of the space. With video, slide projectors, and fluorescent fixtures anchored
inside the two moving armatures, light as well as still and moving images were projected
directly down onto the floor of the stage, sometimes obscuring the bodies of the
performers.
Like 036 Pleasure Life, the performance of pH dealt with how the performers would
operate with the constraints of the technologically constructed environment inhabited
during the duration of the performance. Playing out mostly mundane, task-based behav-
iors, from dancing and vogueing to giving lectures, the performers would also continually
run down the length of the court, jumping over the lower moving beam and flying against
the back wall of the space in an effort to prevent the giant scenographic machine from
knocking them down with its relentless sweeping motion.
Although pH was an international success, Furuhashi’s internal announcement to the
collective in 1994 that he was HIV positive shifted the group’s overall aesthetic and
political direction. Undeniably, S/N, Dumb Type’s last project with Furuhashi before he
passed away in 1995, showed an overt interest in topics focusing on the taboo of AIDS
in Japan and an even deeper political engagement than in previous work. After Furuhashi’s
death, Dumb Type’s later projects such OR (1997), Memorandum (2000), and Voyage
(2003), moved away from the physical architectonics of their past work and toward purer
audiovisual mise-en-scène.
Comprised of time code–synchronized fusions of staccatto stroboscopic lighting, large-
scale projected digital video, and digital sound at the extreme ends of the frequency
spectrum, the affective tone of Dumb Type’s later works transformed. With the increased
precision and control afforded by digital audiovisual production and playback to induce
perceptual vertigo, Dumb Type focused on higher-stakes topics: the border between life
and death as explored in the clinical, white-out space of OR, where human bodies appeared
to be erased by colossal, sweeping video images or the erosion of memory endemic to
technoculture in Memorandum.

Architecture Machines

The tension between brick and mortar and audiovisual scenography expressed in Dumb
Type’s work pinpointed to a larger trend in experimental theatrical performance work
engaged in a technological dialogue. This trend was encapsulated not only by physical
and media fusion but also by the increasing interest of noted architects or artists and sce-
nographers trained in architectural techniques in using performance space as a context for
framing architectural questions.
For example, architect and curator Philip Johnson’s 1988 Museum of Modern Art
exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture (Johnson and Wigley 1988) introduced a handful of
then relatively obscure architects (Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, the collective Coop

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Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and Bernard Tschumi),
four of whom subsequently worked in the context of performance with directors, chore-
ographers, and other artists committed to expanding the scenographic envelope.
Even if many of the projects that Hadid, Libeskind, Gehry, and Coop Himmelb(l)au
engaged with were most of the time one-off opportunities, what these architects brought
to performance was not just the specialized architectural discourse of program, event,
strategy, and movement, but an aggressive challenge to modernist discourses of form
versus function, advancing the role of technology in the process of construction, and
examining the political relationships inherent in the perception of space. Attempting (in
some cases) to materialize philosopher Jacques Derrida’s literary techniques within the
process of construction, the late-twentieth-century architect as scenographer incorporated
strategies of folding and twisting of structure and materials in an effort to achieve
what Daniel Libeskind labeled as “space [that] is not just one space, but a plurality and
heterogeneity of spaces” (Libeskind 1992, 60–62).
The most salient contribution that architects brought to the performance arena and
that also resolutely resonated with their earlier twentieth-century counterparts was an
intimate understanding of new materials that were for the most part utilized only within
the scale of real-world architectural applications. Formed from architecturally standard
building materials like glass, steel, and acrylics combined with more exotic technologies
such as LED lighting and electrochromic glass, large technophysical architectures emerged
as hybrids of sculptures and stage sets, buildings, and live objects.
A case in point was that of two opera sets for the American opera director Peter Sellars’s
1995 production of Stravinsky’s oratorio Oedipus Rex, designed by the Viennese architec-
ture collective Coop Himmelb(l)au. Initially produced for the Salzburg music festival in
1994 and restaged at the Netherlands Opera, the collective designed a massive, eighteen-
meter wall of twenty-five panes of electrically controlled glass that was sequenced to
go from opaque to transparent—a key scenographic device in their goal to embody the
metaphor of Oedipus’s blindness and sight in the material form of a transient object.31
Another collaborative project, “Available Light” (1988) with choreographer Lucinda
Childs [Rules, Games, and Dance Machines, chapter 6], Frank Gehry, and composer John
Adams [Live Electronics II: The Second Wave, chapter 5], featured a environment resem-
bling a stadium entrance constructed from Gehry’s favorite building materials of concrete
and chain-link fence in which angular structures and sharpened edges in the architect’s
multilevel set created an aggressive, multidimensional space that complemented Child’s
formal, precisely executed choreography.
Architectural approaches to theatrical space also appeared in the work of a handful of
contemporary theater/opera scenic designers, namely George Tsypin, Robert Israel, John
Conklin, Marsha Ginsberg, and the German-born Anne Viebrock. Tsypin, a student of
architecture in Moscow and scenic design at New York University, designed scenographic
archi-sculptures that most certainly typified the radical redefinition of the parameters of

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theatrical scenography by way of new materials. Working with visual art as well as archi-
tectural influences, Tsypin’s scenographies stretched the capacities of even the grand opera
world budgets, involving the collaboration of international experts versed in cutting-edge
material fabrication (Tsypin 2005).
His setting for Peter Sellars’s [The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène, chapter 4] 1992
Salzburg staging of Olivier Messiaen’s rarely performed eight-hour opus Saint François
d’Assise transformed the massive Felsenreitschule theater space into a Constructivist
cathedral. Tsypin’s components included a massive “church,” matchstick-like in appear-
ance, housing the opera’s chorus and brass sections and lodged up against the quarry-like
walls of the theater, a set of precipitous wooden ramps almost suspended in air and snaking
up the back walls, and most spectacular, a huge, steel scaffolding-like box containing
thousands of colored fluorescent lights perched at such an angle that it appeared to
topple toward the spectators (figure 2.9). Tsypin’s setting for the American opera director

Figure 2.9 George Tsypin. Scenography for Saint François d’Assise (Olivier Messiaen). Production by Peter
Sellars, 1992. Photo © George Tsypin.

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Francesca Zambello’s Bregenz staging of the musical West Side Story on the surface of a
floating platform in Lake Constance in Austria invoked memories of the twisted wreckage
of the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The most notable example of architects working to reimagine the possibilities of tech-
nophysical scenography was the New York–based husband-and-wife team of Diller
Scofidio. Founded by architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Diller Scofidio
initially made its reputation in the late 1980s working on a series of relatively low-key,
New York–based performance and installation projects. Deprived of the ability to build
in the reactionary economic and cultural climate of 1980s New York and captivated by
the potential of the stage as a proving ground to research architectural issues, the team
devised a series of experiments designed to open up and challenge common precepts of
architectural discourse.
The team’s early projects, made in collaboration with director Matthew McGuire
and the Creation Production Company, were almost textbook examples of architectural
responses to dramatic texts, employing devices such as a Chinese cabinet type of box
that could unfold (Maguire’s The American Mysteries, 1983) or rotating walls and mirrors
poised at 45-degree angles over the stage (the Duchamp inspired The Rotary Notary and
his Hotplate, 1987) which delivered a top-down perspective of the stage action for spec-
tators, thus inverting the normal relationship between ground plan and elevation views
(figure 2.10).

Figure 2.10 Diller Scofidio. Scenography for The American Mysteries, 1983. Photo © Diller
Scofidio.

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 The device of the mirror and its associations of transparency and opaqueness, surveil-
lance, and voyeurism subsequently found its way into later Diller Scofidio projects, most
notably with the Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand’s company Charleroi Dances/
Plan K [The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater, chapter 6]. Facilitated by the subsidies
of an European theater house, Flamand and Diller Scofidio’s productions Moving Target
(1996) and EJM 1–2: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed and Inertia (1988) fused material
and imagining technologies to explore how architecture itself might change the percep-
tion of the lived and moving body; techniques that, as Rose Lee Goldberg has pointed
out, owe as much to the early-twentieth-century experiments of Foregger, Yutkevich, and
Schlemmer as to projection and computer-aided imagining systems.32
Moving Target’s deployment of a massively scaled version of the 45-degree angled mirror
used in the funky New York downtown theater setting for The Rotary Notary achieved
what Diller Scofidio called an interscenium—an updating of the proscenium that shifted
the politicized conditions of spectating constrained by the proscenium arch. In combina-
tion with video projections that bounced off the mirror and created a doppelgänger reflec-
tion on the stage floor as well as an optical flow camera-based sensing system developed
with the artist/programmer Kirk Woolford [Sensate Dances, chapter 6] with which the
performers could be virtually followed by an animated crosshair, Diller Scofidio’s ocular-
saturated stage suggested not only the possibility of reimagining the dancing body
through architecture but also of a “dancing architecture” itself (Goldberg 2004, 203).
With architecture’s return to the stage at the end of the twentieth century, Diller
Scofidio’s experiments—as well as those of other architects—framed a fertile period of
development for the advance of new technoscenographic practices that embraced the
technical beings of their time, while exemplifying the tensions between stage and world
in material terms. If the fusion of electromechanical materials and technologies managed
to turn the spaces of theatrical performance into an experimental microcosm of architec-
tural practice and performance itself into dancing architecture, could the same ideas be
retranslated back into architecture outside of the stage? What feedback, if any, existed
between architecture that remained in the urban setting and the architectural research
laboratories taking place in the controlled safety of the theater space? If architects managed
to turn performance into dancing architecture, did they succeed at the utopian hope of
turning architecture into performance itself?

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 3

Performative Architectures

Our architecture doesn’t have a physical ground plan, but a mental one. Walls no longer exist. Our
spaces are pulsating balloons. Our heartbeats become space; our face is the building’s façade.
coop himmelb(l)au, “our architecture doesn’t have a physical ground plan” (1968)1

Architecture must burn. In a nondescript courtyard of the Technical University in Graz,

Austria, at 8:35 p.m. on December 12, 1980, a huge 15-meter tall, 1.5-ton suspended
steel frame was soaked in liquefied gas and set ablaze (figure 3.1). Covering the surround-
ing walls with protective water curtains, the heat nonetheless was so powerful that twenty-
one windows shattered on impact. With the roaring sound from the burning suspension
amplified, the entire courtyard turned into a Dante-esque symphony of combustion and
noise.2
The fiery inferno inflicted by Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky—the duo that
founded Coop Himmelb(l)au—on this grey southern Austrian courtyard in the coldness
of a December night had all of the markings of a performance: the constitution of an event
in the moment of action, the entangling among forces (humans and machines), (brutal)
material transmutation, and spatiotemporal enactment followed by disappearance.
Art and architecture have always been close if not necessarily comfortable bedfellows.
Forever dreaming of realizing works at monumental scale, architecture manifests the
sculptor’s yearning for objects materialized at monstrous size. With his first sight of the
Manhattan skyline after arriving from totalitarian Europe, Constantin Brancusi’s famous
statement “New York is my studio” now meets the monumental archisculptural forms of
late-twentieth-century architects like Frank Gehry, Herzog and De Meuron, Zaha Hadid,
Rem Koolhaas, Thom Mayne, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, and Toyo Ito.3
But architecture and performance are even stranger partners, for how could a discipline
so reliant on stable materiality embody the ephemeral moment and nuanced but unstable
Figure 3.1 Coop Himmelb(l)au. The Blazing Wing, Graz, Austria, 1980. Photo © Gerald Zugmann.

interactions taking place among actants, milieu, and spectators? Certainly, upon closer
look, the liberation of architecture in the twentieth century paralleled a similar trajectory
to the liberation of stage scenography, not only in the transformation of static materials
into things kinetic but also the dynamization of the perception of space itself.
Architecture was envisioned as that form in which space, technologized through mate-
rials and media, could become expressive—almost performative. The desire for an archi-
tecture in a state of becoming, no longer rooted to the earth but revolving, pulsing,
swimming, crawling, and flying marks not only the hopes of a forgotten industrial avant-
garde modernism, but also our age of calculating machines, micromachining, smart
materiality, and intelligent undulation.

Architecture and Performativity

What role then should architecture play in a technological history of performance? First,
the technical formation and shaping of space is a key concept that cuts across the estab-

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lished but permeable disciplinary boundaries of artistic practice. Second, performance
itself has increasingly become a buzzword in the architectural world—a scaffolding to
understand the dynamic processes occurring in architecture brought on by the onslaught
of digital systems. Architects increasingly speak of structures and environments as perfor-
mances.4 In fact, an entire monograph published in 2005 entitled Performative Architecture:
Beyond Instrumentality attempted to lay the groundwork for performance’s seepage into
architecture’s inherent fixity (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005).
In the hands of architects, however, performance is still a slippery term. Architecture
professor David Leatherbarrow suggests that performance is the method by which a build-
ing reveals its possibilities for action. Buildings are static, however, constructed from the
most stable of materials like concrete, glass, and steel. “Compared to dance and musical
expression, the building seems to be resolutely—even embarrassingly—inert and
inactive . . . about as animated as a stop sign” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 10).
How then does built space become dynamic not in metaphor but in actual movement—
specifically, the way that El Lissitzky envisioned when he wrote at the height of
Russian Socialist optimism, “The static architecture of the Egyptian pyramids has been
superseded—our architecture revolves, swims, flies. We are approaching the state of
floating in air and swinging like a pendulum” (Lissitzky 1967, 330).
With the implementation of movable mechanisms such as screens, blinds, walls and
other elements, a building can suddenly lurch into life. At times, this action is hidden as
in the sense of the building’s response to weather on its climate control systems, while at
other times it is made distinctly visible/audible, in the case of a media façade that becomes
an animated surface for displaying hidden processes. From this perspective, the potential
for temporal action in architecture suggests not only kinetic change but also transforma-
tion at the level of appearance.
But must architecture physically move and be explicitly mechanical in order to be
seen as dynamic and performative? As Leatherbarrow suggests in his concept of “weather-
ing,” buildings contain an innate time constant that is deeply connected to their
material durations. “No building stands forever, eventually every one falls under the
influence. . . . Weathering does not construct, it destroys” (Mostavahi and Leatherbarrow
1993, 4).
As far back as medieval times, the construction of gothic cathedrals acknowledged the
polyrhythmic play of changing light and shadow, setting buildings into larger movement
with the cosmos and bringing a materialized essence of temporality to the structure of
otherwise static buildings. Architectural dynamism was also implicit in the famous house
cum museum of the eighteenth-century British architect John Soane.5 Designed as a resi-
dence for the architect, Soane’s house increasingly became a kind of treasure trove of
knick-knacks, artworks, sculptures, antiquities, mirrors, and countless other artifacts that
would appear to move and change shape through shadows generated by the continual
shifting of light in the house’s countless rooms.

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83
 While action, interaction, temporality, and adaptation characterize architecture’s
potential for performance, architect and University of Calgary professor Branko Kolarevic
describes performative architecture as that which can “respond to changing social, cultural,
and technological conditions” and in which “culture, technology, and space form a
complex active web of connections, a network of interrelated constructs that affect each
other simultaneously and continually” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 205). Architecture
as practice explores the potential of space to unfold in “indeterminate ways, in contrast
to the fixity of predetermined, programmed actions, events, and effects”—a form in which
technical and social behaviors dynamically emerge through how users/inhabitants/partici-
pants use space. Here, Kolarevic makes the leap between the stage and the urban setting.
“Avant-garde architecture advances the latter architecture as performance art.” Space and
structure perform and respond based on the spectator’s actions, however unpredictable,
and the urban environment becomes “a stage on which it [architecture] literally and
actively performs” (205).

Architecture and the Stage

The resonance between theatrical performances and urban architecture is not accidental.
Architects have long been fascinated by the site and practice of theatrical performance, as
a laboratory for exploration and as a staging ground for the fantastic and the visionary.
Book Five of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture specifically focused on theaters and
their acoustic foundations; Book Ten concentrated on the spectacle-like elements of
machines of war.6 As discussed in chapter 1, Tatlin, Vesnin, El Lissitzky, Gropius, and
other trained architects brought ideas about architectonic form, shape, structure, and
material to bear on the creation on new theatrical staging environments in which imagined
future performances would take place.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, this cycle was mirrored, albeit with star
architects working within architecture, challenging the envelope of their own discipline
by collaborating with star stage directors. Architecture seems to have historically needed
the theater to assist in pushing conceptual and structural boundaries—to practice scenog-
raphy on the stage in order to carry it over into the urban wild.7

Architecture and Event

In his provocative 2001 book How Architecture Got Its Hump, critic Roger Connah wrote
about the distinction between surface and depth or what he termed the screen and the scene.
Describing the tension between the flickering, flattened media image (the screen) and the
volumetric depth of space (the scene), Connah searches to find a middle way through the
possibility of performance. “Understanding the difference between ‘scene’ and ‘screen’

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could produce differing, improbable, even performative, architectures,” he wrote; archi-
tectures that, like the transition spaces and gaps that Tibetan Buddhism labels bardos,
could remain impermanent (Connah 2001, 28).
Suggested in Connah’s reference to the shifting, transitory experience of the bardos, the
in-between and the impermanent also help build on architecture’s performative connec-
tions to the stage yet, its relationship to time is as challenging as its relationship to
movement and action. If Tarkovsky once argued that the art of cinema is “sculpting in
time,” architectural critic Sanford Kwinter states its opposite: “What is it about time’s
relentless fluidity, its irreducible materiality that the modern mind finds so impossible—
or repellent—to think?” (Kwinter 2001, 4).
“There can be no architecture without event, without action, without activities,” writes
Bernard Tschumi in his oft-cited “Architecture of the Event” (1992, 25). Written at the
height of architectural postmodernism, Tschumi proposed an architecture of ruptures and
breaks in which “space, action, and movement” would replace the modernist hierarchy of
form follows function. Architecture, in Tschumi’s work, was a “stage set” in which radical
choreographic ideas of space from dance and film could substitute for the power structures
of plans, sections, and elevations, or what Neil Spiller labels “the notations of spatial
repression” (2006, 127). Marshaled on by spatial practices known to the performing arts
but alien to architecture, the event would be a place of shock in which “by understanding
the nature of our contemporary circumstances and the media processes that go with it,
architects are in a position to construct conditions . . . that will create . . . new relation-
ships between spaces and events” (Tschumi 1992, 27).8
It is the tension between the transitory nature of the event brought on by the media
age and its fixity due to material conditions that form the basis of what is commonly
called visionary architecture—architectures that traverse the earth, swallow cities, or fight
to the death in atmospheres of war and crisis in short, imagined architectures that operate
at the fringes of material reality.9 Perhaps then in the bardo between fixed materiality and
disappearance lies the essential argument for why architecture should be included in a
book about performance.
In order to understand the invisible forces, movements, agencies, and affects that make
the machinic performances possible that Félix Guattari described, architecture as a dynamic
and elastic “animate form” (Lynn 1999), must also articulate and enunciate. How then
do we understand the performative elements of architecture? What are its actants and
how do they express themselves? What happens when stable material gives way to hybrid,
mutable stuff as a material of signifying expression? The kinetic and responsive structure,
temporal event, and flickering screen all contribute to our understanding of the transitory
performances of and within architecture that help us pose complex questions straddling
the territories of stillness and movement, façade and depth, stasis and morphogenesis, and
permanence and evanescence.

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 Movement

Like its ambition to transform theater into a plastic-kinetic complex through technology
[Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance—Scenodynamics, chapter 1], Futurism’s
architectonic yearnings also were conjoined to the animated power of the machine. As
Marinetti expressed in the Italian Futurist’s 1909 opening manifesto,

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multi-
coloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly
fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that
devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke;
bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives;
adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks
like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose
propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (Marinetti
1973, 22)

For Marinetti, who began to imagine and articulate entire urban settings as animistic,
architecture would have to follow suit.
In 1914, Enrico Prampolini penned an architectural manifesto (The Futurist Atmosphere-
Structure) in which he laid out architecture’s new kinetic future to be formed by the
external energies of a society in technologized transition and shaped by “motion, light,
and air” (Prampolini 1973, 182). The greatest proclamations, however, came from the
short-lived Antonio Sant’Elia, who called for nothing less than architecture’s reinvention
in light of the urban transformation taking place in the culture of speed. The Futurist
city would be “agile, mobile, dynamic in every part and the modern building must be
similar to a gigantic machine” (Banham 1960, 129).
Sant’Elia’s own architectural sketches and plans, of course, looked nothing like the
dianissino architecttura of swarming elevators, conveyor belts, and suspended catwalks that
he and others so emphatically described. Nevertheless, Futurism’s call for machine archi-
tecture would set in motion a tension that would both enthrall and contradict architec-
ture’s machinic obsession over the next hundred years: the machine as metaphor versus
the machine in materialized motion.
If the Italian Futurists’ dynamism lay latent in paper architectures and phantasmagoric
descriptions, Russian Suprematism and Constructivism sought actualized movement.
As in theater scenography, the Russian spin on dynamic architecture rested upon that
which would interact with its environment: structures that would resonate with the times,
bearing the icons and letterforms of media and typographic symbols of the oncoming
age of advertising and design, put in the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Influenced by the new media of motion pictures and radio coupled with a messianic desire

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to integrate aesthetic and technological-scientific forces, Russian avant-garde architectural
movements of the early 1920s proposed projects that sought to make manifest the new
machine age in appearance, form and materials.
With the machine as an idea playing a central role in architectural conceptualization
and planning, there was no agreed-upon consensus among Russian architects and urban
planners how to materialize it in built form. Constructivism’s reach into architecture was
similar to its position within theater and the visual arts [The October Revolution and
Constructivism, chapter 1]: not a singular monolithic movement but instead one snarled
in different individuals, factions, ideologies, and projects.
Already, within the Moscow-based “Higher Artistic and Technical Studios” or
VKHUTEMAS, two different factions had arisen while attempting to define the “New
Architecture” based on machine-age aesthetics. The Association of New Architects
(ASNOVA) movement, led by the architect and educator Nikolai Ladovsky and joined
by Konstantin Melnikov, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Krinsky, preached a form of archi-
tectural rationalism formulated from psychoperceptual concerns with the ways in which
human beings perceived and interacted with space.10
In his 1924 manifesto-like treatise Stil’ I Epokha (Style and Epoch), Moisei Ginzburg,
the foremost proponent of what would be dubbed Constructivist Architecture, founded a
parallel VKHUTEMAS movement called OSA (the Union of Contemporary Architects)
in 1925 along with the Vesnin brothers. Calling for a fusion of engineering and architec-
ture to use the principle of the machine to formulate a new social-technical reality, the
machine for Ginzburg was nothing less than an ideal organizational model: precise, objec-
tive, and functional (Ginzburg 1983).
With its images of grain silos and American factories combined with forty-five images
of exemplary Russian architectonic experiments, Style and Epoch bore more than just a
passing resemblance to another great work that rhapsodized the machine aesthetic of the
time published one year earlier: Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (Towards an Architecture)
(2007). Le Corbusier had taken a great interest in the Russian Socialist aesthetic project
and had deeply influenced both Ginzburg and Leonid Vesnin. Even Le Corbusier’s fabled
argument for the machine à habiter, the house as a machine for living, however, was properly
eclipsed by Ginzburg’s belief in the powers of the machine, not the human architect, to
determine the functional course of building.
Yet Ginzburg knew that the image of an industrial architecture was just that: an image.
Any true machine architecture would have to be reflected not only in the outwards appear-
ance of a structure but also within the very function of the structure itself. Architecture
would thus be the ultimate unification of Aleksei Gan’s principles of konstruktsiia, tekton-
ika, and faktura: a rationally organized, engineering-based set of practices that would
ultimately transcend its technological framework to become a “social condenser” and
create new forms of social life. If this vision of architecture confirmed El Lissitzky’s famous
statement that while being an immortalized unification of technology and ideology, the

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Russian revolution was indeed not a technological revolution but a social one, it also reso-
nates with Kolarevic’s argument described earlier that a performative architecture would
be “that which can respond to changing social, cultural, and technological conditions” in
a dynamic manner (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 205).
As influential as they were, Ginzburg’s ideas represented only one perspective in the
vigorous debate around the nature and form of Constructivist building. The architect
Iakov Chernikov’s The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms in 1931 appears to
embrace a similar understanding of the machine.11 For Chernikov, the machine was an
ideal model for construction, as it was composed of a series of pure, almost monumental
forms, uniting disparate parts or objects into a functioning whole. Through a bevy of
constructive unions such as penetration (solids inserted into each other), embracing (solids
wrapped around each other), interlacing, mounting, integration, clamping, and coupling,
new and more complex united aggregates could be formed from simple elements such as
planes, volumes, and surfaces depending on their combination and transformation.
The machine not only enabled “the insertion of one element into another with all the
possible individual variations and combinations,” but also generated what Chernikov
labeled constructive dynamics (Cooke 1995, 113). Although this mechanical nature demanded
“that movement of some sort take place,” the architect readily admitted that buildings
were static; their potential for real, kinetic movement stopped in time. Perhaps this is
one of the reasons why The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms is filled with
images of other disciplinary manifestations of Constructivist form alongside architecture:
theatrical sets, gantries and cranes, machine components, and most important, imaginary,
constructive “fantasies.” These are not explicitly stated; one senses in Chernikov’s descrip-
tions of dynamic curves; surfaces and lines; jagged volumes; and vibrating, rhythmic
components a deep yearning for an architecture where movement would become actualized
in physical form.
Chernikov might have stopped short of planning for a true kinetic architecture at
building scale but the crème de la crème of the Russian avant-garde like Melnikov, Lis-
sitzky, Krutikov, the Vesnin brothers, Gustav Klutsis, and Tatlin, among others, drew
up grandiose plans for cityscapes inhabited by buildings and structures that indeed would
perform: rotate, shift, and, in more than one extreme case, float, in all of their kinetic
glory.
The architect Anton Lavinskii imagined a circular City of the Future suspended on
springs above the earth and divided into zoned areas. More fanciful ideas bordering on
science fiction came from Georgii Krutikov’s 1928 plan for a Flying City on the Aerial
Paths of Communication, in which a cylindrical apartment complex, suspended in the air
by way of electricity and accessed by nuclear-powered enclosed vehicles, would continually
rotate (figure 3.2). Closer to the ground, the remarkable 1924 design by Leonid, Alek-
sandr, and Viktor Vesnin for the future headquarters of the Leningradskaia Pravda news-
paper included a glass-clad building sitting on a mere 18 m s 6 m s 6 m foundation with

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Figure 3.2 Georgii Krutikov. Flying City on the Aerial Paths of Communication, 1928.

exposed wheels, lights, speakers, and glass elevators that literally swarmed up the side of
the buildings as Sant’Elia had imagined.
Lissitzky saw the Vesnins’ plan for the Pravda headquarters as representing the proto-
typical “aesthetic of Constructivism,” one in which architecture would no longer be a
hermetic, self-sufficient form sealed off from quotidian life, but where “all accessories—
which on a typical city street are usually tacked onto the building—such as signs,
advertising, clocks, loudspeakers, and even the elevators inside have been incorporated
as integral elements of the design and combined into a unified whole” (Lissitzky
1984, 32).
Rotation was not simply restricted to the air but also envisioned taking place on the
ground. Melnikov’s unrealized plans for a gigantic Monument to Christopher Columbus in
Santo Domingo (1929) included a glass-sheathed building shaped like a twisted corkscrew
that rotated 360 degrees. The greatest plan for kinetic architecture of the time, however,
belongs to Vladimir Tatlin’s colossal vision for the Monument to the Third International.
Commissioned by the Cominterm in 1924 to commemorate the third anniversary of
the October Revolution, Tatlin’s proposal was a 400-meter-tall, ziggurat-like structure
some three times higher than the Eiffel Tower and constructed from steel and glass. Tatlin

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imagined the monument, to be “built on the basis of entirely new architectural
principles,” to be a “place of the most intense movement” (Zhadova 1984, 5; Lodder
1983, 56).
Tilted in relationship to the earth’s axis, the tower consisted of a double-helical open
structure housing four monumental geometric forms: a cube, cylinder, pyramid, and
semisphere (figure 3.3). With forms constructed of glass and rotating at different speeds
on their axes in accordance with the passing of minutes, days, hours, and years, had the
tower been built it would have certainly constituted a dynamic spectacle more amazing
than all of the Constructivist theater performances combined.
Certainly Tatlin’s intricate steel construction was one of the most radically planned of
the time, yet it was his plans for “promoting agitation and propaganda” through a
“modern technical apparatus” in the uppermost cylindrical space that acts as a harbinger
of the performative “mediatectures” of the late twentieth century. Situated at the top of
structure amongst radio masts and communications stations to keep the international
proletariat informed, was a single powerful projector with enough lumens to project
slogans onto the clouds, as well as a massive screen to broadcast “the latest news in
the cultural and political life of the whole world.” Far from being add-ons, Tatlin
declared his media apparatus as essential to the form of the monument. “The radio,
screen, and aerial, being elements of the monument, can also be the elements of the
form” (Lodder 1983, 56). In combination with Tatlin’s media instruments, the overall
kinetic gestalt of the tower gave the overwhelming impression of a living, breathing
apparatus.
Like their Italian Futurist contemporaries, none of the more extreme kinetic fantasies
of the Russian architectural avant-garde were ever built. Ironically, the only truly kinetic
object that has survived is artist Naum Gabo’s 1920 Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave),
an evocative but fragile sculpture consisting of a single steel rod that was set into vibrat-
ing, vertical motion by the mechanism of a doorbell buzzer. Tatlin’s architectural marvel
also achieved its only manifestation in a 6-meter-tall wood, paper, and wire model that
was exhibited in the Academy of Arts in Petrograd in 1920 and later in Moscow. Despite
Tatlin’s assertions that “modern technology fully allows for the possibility of constructing
such a building,” the actual construction of the tower (if it had been attempted), would
have used up all of the available steel in Russia—not a trivial fact, considering that
Russian society was barely at the threshold of industrialization and electrification at the
time.
A similar fate greeted the plans of architects who, like Lavinskii or Krutikov, wanted
to take advantage of the magical technologies of electricity in their architectures—an even
more utopian vision in an atmosphere in which, as art critic Robert Hughes reminded us,
there “was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer” (Hughes
2004). It seems logical given the economic and political instability of prewar European
societies that such technosocial experiments in construction could not be realized in mate-

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Figure 3.3 Vladimir Tatlin. Proposal for a Monument to the Third International, circa 1919.

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rial form. What the Constructivist and Futurist movements did do, however, was to
envision architectures that would enact rather than represent movement, letting it live
and propagate and, if only on paper or the screen, release built space from the shackles of
gravity and stasis.

Event

Visions of performing buildings and living cityscapes resurfaced with an acute vengeance
in the 1960s. No longer convinced of a socialist utopia at mass scale, younger designers
and collectives instead questioned the very nature of the architectural profession itself—
particularly its failure to respond to the rapidly changing political-social-cultural-
technological fault lines.
Adorned with enigmatic names like Archigram (UK), Superstudio (Italy), Archizoom
(Italy), Coop Himmelb(l)au (Austria), the Metabolists (Japan), Haus-Rucker-Co (Austria),
and others, the next generation sought a complete reimagining of architecture in an age
of technological advancement, televisual media, and social upheaval, turning to political
rallies, theater, and temporary events in the urbanscape as well as media instruments of
pop culture such as leaflets, ’zines, and advertising for inspiration (Rouillard 2004).
Simultaneously, the turn toward the ephemeral event challenged the essence of architec-
ture as a form of knowledge making, and more specifically, critiqued the very act of
building itself, which many saw as reactionary in the face of the wild and fluid metamor-
phosis of the 1960s.
Arguably the most influential of the 1960s collectives, Archigram (an amalgam of
“architecture” and “telegram”) was formed by Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Mike Webb,
Warren Chalk, David Greene, and Dennis Crompton. Taking its impulses from ’60s
counterculture, advertising, comic books, technology, and mass market consumerism,
Archigram was the name given to both the collective and its major architectural output:
a series of nine ‘zine-like publications between 1961 and 1974. Reacting to both the ste-
rility of British architecture of the time as well as the lack of trade publications focusing
on architectural issues, Archigram proposed speculations in the form of concepts, ideas,
sketches, and drawings in order to “make what is essentially an inert object, a building,
into something fluid” (Webb 1999, 3).
Issued in 1961 as a one-sheet publication on cheap paper, the first Archigram published
by Cook and Greene set out the collective’s playful tone and conceptual break with
the past. Graphically rendered surreal and almost hippie-tinged proclamations such as “a
new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject
the precepts of Modern yet, in fact retains these precepts,” and “we want to drag into
building some of the poetry of countdown, orbital helmets, discord of body transportation
methods and leg walking” were nested amidst cartoon-like, pop iconography, lending the
entire enterprise a manifesto-like tone. Gradually revealed over the next issues of

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the magazine (now stapled), Archigram’s architectures were more like “situations,” “the
happenings within spaces in the city,” and environments than built monuments
(Cook 1999, 16).12
Partly inspired by architectural historian Reyner Banham who foresaw the increasing
technological transformation of the urban environment, Archigram’s projects like
Living City, Plug-in City, Instant City, Walking City, Mobile Village, Living Pod, Drive in
Housing, and Blow Out Village firmly established the group’s science fiction–esque, visual-
architectonic lingua franca.13 Living Cities, the group’s 1963 exhibition at the London-
based Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) created a visually packed environment of seven
spatially organized zones or gloops (spatial “loop enclosures”) of contemporary city life
(survival, crowd, movement, man, communications, place, situation), adorned with
collage-like formations of advertisements, texts, drawings, schematics, and plans. Evoking
“the vitality of city life,” rather than the top-down, repressive mechanisms inherent in
urban planning (Cook 1999, 20), Living City was prototypical of Archigram’s futuristic
schematics that gave the appearance of living, behaving machines.
The most explicit example of performing architecture in Archigram’s canon, however,
was easily Ron Herron’s Walking Cities series. Directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s call for
the machine à habiter, Herron’s paper visions imagined colossal, ambulatory, buglike struc-
tures that were robotic in appearance, with telescoping legs that could at a moment’s
notice scurry across the landscape, instantly situating themselves and adapting to a new
environment (figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4 Archigram/Ron Herron. A Walking City, 1964. Courtesy of Simon Herron.

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 Imagined at the size of 400 m s 60 m and standing at a height of over 200 meters,
Herron’s Walking Cities on the Ocean, Desert, or in New York were technologically cutting-
edge but environmentally efficient visions of a future in which all sustainable resources
had been wiped away. Each city was to be constructed as a series of different units or pods
that could be self-sufficient or exchange environmental resources with other pods, no
longer relying on fossil fuel technologies but instead adapting to the particular environ-
mental features at each new site. Walking Cities was part of a larger Archigram obsession
with the throw-away, the inflatable, the movable, and the temporary—self-sufficient,
modular, transformable architectures that could be inflated, carried on the back (as was
the case with Mike Webb’s Cushicle and Suitaloon), disassembled, reassembled, and
reconfigured.
Radical for their time, Archigram’s machine-like structures also inspired later genera-
tions of architects to further explore the concept of moving architectures poised between
the mechanical and the organic. Founded by Prague-born Jan Kaplicky and David Nixon,
the London-based architectural partnership Future Systems developed visionary moving
structures in the mid 1980s, most specifically with their technomechanical schemes for
living spaces like Peanut House (1984): a pod that could be raised into the air by a hydraulic
boom and set down in any particular environment to afford the inhabitants a 360-degree
view (Spiller 2006, 105–106).
The most extreme example of walking, robot-like architectures was the speculative
work of the American architect Lebbeus Woods. Trained as an architect, Woods turned
exclusively to conceptual sketches and drawings in order to realize his fantasies of crawl-
ing, mechanomorphic buildings. Set within a postapocalyptic, war-torn present, Woods’
ravaged works like Berlin Free Zone and Zagreb Free Zone depicted huge, insect- and
machine-like structures clinging to the sides of buildings and engaged in macabre battles
to the death. Like Herron’s Walking Cities, Woods proposed a speculative, migratable,
and visionary architecture depicting a dystopian world shot through with violence and
war in which buildings were depicted in colossal conflict with one another.
Archigram’s progressive ideas about temporary, “living” architectures also inspired
individuals and groups outside of the United Kingdom—predominantly Austria and
Italy. The fact that such a large number of experimental architecture formations adorned
with names like Haus-Rucker-Co, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Missing Link were situated
in Austria led Peter Cook to dub the movement “the Austrian phenomenon.” Formed by
Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, and Rainer Michael Holzer in 1968, Coop Himmelb(l)au
(meaning “sky-blue collective” or “building the sky”), the most famous of these collectives
that is still active today, provoked established conventions, in particular the “suffocating”
architectural landscape of Vienna.
Envisioning an architecture that would “be as buoyant and variable as a cloud,” Coop
Himmelb(l)au’s early experiments involved the creation of pneumatic and inflatable living
units; an architecture that would perform by reacting to “our movements, feelings, moods,

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emotions, so that we want to live within it” (Coop Himmelb(l)au 2005, 24–27). The
Cloud (1968–1972) was “an organism for living”; a mobile space composed of “air and
dynamics” that would breathe like a pair of lungs while the prototype urban environment
Villa Rosa (1967) consisted of Archigram-inspired pneumatic and spherical modules that
could be linked up and undergo physical transformations (80).
In their effort to create new urban living environments that “beat like the heart and
fly like breath,” Coop Himmelb(l)au also turned to performative actions and installations
to explore the relationship between the spectator’s/participant’s body and a responding,
breathing architectural surround, at times employing early sensing and interactive tech-
nologies (figure 3.5). The group’s 1968 action Hard Space, for example, used the heartbeats

Figure 3.5 Coop Himmelb(l)au. Herzstadt—The White Suit, 1969. Photo © Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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of three people in order to trigger a series of sixty explosions in a field outside of Vienna
to “create a space” over the duration of twenty heartbeats.
Soft Space, filled a section of the Universitätstrasse in Vienna with 1200 m3 of soap foam
per minute. Restless Sphere and City Soccer, another series of interventions during 1970–
1971, created large-scale translucent inflatable spheres that invaded pedestrian zones in
Basel and Vienna and were moved by people walking inside them. Coop Himmelb(l)au
also explored similar techniques with indoor performative installations, early precursors
to what computer scientist and artist Myron Krueger later labeled responsive environments
[Responsive Environments: First Generation, chapter 8], creating spaces that used the
visitors’ breath or bodily movements to control the behavior of light and sound in order
to manifest the assertion that their architecture was not a physical one, but a “mental
one.” Coop Himmelb(l)au moved on to more bricks- and mortar-based building projects
in the 1980s, but they continued to explore the disrupting role of performance with their
stage designs [Architecture Machines, chapter 1], exhibitions, and experimental building
techniques.
During the same period, another Austrian collective named Haus-Rucker-Co (1967–
1992, founded by Manfred Ortner, Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp, and Klaus
Pinter) also played with the performative potential of inflatable structures as a framework
for ephemeral events and alternate living concepts. Haus-Rucker-Co’s Mind Expander
(1967) and Yellow Heart (1968) were pneumatic, capsule-like pulsating environments
influenced by 1960s participatory politics and happenings. Developed for Documenta 5
in 1972, the collective’s Oase #7 was another example of what the collective called “pneu-
matic dwelling units” or pneumecosms: a giant inflatable sphere measuring some 24 feet
(8 pneumecosms meters) across and attached to the side of the baroque Friedericianum, the
main exhibition hall in Kassel, Germany, within which a catwalk-like scaffolding was
built that could be inhabited by people.
In a series of experimental texts and works during the late 1960s, the Austrian-born,
United States–educated architect Hans Hollein, who belonged to a slightly earlier genera-
tion, also argued for fantastic architectures based on machine aesthetics which suggested
“plastic, dynamic, expressive, formal, and emotional potentials” (Hollein 1968). Hollein’s
projects and writings, such as Mobiles Büro (1969), an inflatable office that could be moved
to a new location enabling mobile communication to take place long before the cellular
telephone and Alles ist Architektur (Everything Is Architecture), a searing, graphically illus-
trated manifesto that dared to transform architecture from its tradition of physical con-
struction into something permeable and transitory, embraced strategies from the new
media (Marshall McLuhan was a large influence) and technology, cybernetics, the visual arts,
and philosophy, among other disciplines. “Architects must not only think in terms of
buildings,” Hollein wrote, for a new architecture would be one that possessed “haptic,
optic, and acoustic qualities” (Hollein 1968).

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 Architectural performances and events that became de rigueur in the 1960s were also
manifested in the work of the well-known Australian architecture-trained sculptor and
later media artist Jeffrey Shaw [Performative Interfaces and Spaces, chapter 8]. More
rooted in the visual arts than an architectural context, Shaw’s work with the Eventstruc-
ture Research Group (ERG), cofounded with Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-
Miller, nevertheless was strongly influenced by the manifestos and actions of the event
architecture movement. Stating that “the event we look for is when a particular structur-
ing of art/architecture/spectacle/technology makes operational an expanded arena of will
and action open to everyone” (Shaw 1969, 49), ERG’s early work consisted of expanded
cinema projects such as Corpocinema (1967) and Movie-Movie (1967) that entailed the pro-
jection of slides and films within inflatable environments, fusing immaterial media with
temporary architecture.
With their series of outdoor installations called Waterwalks, ERG soon moved to the
creation of inflatable architectural environments that could be inhabited by participants.
The most extreme of these in scale, WaterWalk Tube (1970), was formed by a 250-meter
inflatable plastic (PVC) tube that sat on the surface of the Masch lake in Hannover,
Germany, in which visitors could enter and literally walk across the surface of the water
(figure 3.6). Like Hollein’s, Shaw’s, and ERG’s focus on creating an “alternative form of

Figure 3.6 Jeffrey Shaw/ERG. WaterWalk Tube (1970), Maschsee Hannover, 250 m s 3 m. Eventstruc-
ture Research Group (Theo Botschuijver, Jeffrey Shaw, Sean Wellesley-Miller). Photo © Pieter Boersma.

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environmental situation . . . which is in itself as undetermined as possible, depending for
its life and forms on participant action and invention,” functioned to reimagine architec-
ture as both event of a new, almost unstable materiality and event activated by inhabitant
participation (Shaw 1969, 48).
Regardless of their geographic and sometimes ideological differences, what linked
many of these experiments was a common interest in exploring the shifting materiality
of architecture brought on by postliterate, televisual culture, and social-cultural transfor-
mation. Embracing performance practices that involved fluid relationships between the
body and space, architecture became ephemeral—an event that would literally disappear
and whose constructive trace would remain only in the bodily memory of its participants/
onlookers and in media documentation. Certainly no one exploited this tension more so
than the American architect-turned-artist Gordon Matta-Clark.
The son of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark studied architecture
at Cornell University in the late 1960s before rebelling against the profession and turning
to performative architectural interventions inspired by his burgeoning interest in happen-
ings, land art, and environments proliferating in the visual arts. In contrast to the utopian,
almost rarified futures of the Archigram-influenced architects, Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture
operated in the grungy here and now of the derelict structures and constructed wastelands
of urban modernism that dotted the city landscape of New York. Consisting of perfor-
mances in which the artist would dissemble, saw through, or remove structural parts of
buildings that were to eventually be demolished, Matta-Clark’s interventions were potent
critiques of architectural practice that changed the formal appearance of his targeted
structures along with their actual material construction.
His most famous intervention, Splitting (1974), took place in a New Jersey suburb
where the artist proceeded over the course of three months to saw a disused two-story
suburban house in half, creating a sculptural form that appeared like two freestanding
houses separated from each other with an elegant slice of sunlight down the middle. Held
up by art historians as a prime example of literal dematerialization of the aesthetic object,
Splitting also exploited the architectural tension and trauma between the representation
of a structure in the form of a ground plan versus the actual material process of making
(and unmaking) a building. Moreover, Matta-Clark’s action almost was a textbook dem-
onstration of the manner in which a building was put together, recalling bit by bit the
different potentialities of structural chaos that would ensue with each direct cut into the
building’s architectural framework.14
During the mid 1970s, Matta-Clark continued his building deconstruction perfor-
mances with works in New York, Paris, and Antwerp. His notorious action Days End
(1975), which involved the cutting up of floor, wall, and ceiling sections in a disused
New York metal warehouse on the edge of Pier 52 on the Hudson River in order to create
what the artist described as a “sun and water temple,” caused such a stir that the event
was shut down by the NYPD and Matta-Clark was smitten with a lawsuit.

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 In Conical Intersect, performed in Paris in 1975, the artist cut conical forms into
seventeenth-century townhouses scheduled for demolition at the future site of the Centre
Pompidou—an ironic action, considering the exoskeletal façade that Richard Rogers’s and
Renzo Piano’s future museum eventually would have. Matta-Clark died of cancer at the
age of thirty-five in 1978, and the only record of his work exists in 8- and 16-mm films
and photographs that were shot on site during the performances. In these haunted media
memories, the notion of disappearance becomes acutely revealed in Matta-Clark’s work;
not only did his anarchitectural actions vanish, but the material conditions that he trans-
formed also eventually disappeared.

Kinetics: Movement Revisited

If kinesis embodied in architectural scale and structure was the stuff of paper in the 1920s,
such concepts became reality with advances in material sciences, engineering, and com-
putation, finally coalescing into direct material attempts: a kinetic architecture that tried to
implement and simultaneously go beyond the principles of Le Corbusier’s machine à
habiter. Through a history of moving structures like medieval drawbridges or modern
additions like elevators and escalators contained within the shell of static buildings,
architecture, of course, did not necessarily need the kinetic dreams of the Constructivists
to further its quest for total adaptation. “We must evolve an architecture which will adapt
to continuous and accelerating change,” wrote the architect William Zuk, “a kinetic
architecture” (Zuk and Clark 1970, 9). Kinetic architecture would thus not only be an
idea of transformation but an actual set of strategies that would require new conceptual
and material notions of building to take precedent over older, fixed concepts of perma-
nence and monumentality.
With its D’Arcy Thompson–inspired discussions of formal morphogenesis and descrip-
tions of the multivariable evolution and adaptation inherent in machines, Zuk and Clark’s
1970 book Kinetic Architecture was a pragmatic manual for the Archigram-inspired genera-
tion eager to create a new continuously moving, shape-changing reality. In particular,
through the connections drawn between the 4D and Dymaxion houses and cars conceived
by architect and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller and their later retranslations in the retract-
able, pneumatic roof skins of the German tensile architect Frei Otto, Zuk’s book set out
some of the key frameworks for the coming age of buildings fusing technology, sociology,
and biology; a movement that architect and writer Charles Jencks would famously label
Organi-Tech.15
The translation by Fuller and Otto of kinetic imaginings into structurally engineered
realities foreshadowed the direction that dynamic, performative architecture would even-
tually take at the end of the twentieth century. Although he had no formal architectural
training, as early as the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller had begun to explore the possibilities
of machine-like living environments that would adapt to their surroundings like living

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creatures and animate matter. In his 4D House, a curious, pagoda-like, stacked, multilevel
structure that bore an uncanny resemblance to Krutikov’s Flying City, he proposed an
environment with movable partitions, pneumatic beds, doors, and floor pads, which would
bring about an economically and ecologically viable dwelling.
A more technologically sophisticated version of the 4D House, the futuristic, autono-
mous, and prefabricated Dymaxion (for dynamic maximum tension) assemblage-like
dwelling from 1929, furthered Fuller’s deep interest in adaptive architecture. Easily
reconfigurable through the use of lightweight materials such as aluminum and photoe-
lectric cell–augmented pneumatic doors that would change the physical form of the
environment, the hexagonal Dymaxion house fulfilled what Fuller described as ephemer-
alization: the notion that “less is more” in order to gain more “performance per square
inch” through the use of new materials.16
Fuller’s interest in dynamics and reconfigurability would more boldly come into
material reality with his geodesic domes; in particular, his and Shoji Sadao’s design for
the U.S. pavilion at the 1967 Montréal World’s Fair. Adapting a construction principle
labeled by Fuller with the word tensegrity (short for “tensional integrity”) that was derived
from the work of American sculptor and Fuller student Kenneth Snelson, the geodesic
dome was a hemispheric structure conceived to cover a mass area without any internal
support, its structural strength derived from the push-pull effect of a continuous tensional
grid of interlocking steel tetrahedron shaped elements. Fuller’s 70-meter-tall U.S. pavilion
for Expo ’67 went a step further, incorporating a motorized membrane of transparent
acrylic panels over the structure. It was never wholly functional; Fuller nevertheless
envisioned a self-regulating and responsive surface that could “articulate just as sensitively
as a human being’s skin” (Krause and Lichtenstein 1999, 428).
Composed of a series of mechanically actuated, triangularly shaped shades that were
driven by some six hundred photocell-controlled motors overlaid across the surface of the
sphere, the pavilion would become not only a continually breathing surface that transi-
tioned from opaque to clear based on the sun but also a totally regulated and adapting
environment. Fuller would also embrace similar concepts with Autonomous Dwelling (1983)
a short-lived and ultimately unrealized collaboration with Sir Norman Foster that
attempted to construct twin revolving geodesic domes that would mechanically open and
close based on the sun’s position over the course of a day.
Frei Otto’s tensile structures and pneumatic membranes also bore structural resonances
to Fuller’s work. Building tent-like canopies installed with pneumatics, Otto’s innovative
electric motor-controlled retractable roofs and his development (with assistant Bodo
Rasch) of hydraulic-driven, large-scale convertible umbrellas that were installed, among
other places, on a 1978 American Pink Floyd tour and in two courtyards of the Holy
Mosque in Medina, set his work into the kinetic lineage of Fuller and others.
Attempts at creating kinetic structures rapidly multiplied from the 1980s onwards, as
engineering techniques were perfected through newly developed computer-controlled

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sensing, modeling, and fabrication processes. Still, a conceptual and material tension
remained unresolved between movement taking place at the surface or skin (like Fuller’s
skin for the U.S. pavilion) versus kinetic sculptural forms at building scale that mechani-
cally expanded in volumetric space with performative nonhuman gestures.
Within the context of sculptural forms that intended, as former head of the MIT
Kinetic Design Group Michael Fox described, “to re-configure themselves to meet chang-
ing needs,” were included the projects of a bevy of architects and engineers, ranging from
the filigreed, tensile work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, to the eco-engineering
of Ove Arup; Kas Oosterhuis’s pneumatic, computer-controlled “hyperbodies”; Wes
Jones’s mechanical houses; Mette Ramsgard Thomsen’s “robotic membranes”; Chuck
Hoberman’s “transforming structures”; Fox’s kinetic “robotecture”; and others.
Resembling the skeletal wings of birds and pterodactyls, Calatrava’s spindly,
tilted edifices were some of the few built examples to incorporate kinetic elements at
both a poetic as well as functional level. His Puente de La Mujer in the Puerto Madero
area of Buenos Aires, for example, was a footbridge that could rotate 90 degrees in
order to let ships pass under it. More fantastic was the architect’s kinetic Burke Brise
Soleil, a gigantic, 115-ton winged structure perched atop the architect’s Milwaukee
Art Museum that opened and closed like a bird in flight, or the proposed Qatar
Museum of Photography, in which the walls of the structure could shift depending on
the amount of sunlight.
The Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis—one of the leading progenitors of so-called
blob architecture, in which non-Cartesian geometries were created through sophis-
ticated, computer-generated 3D modeling techniques—developed an entire research
program for the 2000 Venice architecture Biennale dubbed Transports, to explore the
impact of programmable, expanding structures that fused the pneumatic ideas of
the 1960s with the sensor-actuator-augmented, computer-controlled technologies of the
1990s.
Realized for the 2003 Non-Standard Architectures exhibition at the Centre Pompidou,
Oosterhuis described his MUSCLE prototype, developed with his Hyperbody research
group at the Technical University Delft, as “a 3 month performance”—a “prototype for
an environment that is slightly out of control” (Oosterhuis 2003). Continuing as well as
critiquing Herron’s Walking Cities by stating that “programmable buildings can recon-
figure themselves mentally and physically, probably without considering to completely
displace themselves like the Walking City proposed by Archigram in 1964,” MUSCLE
consisted of a soft, inflated volume festooned in a series of pneumatic, servo-controlled
tensile muscles.
Changing its physical shape based on sensor orchestration of individual muscle strands,
the structure could leap into action due to the proximity of visitors or be steered from a
more traditional screen-based interface. With input from the public as well as from pre-
programmed algorithms, MUSCLE pointed to an architecture that not only described but

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embodied the rhetoric of fluidity and transformation proposed by the wide spread use of
digitally controlled systems in construction (Oosterhuis 2003).
The other stream in kinetic architecture was that of physical movement taking place
at the surface of a structure: the opening, closing, and undulation of mechanical parts or
elements that would animate the surface of a construction, giving the sense that Fuller
described of “skin-like articulation.” One of the earlier and also most celebrated of such
articulations occurred in the French architect Jean Nouvel’s 1987 design for the Paris-
based L’Institut du Monde Arabe cultural center.
Known in the 1960s as one of the rebels against the prevailing trends in post-Corbusier
modernism, Nouvel’s exterior and interior exploited geometrical forms and lighting
patterns from Arabic architectural traditions in order to create what he called “a hinge
between two cultures and two histories” (Nouvel). Nouvel’s own take on one of the central
elements of Arabic architecture, the brise soleil of the traditional mashrabiyah screen, con-
sisted of an immense wall with some thirty thousand photoelectric cell–enabled, servo-
controlled “diaphragms.” Crossing the mechanism of the camera lens with the intricacies
of the mashrabiyah’s lattice-like openings, the light-regulated shuttering of the dia-
phragms generated a continually shifting series of luminous reflections, refractions, rever-
berations, and shadows within the interior spaces of the building.
Nouvel’s photosensitive façade played off the structural resonances of formalized
Arabic patterns; British architect Mark Goulthorpe’s and Austrialian Mark Bury’s
2003 responsive Aegis Hyposurface operated more along the lines of an architecture
envisioned by science fiction. Inspired by dance performance—particularly the fragmen-
tary ballets of the German-based, American-born choreographer William Forsythe
[The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater, chapter 6]—Goulthorpe’s architectural
surface was originally commissioned as an interactive artwork for the Birmingham
Hippodrome.
As an exterior architectural response to the interior goings-on within the theater itself,
the project was built from hundreds of faceted metal plates attached to an elastic-like
surface that dimpled and deformed in real time through a series of 896 computer-actuated
pneumatic pistons installed behind the plates (figure 3.7). With its performance based on
environmental stimuli like bodily movement, moisture, or acoustic changes picked up by
sensing and input to a microcontroller, Goulthorpe’s deformable surface could be modified
by such exogenous data through a complex series of parametrically alterable qualities
(speed, amplitude, phase, and direction) describing but not determining the temporal and
hence the spatial evolution of the surface.
Evoking the word smectic, which describes the mesomorphic state in liquid crystal in
which molecules line up in parallel layers, Aegis Hyposurface suggested the very possibility
of a latent performance embedded within frozen architecture: an event in waiting, jump-
started by the environment but instantiated in real time through its own rules and
reactions.17

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Figure 3.7 Mark Goulthorpe/decoi. Aegis Hyposurface, 2003. Photo © HypoSurface.

Responsiveness: Transforming Materiality

Goulthorpe’s responsive surface can be seen as both a highly technologized throwback

to earlier kinetic experiments as well as something pointing toward future directions
in widening our understanding of “performance” within the architectural milieu. His
appropriation of the psychoanalytic terms autoplastic (the environment affects the
subject) and alloplastic (the subject affects changes to the environment) to frame Aegis
Hyposurface’s hybrid mixing of mechanical, chemical, electrical, and computational
materials fittingly describes the current shift from an industrialized era of kinetics expressed
through mechanically driven movement (gears and levers) and toward nonhuman yet
materialized gestures or “choreographies.” In short, the performative enunciation of agency
that takes place within the actual molecular-chemical-physical substrates of materials
themselves.
Current and future research into so-called intelligent or smart materials that can
undergo shape, color, light, heat, and other mutations suggests a different notion of

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kinetic that nonetheless still remains preoccupied with the dynamics of interaction and
responsiveness. Responsiveness at the material level, however, now signifies substances
that can alter their thermal, electrical, mechanical, or optical properties through micro
or molecular changes in their substrates caused by environmental influences and
perturbations.
It has been claimed by experts such as Yale professor of architecture Michelle Adding-
ton that smart or intelligent materials have remained difficult to classify, because they
do not stay in a single physical state for the duration of their lifetime (2005, 10). But
such materials can nevertheless be qualitatively distinguished by characteristics such
as immediacy (real-time response), transiency (movement between several possible states),
self-actuation (internal intelligence rather than external actuation), selectivity (discrete and
predictable response), and directness (local response to a particular actuating event or
stimuli).
The kinds of smart materials that could potentially launch architecture from its mecha-
tronic past to an age of self-actuated, real-time transiency can easily overwhelm with
regard to the range and complexity of technologies deployed. Thermo-photo-electro-chromic
materials that change color based on heating, lighting or electrical changes, luminescent-
phosphorescent materials that emit light based on changes in electrical fields or light-
absorption polymer and liquid crystal films that can vary their opacities describe the emissive
potential of new substances. Intelligent, shape-changing gels and shape-memory alloys
(SMA’s) whose crystalline structure can be deformed and reformed through heat in order
to remember their initial shape propose, however, physical deformation in matter itself;
an intricate array of substances that suggest new, perhaps still nonexistent architectures
whose performativity lies in processes involving fundamental material transformations
over time.
“When will Gehry’s ‘metallic flower’—the rotunda of his design for the new Guggen-
heim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—bloom in truth?” wrote Mark Dery in an ironic 1999
essay entitled “The Persistence of Industrial Memory,” asking when Gehry’s architecture
might become truly “life-like” through the fusion of biology, chemistry, and computation.
When would the “solar panel petals opening to greet the sun, its organic metaphor
brought to life by microscopic nanomachines that juggle atoms to make the museum
grow rooms or sprout a profusion of mushroom-like ventilator chimneys, all at the speed
of time-lapse photography?” (Dery 1999b, 63).
The current technical complexities and unstable knowledge base for such smart, nano,
and mutable materials, however, has kept attempts at constructing truly performative
architecture strictly at the tabletop scale or as singular, functional elements installed within
larger brick-and-mortar infrastructures. Exploited by multiple architects such as Stanley
Saitowitz, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Diller Scofidio Renfro, and Thom Faulders,
electrochromic glass—one of the most common smart materials—was utilized more for

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its energy-saving properties, while other designers such as Kennedy Violich, Martina
Decker, and Jürgen Mayer H. explored the use of thermochromic inks and electrolumi-
nescent technologies coating or embedded within furniture or as wallpaper and wall
hangings. Yet, what kinds of stagings and enactments do smart materials suggest that
could take place at the urban scale and go beyond pure function, crossing over into the
domain of aesthetic expression and transforming space into an undulating, dynamic
form?
The complications generated by a technological revolution in new materialities open
up a Pandora’s box of questions. Do smart materials catalyze the physical realization of
the visionary structures and environments suggested in the sketchbooks, transitory events,
and manifestos that exploded the twentieth-century architectural landscape? Could it be
in the technological animation of inert materials, in the wiggling, jerking, oozing, flash-
ing, and shifting, that finally the qualities of stasis that has forever been architecture’s
stigma disappear? Could a new kind of impermanence that is ironically wholly dependent
on transforming materiality suggest a performance in architectonic forms akin to the
nuanced and expressive dance of bodies in motion on the stage?
In built form, one of the most compelling recent architectonic experiments that
attempted to embrace these thorny questions of responsiveness, transient event, and
performance was Diller Scofidio’s Blur Building, erected for the Swiss Expo 2002.
A nod to earlier attempts (the first fog sculpture created by master fog artist Fujiko
Nakaya at the Pepsi pavilion during the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair), the building
consisted of a massive tensegrity platform measuring some 100 m wide by 120 m
deep by 17 m high, installed off the shore of Lake Neuchâtel in southern Switzerland
(figure 3.8).
Although not specifically constructed of smart materials, the shape and movement of
this computer-controlled fog structure nonetheless gave the visitor/participant the impres-
sion of a dynamically shifting space where optics, acoustics, and haptics intersected.
Rendered by the fine spray generated by 31,500 specially designed computer-regulated
fog nozzles sucking water from the lake, Blur’s undulating, volumetric shape appeared as
an image or display surface from a distance.
Upon walking over a pair of flume-like bridges into its massive cloud of unknowing,
however, Blur’s 3D volume receded into an ambient, swirling, white-noise-enhanced
milieu; an anti-spectacle, according to the architects, where “visual and acoustic references
are erased” (Diller Scofidio Renfro n.d.). Like an ephemeral stage performance, Blur
too disappeared, its form and materiality in a state of transition and impermanence.
In its transient, interstitial form between (invisible) object and place, perhaps Blur
most closely embodied what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann termed atmosphere:
the “surplus of space between place (Stelle) and objects (Objekte) which is ungraspable”
(Löw 2001, 146).

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Figure 3.8 Diller Scofidio. Blur Building, 2002. Photo © Diller Scofidio.

Screen/Scene

What Diller Scofidio’s undulating building exposed was the underlying friction between
an architecture of performative space versus an architecture of performance originating
at the intelligent surface. “Most current attempts to implement smart materials in
architectural design maintain the vocabulary of the two-dimensional surface or continuous
entity and simply propose smart materials as replacements or substitutes for more conven-
tion materials . . . while the common mantra is that architects design space, the reality is
that architects make (draw) surfaces” (Addington 2005, 5). The tension between volume
and surface, and between smart material as substrate and as surface cladding is now even
more pronounced in an era in which, covered with colossal LCD (liquid-crystal display)
and LED (light-emitting diode) matrices, the surfaces of buildings themselves have
become displays for the thundering and flickering ephemeral media images of our
moment.
In 1994, philosopher Mark C. Taylor coined the term electrotecture to describe the
oncoming age of blurred boundaries between “building and builder, between programme
and programmer, time and space.” Describing Japanese architect Toyo Ito’s 1984

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architectural-video sculpture Egg of Winds for a Japanese residential complex, Taylor wrote
that the work was “neither a television or a video screen nor neon nor electric sign,” but
a set of layered surfaces, partially material (out of perforated aluminum) and partially
simulated (the flickering of LCD projection installed inside the egg). “No longer
architecture but not yet electrotecture,” Ito’s media sculpture acted as a “transitional
object” for Taylor—a form straddling the material and immaterial (Taylor 1994, 83).
As architecture seems predestined toward what Bernard Tschumi once described as
buildings made of “pixels and light,” then the current movement to transform global
cities into electronic screenscapes is the beginning of that fulfillment. “While the develop-
ment of a physically changeable (robotic) architecture appears still to be years away,”
stated Berlin architect Jan Edler, “there is a promise of significant progress in digital
display technologies, which allow patterns, images, text, to be mapped onto a building’s
surfaces, thus changing its appearance” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 151). Edler’s state-
ment brings us back to the crux of the thorny question already proposed. Is changing
appearance on the surface enough to effectuate a true performative architecture, with the
characteristics of transformation and flux at the material level and spatiotemporal enact-
ment or is the predominance of electronic skins and so-called mediatecture just another
confusion of scene and the screen—between filmic versus inhabited and co-present
reality?
Architectures fusing light and media image first imagined in the fantasies of the Con-
structivists and Le Corbusier, the “cathedrals of light” of Albert Speer and the protocy-
bernetic architecture of the Hungarian sculptor/architect Nicolas Schöffer are now
commonplace. Considered one of the early pioneers of “cybernetic art,” Schöffer already
proposed in 1963 the construction of a colossal, 327-meter-high Tour Lumière Cybernétique
in La Defense, on the outskirts of Paris.
Following in Tatlin’s footsteps, Schöffer imagined his tower to be outfitted with over
260 mirrors and 3000 high-powered lighting instruments, its media apparatus designed
to react not only to environmental parameters like wind, noise, and atmospheric luminos-
ity, but also to radio and television signals. An early example of such media façades with
light also included artist Vladimir Bonačić’s DIN.21, a public computer-controlled light-
ing project installed on the front of the NAMA department store in Zagreb in 1968.18
Toyo Ito’s Tower of Winds (1986) in Yokohama and the Egg of Winds (1991) in Tokyo,
however, are usually cited as some of the earliest built attempts to create electrotectural
hybrids: electronic skin-sculptures that would rerender and remap the invisible data flows
of the city onto a building-sized structure.19 Architected to mask a 20-meter-tall ventila-
tion/water tank outside of the Yokohama central Nishi-Guichi train station, Ito’s Tower
of Winds was a temporary, ovular-shaped, perforated metal structure sheath around the
interior concrete ventilation tower.
With 1280 mini halogen lamps and a stacked concentric set of twelve neon rings
inserted between the structure’s aluminum cladding and the concrete of the tower, Ito’s

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dematerialized architecture of light came nightly into being, the patterns and brightness
of its visual choreography controlled by a computer reacting to changes in wind speed
and direction as well as to the ever-shifting urban noise floor (figure 3.9). “Although the
tower, which winks lights similarly to other advertising neon lights, is less spectacular,”
wrote Ito in a text appropriately entitled “Architecture in a Simulated City,” “it is said
to give an impression that the air around the tower is filtered and purified. It may be so
because what I intended was not to cause a substance to emit light in the air but to make
the air itself convert into the light” (Ito 1994, 87).
The Tower of Winds not only manifested Ito’s desire for an ephemeral architecture where
the urban scene could “lose its clear configuration and fade into morning mist,” but also
was one of the earliest in a long line of examples to reconfigure the brute material of the
architectural surface into façades of ephemeral, electronic shadows (Ito 1994, 85). Even
with the notoriety of Ito’s work, however, the electronic surface-skin was something that
only a few architects interested in media explored early in the 1990s.
The German architect Christian Möller, already working with computer-augmented
installations and performance events, built a reactive light façade onto the front of the
Zeilgalerie Shopping Center in Frankfurt, Germany in collaboration with architect
Rüdiger Kramm. Like Ito’s earlier projects, Möller and Kramm’s Kinetic Light Sculpture
also attempted to translate weather data (temperature, wind speed, and direction) and
street noise into lighting representations, delivered through the changing yellow/blue
color spectrum from an array of 120 HQI lighting instruments positioned behind perfo-
rated aluminum on the building’s front as well as through the animation of an LED display
that visualized ambient noise in the area.
Following Ito’s and Möller’s perforated surfaces through which light could be revealed,
a host of other image façades further advanced the reimagining of building surfaces as
pixelated low-resolution screens. Deploying sophisticated, state-of-the-art flat-panel LED
lighting display technology, entire building surfaces became charged with animations,
advertisements, artworks, and digitally constructed data visualizations driven by internal
systems as well as by human users or sensors exploring weather patterns, urban noise, and
other continually varying input parameters.
For the Rotterdam headquarters of the Dutch telephone company KPN, in 2000
architect Renzo Piano installed a 3,600-square-meter semitransparent tilted curtain wall
outfitted with 900 green, flat-panel Planon-brand lamps that could be animated, convert-
ing the building into a monochromatic billboard. Later projects utilizing mass deploy-
ment of LED technologies included the National Library of Belarus in Minsk (2006) and
featuring a massive rhombicuboctahedron form adorned with 4646 RGB LED lights; the
LED-covered, 300-meter T-Mobile headquarters in Bonn, Germany, designed by the
German design group ag4 Mediatechture; the Dexia tower in Brussels (2006); and dozens
of projects in Europe, the Middle East (such as Dubai and Qatar), and Asia, where it was
not uncommon to see Blade Runner–esque buildings with displays of more than 5,574

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Figure 3.9 Toyo Ito. Tower of Winds, 1986. Photo © Shinkenchiku-sha.

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Figure 3.10 realities:united. BIX façade, 2003. Photo © 2003 Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz. www.
bix.at.

square meters (the Grand Indonesia Tower in Jakarta) or even floating displays on boats
(Shanghai).
One of the most high-profile projects, the BIX skin—designed by the Berlin architec-
ture group realities:united (Jan and Tim Edler) for Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s
Kunsthaus in Graz in 2004—almost functioned as a global prototype for the performing
media façade (figure 3.10). Employing extremely low-resolution display technology (dim-
mable, 40-watt fluorescent circular tubes), 930 independently controlled pixel-like lamps
capable of displaying eighteen frames-per-second scan resolution were embedded into
the Kunsthaus’s front-facing acrylic façade, providing the possibility of creating low-
resolution animations, texts, and films that would literally crawl over the building’s
blob-like surface.
Unlike similar flat surfaces, the BIX façade shared the same geometric deformation as
the building itself. Described by the architects as an “architectural enabler,” the BIX skin

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immediately revealed its underlying form the moment the tubes lit up, the presence of
the circular fluorescent fixtures normally used in urban homes in the 1970s providing
a recognized if not slightly defamiliarized context for the building’s luminous skin
(realities:united n.d.).
The Edler brothers applied the same principle in their 2005–2007 Spots light and
media installation, set into a more conventional (albeit also curved) building in Berlin’s
bustling Potsdamer Platz area and using a higher-resolution setup.20 Like BIX, Spots
explored the transformation of a building “into a communicative membrane, used primar-
ily for the display of artistic material” (realities:united n.d.) through a series of curated
themes that turned architecture into a “seeing object” (City Gaze), a manifestation of the
continual transitions of travelers and transport moving through the city (Transition) and
a microcosm of the city itself (Inner City Waltz).
If the low-resolution, monochromatic façades of BIX and Spots were reminiscent of the
Benday dots of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop canvases, then another high-profile media façade,
the multicolored shifting skin of UN Studio’s 2004 redo of the Galleria West department
store in Seoul, Korea, suggested the optical hallucinations of Victor Vasarely’s Op Art.
Employing over 4,000 sequin-like, dichroic glass disks with color-changing LED fixtures
mounted behind each disk and plastered across the façade, UN Studio created a 3,716-
square-meter screen that could be swept in real time with sixteen million color combina-
tions, thus generating a kind of “living kaleidoscope.”21
In counterpoint to the fluid morphs of such color/image-changing surfaces was the
emphasis on a kind of DIY hacker aesthetic of exploring buildings as surfaces for expres-
sion and play, specifically as the metamorphosing of urban façades into colossal video
games, SMS receivers, and any other number of subversive messages. Enabling both
present and remote users to be able to switch pixels on and off through websites, cell
phones, and other devices, projects such as the famous Tetris games played on the surfaces
of buildings at the TU Delft (Netherlands) in 1995 and Brown University (Providence,
R.I.) in 2000, “Clickscape Public Space 1998” (which turned the surface of the E.A.
Generali insurance building during the 1998 Ars Electronica in Linz into a “public
drawing board”), and the Chaos Computer Club’s famous 2001 “Blinkenlights” project
in Berlin, translated the anonymity of private screen-based play into visual and acoustic
performances taking place on an urban scale [Urban Interactions, chapter 8].
It is difficult to keep up with the barrage of international projects and initiatives
seeking to transform the global city into an electronic play of surface effects. Driven by
endogenous and exogenous variables such as sensors, people, traffic, weather, statistics,
births and deaths, and the neverending flow of markets, the future electrotecture continu-
ally renders the immaterial data of binary numbers into the immateriality of moving light.
Yet, if all events and actions could be turned into data, did these new intelligent skins
and façades simply rerepresent forces and utterances, ultimately emptying them of their
material intensity and resistance? Does architecture lose its muscle, its power of lasting

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duration, when it becomes a flickering, ephemeral surface in order to scaffold itself, as
Roger Connah (2001, 2) wrote, with the long history of screenal culture? Finally, in light
of the hybrid materialities of smart substances where molecules and atoms undergo altera-
tion and exert new kinds of enunciations into the world, would not digital display surfaces
be a step backwards into yet another set of image representations? Whatever the response
to these questions, the urban screen, like the history of projected, moving images on the
stage to which we now turn in chapter 4, will not be replaced in the near future.

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 4

The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the

Performative Screen

The metopes of the Greek temple pediments represent, by their centering process, a coherent
attempt at setting in depth. There is a direct relationship down from the classical scene to the
electronic image, from the first codes of perspective to digital or virtual videos. The image is, even
now, a prisoner of that rectangle, of that founding frame.
jacques polieri, “rectangle and setting in depth”1

Our obsession with the origins of the projected image in the West leads us back to
Athens—not only the subterranean phantasmagoria of Plato’s cave around 350 BC, but
also the fabled fifth-century Theater of Dionysus, where the rectangular frame began to
dominate the architectural backdrop of the stage. The façade of the skene—the wooden
framework that served as storage facility, changing room, and eventually, scenic back-
drop—was, at first, a low-lying structure that kept open visual access to the natural sur-
roundings lying behind the hillside of the theater for the seated masses.
As the later Hellenic and especially Roman theaters closed off the view through the
construction of higher walls, transforming the skene into the scaenae frons (literally, the
“front stage house”), such architectural adjustments resulted in a radically new perceptual
experience for the spectator: the imposition of a dominant, background frame onto the
action. The Hellenic proskenium, a series of columns set above the façade of the skene already
anticipated the later sixteenth-century Italian construction of the proscenium arch,
which would hence box in and frame the theatrical stage for the next four hundred
years.2
In strong contrast to the hard geometric frame of the Western proscenium, the Javanese
Wayang Kulit, a variation of the Indonesian wayang or shadow puppet theater that most
likely originated around 900 AD, unknowingly anticipates the flickering projection
surfaces to appear in the early twentieth century.3 Bundled before the delicate stretched
cotton screen or kelir lit from behind by the dancing flame of coconut-wick lamps, the
spectators who gather for the magical performance stare onto a surface that is continually
born anew through the intricate manipulation of the stylized cutouts of puppets by the
master performer or dalang.
Pressed up against the cotton surface or disappearing into large shadows as they are
drawn away from the screen, the hundreds of characters manipulated by the dalang at
times appear to materialize out of thin air and at other times to disappear into the shadowy
darkness behind the fire. The performance setting of the Wayang Kulit is none other than
the screen itself as the dalang conjures up the endless procession of shadowed characters
arising out of his retelling of the Ramayana and Mahabharata myths.
In our times, it is these age-old tensions between the frame of the proscenium and the
flickering surfaces of projection, between flatness and depth, that continue to reinforce
the screen as a central technic within artistic performances. But the appearance of these
ghostly phantasms of light on the surfaces of the stage and in the gallery, loft, or build-
ings of the city also cannot be dissociated from their cinematic origins. It is well docu-
mented that the mechanisms and strategies of the theater were co-opted by cinema’s
earliest inventors, from Georges Méliès to Eisenstein, all of whom came from theater
backgrounds.4 With the explosion of perception that greeted audiences at the Lumière
brothers’ first paid public screening in December 1895, when viewers thought that images
would literally burst through the screen and into their laps, or the thrill of watching
movies embedded into the context of live vaudeville in early-twentieth-century Ameri-
cana, it is not difficult to understand why cinema at first was a weird hybrid of projected
and performative forms.
Yet it is the development of that other electronic imaging system, television, that has
had perhaps an even more radical effect on the perception of the projected image to the
spectator. Just as it is difficult to break the feedback loop between cinema and theater,
we cannot also ignore the presence of the television monitor and its use in video-based
performance practices. Building upon the precedents of cinema, theater, and music,
video’s appearance was hailed as the ultimate time-based art. The introduction of video-
tape (1958) and the commercial release of the Sony Portapak portable black-and-white
video camera/recorder (1967) soon relieved artists of the production-heavy infrastructures
of motion pictures on the one hand, and the theater on the other. No longer restricted to
the scale of these apparatuses, the cultural phenomenon of video birthed new performance
forms that appeared in the most unlikely and unsophisticated of sites: off-circuit experi-
mental galleries, lofts, basements, church meeting rooms, and even the former kitchen of
a downtown New York hotel.
Alongside the rapid technical evolution of electronic imaging from television and video
to their eventual digitization also came new perceptual paradigms that uprooted long-
standing assumptions about the relationships among screen, physical space, the live,
and the recorded. Although, as we mentioned in chapters 1 and 2, projected images as

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architectonic structures within scenographic practice had a long history before electronic
reproduction, the ability to record, play back, and manipulate captured images put an
end to the illusionary supremacy of the live performer, sending the theater into a deep
metaphysical crisis, while work with the new imagining systems flourished in other artis-
tic contexts, such as video art. Human performers thus increasingly came to share space
and time with their screenal interlopers; new actants that had to be acknowledged and
reckoned with.
If stages in opera houses, theaters, and concert halls had a somewhat uneasy relationship
with the reign of projected electronic images during their naissance, the screen’s predomi-
nance as a performative medium in its own right accelerated through the rise of audio-
visual experimentation and DJ/VJ club cultures in the 1990s. Owing much to (1) the
syncretic experiments between sound and image in the early twentieth century, (2) the
expanded cinema movement in the 1960s, (3) the manipulation of images in the early
decades of video art, and (4) the development of computational image processing, new
practices of live cinema arose that were fully neither cinema nor theater but nonetheless
demanded co-present and engaged audiences.
Viewers became witnesses to technological hybrids that detoured attention from
the live actor in front of the projection surface to the play of pixels on the screen
itself, transubstantiated by a new set of “performers”: both human digital alchemists
as well as computers, mixers, and other interactive paraphernalia on the sidelines. Visible
only through the glowing laptop screen, at times these almost transparent human mani-
pulators faded, leaving only surfaces of flickering light. Despite their disappearance
on the stage, however, there was still an air of performative presence emanating from
the tangle of screen, space, technics, and perceivers. It is these histories of projection,
from the televisual monitor and the projected architectonic to the screen itself as
object and site of performance where the human actor is displaced that will now be our
focus.

Televisual

The now iconic object of the monitor that entered the performance landscape had its
origin in two of the most important mass media developments in the post–World War
II period: the widespread influence of television in the 1940s and 1950s and the develop-
ment of video in the late 1950s–1960s. With the first televised broadcasts taking place
in the late 1920s, it is estimated that half of U.S. households had television sets by the
mid 1950s.5 As broadcast television became a mass medium, the development of video
tape by the Ampex corporation in 1951 as an alternative to film in logging television
broadcasts and the marketing of the Sony corporation’s Portapak, the first nonbroadcast
consumer video camera, in 1965 (as a nonportable, 110V device) and later (commercially
and battery-powered) in 1967, acted as key catalysts for a new generation of artists who

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began to use the object, image, and cultural iconography of the television as an political-
aesthetic conduit for channeling social criticism.
For artists in the 1960s, televisual-based technologies held a compelling bundle of
contradictory fascinations that were deeply linked to both rising countercultural mores
and the imperatives of the broadcast television industry. For one, television was a popular
medium associated with the bland and uniform vision of postwar suburban life and so its
sudden transference to the rarefied world of the art gallery (let alone museum) had an
appealing but suspicious quality enveloping it. More important, the interest of artists in
using the possibilities of a new mass industrially generated medium served as a platform
to critique, as video artist Martha Rosler has famously pointed out, the “silencing or
muting of artists as producers of living culture in the face of the vast mass-media indus-
tries” (Rosler 1990, 31).
The early histories of video art have been well described, but what has remained
relatively unexplored is the strong influence of performance practices on these histories.6
This is perhaps not unintentional, given what we saw in our introduction as the visual
arts’ tenuous connection with temporal processes, nonobjecthood, and ephemerality.
Even though leading artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, and Bruce
Nauman, among others, initially embraced video technologies, they still maintained
an ambiguous relationship to performance, particularly due to its associations with
the traditional stage. As Acconci stated, “we hated the word ‘performance.’ We couldn’t,
wouldn’t call what we did performance . . . because performance had a place and that
place by tradition was a theater, a place you went towards like a museum” (Rush
2005, 52).
Despite this consternation, the advent of portable video gave artists eager to move away
from the static nature of painting or sculpture the possibility of turning the camera onto
themselves and recording on single-channel tape their most private and intimate expres-
sions. Once a set of actions by the artist was recorded, they could be endlessly rewound
and repeated, regardless of the site, circumstances, or time. Recording thus had the strange
effect of capturing the potentially unpredictable behavior of the artist-performer and sud-
denly rendering it into an object outside of time and space. This effect served the purpose
of enabling the visual arts to co-opt performative techniques while still maintaining their
distance to “theatricality.”7
In contrast, another strain of practice—namely, an emphasis on materiality of the
projected image and the interest in the real-time manipulation of that image before
a spectator—owed more to the musical performance backgrounds of some of its key
proponents such as Nam June Paik and Steina Vasulka than it did to the visual arts.
It is this trajectory that allows us to make connections among a cluster of performative
practices with the screen that, for now, may appear to be unrelated to each other:
experimental theater, worlds fairs, rock concerts, urban streets, new media festivals, and
clubs.

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 Paik’s Instruments
There are ongoing arguments about the early origins of video art, but inevitably, the dis-
cussions all come back to the almost mythic figure of Nam June Paik.8 There have been
endless debates about whether Paik was the first artist to use video by way of owning an
early model of the Portapak (it is a well-known fact that artists like Andy Warhol, Les
Levine, Wolf Vostell, and others were already onto similar territory at the same time),
but what is pertinent here is how Paik’s early composition background and interest in
music figures into video’s early performance-based roots.9
Korean-born and Western-educated in music, history, and philosophy (in Germany),
and an assistant to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen [Serialism, Tape, and Signals, chapter
5] at the WDR electronic music studios in Cologne, Paik was already involved in the
happening-like performances of George Maciunas’s Fluxus movement and quickly fell
under the influence of composer John Cage, whom he met in Darmstadt in 1958. The
German painter and fellow Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell was known to have already been
working on the integration of television sets into the gallery context in his notorious TV
De-Coll/age already in 1958, but Paik’s transplantation of the decidedly middle-class
technology of television into the art world at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal-Elber-
feld—famously entitled the Exposition of Music-Electronic Television—in 1963 already
betrayed his simultaneously perverse and playful sensibilities. If one could take Paik’s
infamous statement that “television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back” as
a partial indicator of his critical opinion of mass televisual media at the time, then his
exhibition at the private home/gallery of the Wuppertal architect Rolf Jährling directly
materialized this sentiment (Ross 1998).
Sprawling over the private gallery and rooms of Jährling’s residence, Paik filled his
exhibit-happening—originally titled Symphony for 20 Rooms—with what now reads like a
litany of avant-garde objects of the time: prepared pianos, treated violins, sonorous objects
and noisemaking sculptures, a dismembered mannequin lying in a bathtub, the freshly
slaughtered head of an ox, and, in one rather unnoticed area, a scattering of thirteen
television sets that, as Paik later described, “suffered 13 sorts of technical variation.”10
Tipped on their side like so much technical detritus from a junkshop, Paik’s scattered
televisions ran found footage of television programs contorted beyond recognition (figure
4.1). With images overlaid on each other on one set and rolled up into a cylinder in
another, Paik’s vision of the monitor resonated closely to his prepared pianos: as musical
instruments subjected to the nondeterministic force of electronic signals.
Interestingly enough, even if his early role as televisual age iconoclast has long been
emphasized, Paik’s manipulation of the TV set and its signals appeared to be not only
about the destruction of the image and object of televisual media, but also the treatment
of the monitor as musical instrument; not as representational screen, but as a Cagean-
prepared instrument. As Cage inserted the screws, bolts, wires and picks that transformed
the normally resonating strings of the piano into dampened, percussive sonorities, Paik’s

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Figure 4.1 Nam June Paik. “Exposition of Music/Electronic Television” Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal,
Germany. March 11 to 20, 1963. Photograph by Rolf Jährling. Courtesy of Gilbert and Lila Silverman
Fluxus Collection, Detroit.

distortion of both broadcast image and monitor by way of magnetizers, rectifiers, and oscil-
lators helped defamiliarize and thus transfigure a visual medium into an expressive instru-
ment operating across multiple senses.
In the interstices between music and the newly developing technologies of video and
armed with the influence of Fluxus and Cage as well as his own Buddhist practice with
its emphasis on impermanence, Paik quickly began to explore within the gallery setting
not what television signified (i.e., its sign) but the temporally based constitutive processes
that one could engage with it before an audience.
Shortly after moving to New York, Paik furthered his interest in the television object
as a key performative element. His first exhibition, the 1965 Electronic TV Color TV
Experiments at the New School for Social Research, featured a live version of his
Wuppertal tinkerings, employing magnetizers, feedback processes, and the dismantling
of electronic components to distort the televisual image before a captive audience. In what
he later called Participation TV, visitors with cameras trained on them unwittingly became
performers together among Paik’s “chamber ensemble” of prepared televisions, waving
magnets in the air and speaking into microphones to warp the TV set’s signal, creating
a fluid, visual music.

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 The use of the televisual object as musical instrument progressed even further
with the now-notorious set of ongoing performances that Paik collaborated on with the
Juilliard-trained cello master Charlotte Moorman—work that reinforced Paik’s critical
and playful stand on his music and media roots. The most noted of their media-musical
collaborations, TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), a Fluxus performance in Cologne
later restaged in the TV As A Creative Medium show at the Howard Wise Gallery in
1969, featured a topless Moorman wearing two miniature (3-inch) TV monitors on her
breasts.
Although Paik claimed that he was trying to humanize electronics and technology,
“by using TV as bra, the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate
the human use of technology, and so stimulate the viewers not for something mean but
stimulate their phantasy [sic] to look for the new imaginative and humanistic ways
of using technology,” the performance smacks of a kind of bad-boy aesthetics and an
admittedly sexist gesture (Paik 1969, 6).
With the groundwork already laid in their earlier, controversial project Opera Sextro-
nique (1967), during which both artists were arrested for indecent exposure, Paik and
Moorman’s controversial partnership furthered the notion that the television could become
what the French sociologist of science Michel Serres has called a quasi-object: a fabricated
thing mediating between human subjects and environment. The quasi object functions
as a material object that is both symbol (in this case, invoking televisual media’s social
and economic context) and process (constructing a system or instrument to be changed
in the act of performing with it), thus altering its relationship with a subject who comes
in contact with it.11
The quasi object nature of Paik/Moorman’s investigation of the television set in per-
formance continued with their hybrid music-media instrument Violin Cello, played by
Moorman in the 1971 Concerto for TV Cello and Video Tape and utilizing the video synthe-
sizer that Paik and the Japanese electronics engineer Shuya Abe developed at the WGBH
public television laboratory in Boston. Staged at the Galeria Bonino in New York,
Moorman, wearing glasses made of miniature TV screens, sat behind a stack of television
sets in the form of a cello, drawing her bow across the screens.
Using electronic pickups that caused real-time transformations of the sound and image
material, the event included live feeds of Moorman herself, intercepted broadcasts, and
other video collages by Paik. Essentially a colorizing unit in which seven video inputs
could be altered through nonlinear processing amplifiers, the Paik/Abe synthesizer elicited a
directly perceivable interaction between performer and image, already anticipating the
live, real-time processing of images that we currently take for granted. “The video syn-
thesizer has to be played in real time, like a piano. From a purely artistic viewpoint that
is highly interesting—a truly new thing that has no precedent. You simply play and then
see the effect . . . it might end up producing a new fertile genre, called ‘electronic opera’ ”
(Paik 1974, 55).

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 The Vasulka’s Kitchen and Performing Video
Even though Paik turned away from performance in the mid 1970s to concentrate on
multimonitor sculptures and installations, his interest in video-based temporal events
incorporating the televisual was echoed in the work of other practitioners at the time.
The early video pioneers Woody Vasulka and Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir (Steina) were
not only outstanding experimental artists in their own right, but also helped forge links
between the avant-garde performing, musical, and visual arts worlds with their establish-
ment of The Kitchen in New York in June 1971.
Housed at the Mercer Arts Center, a kind of downtown New York Lincoln Center with
theaters, cabarets, and restaurants supporting both mainstream and new performance
forms, The Kitchen was named for the old hotel kitchen inside the center where the venue
was located. Originally founded by the husband-and-wife team—Czech and Icelandic
émigrés, respectively—The Kitchen was created to respond to the demand for a public
presentation environment where friends and colleagues could show experimental video
work. As a public alternative to their loft (which the Vasulkas had already outgrown),
The Kitchen stands as one of the earliest presentation platforms for technological experi-
ments with video in a performance context.
For the Vasulkas, video was a performance: an “activity,” and not “art a priori.”12
Gradually becoming one of the premiere presentation venues for the newly developing
electronic arts, The Kitchen—or, as it was described in some publications, The Kitchen
Videotape Theater—was “a theater utilizing an audio, video, and electronic interface
between performers (including actors, musicians, composers, and kinetic visual artists)
and audience” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971–1972, 1). Creating a new genre of performing
video that was neither cinema nor theater but somewhere in between, the Vasulkas
enabled a presentation environment where spectators gathered in a room to watch video
screenings of new work. Referred to as “live video performances [which] involve the gen-
eration, synthesis, and processing of images during actual performance time” (Vasulka
and Vasulka 1971–1972, 5), the Vasulkas played with forms that were simultaneously
outside of the gallery and theater context, experimenting with the fusion of music and
synthetically generated or altered video images. Combining Steina’s classical training as
a violinist and Woody Vasulka’s background in film and mechanics, performance became
to be seen as the generation of gestures with the direct engagement of a machine.13
With her shift from music to video and particular interest in the construction of real-
time image processing tools, Steina’s work followed a similar path to Paik’s. Their cross-
influences are not surprising, considering that both artists were part of the same downtown
New York experimental arts community and among the earliest in the video field. This
fascination with the phenomenology of the electronic image was highly evident in both
Vasulkas’ early experiments.
In fact, the manipulation of the monitor and camera as instrument in Steina’s Violin
Power cycle (1969–1978) already picks up where Paik left off in his work with Moorman.

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Called “a demo tape on how to play the violin,” later versions of the piece featured Steina
manipulating the live image of herself using the violin hooked up to a Rutt/Etra Scan
Processor, an analog device developed in collaboration with engineers Steve Rutt and Bill
Etra that enabled the reshaping of television frames through a programmable deflection
system.14 This work would later continue in the software realm through Steina’s follow-up
Violin Power performances of the 1990s, when she used a MIDI–enabled15 violin to trans-
form both live camera-fed and prerecorded laser disk images in a virtuosic display of
real-time editing and montage.
In terms of the working environment, The Kitchen was a far cry from the media per-
formance presentation venues of today. A payphone acted as the only telephone number
for the office, while open curatorial practices resulted in a kind of open mike/open video
night that took place every Wednesday evening, for which people could bring their own
videotapes to show before the public (figure 4.2). Primarily interested in video during
their years with The Kitchen (between 1971 and 1973), the Vasulkas also let in the door
the “great impurities” of other disciplines like theater and “other forms of alternative
culture.” In the first newsletter of the organization, the first of many prospective activities
included the pursuit of “Media Theater,” “utilizing pretaped and live video- and audio-
tapes, live performance, live music, projected slide and moving pictures, and light “shows”

Figure 4.2 Ben Tatti, Electronic Imagery, Video installation shown at The Kitchen (New York, N.Y., United
States), May 18, 1972. Courtesy of the Vasulkas.

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offering a visual spectrum of all light frequencies and energies” (Vasulka and Vasulka
1971, 1).
Additionally, an early experiment called The Actors Video Workshop (AVW),
described in the press releases as an “ongoing process of discovery emphasizing the
interaction between theater and modern media forms” was also in residency (Vasulka and
Vasulka 1971–1972, 6). The main objective of the AVW was to create experiments
and projects that focused on theatrical performances within live video environments.
Simultaneously, The Kitchen was also home to the Midnight Opera Company, another
group exploring the potential of live stage action and video “within an opera framework.”
Desiring the exploration of video as moving scenery through “the presentation of ‘flash
backs’ allowing for the exploration of past, present, and future simultaneously,” the
Midnight Opera Company sought the added visual dimension of watching what was
occurring live through different angles, running the tape simultaneously or with a
slight time delay. “The effect is to create a living cubism of movement that takes
place with the dance or mime, utilizing all spatial directions” (Vasulka and Vasulka
1971–1972, 9).
Although the Vasulkas departed after the literal collapse of the hotel housing the
Mercer Street Arts Center in 1973, The Kitchen relocated and quickly grew to become
one of the premiere venues for experimental performance work in the United States in
the late 1970s. Despite this later success, we must bear in mind that the initial organiza-
tion of The Kitchen was radical in providing both a presentation home and context for
the then fast growing but still very alternative video art/performance scene—a media rich
scene that was still far from acceptance within the framework of traditional cultural
institutions.

Screen Violations
Alongside Paik’s experiments in Germany and New York, his fellow Fluxus compatriot
Wolf Vostell also sought out new kinds of settings in which TV-based art performances
could transpire. In May 1963, approximately two months after Paik’s defilement of the
television monitors in Wuppertal, the Smolin Gallery in New York sponsored two Vostell
décollage TV events. The first, a solo show entitled Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage &
Decollage Posters & Comestible Decollage, featured the same kind of televisual shenanigans as
the Paik show in Germany, this time with six “transformed” monitors exhibited while
Vostell encouraged gallery visitors to engage in their own performative DIY décollage by
smearing vials of liquid on magazine posters hung on the gallery walls.
The second sponsored activity was more in line with the performance-oriented Fluxus
and Happening events of the time. Taking place in a New Jersey field as part of the YAM
festival, Vostell’s TV Burying deframed the television monitor from its intended context
through décollage techniques. In this action, Vostell produced an elaborate ritual in which
running television monitors were first hit with custard cream pies, then wrapped in barbed

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wire, and eventually buried in the ground. While Paik and Vostell’s actions commented
on the military-industrial context of media images, a similar performative defilement of
television sets occurred twelve years later with the California video collective Ant Farm.
Given a much more sharpened political agenda, the group’s Media Burn (1972) involved
the ramming of a 1959 Cadillac Biarritz through a wall of kerosene-doused television sets
at the San Francisco Cow Palace—an undoubtedly forceful critique of the banality of
televisual culture.

The Videated Self in Performance

Despite crossovers like Paik, Vostell, the Vasulkas, and others, the visual art world’s
interest in performance and video took another direction away from the formal,
compositionally centered real-time abstractions of Paik and Steina. Instead, the technical
ensemble of camera and monitor became instruments to record and reveal private actions
inside the artist’s studio that were not necessarily designed to be shown to the public.
Armed with the ideal apparatus in which to perform, record, and distort the self,
the camera and monitor acted as a new electronically enabled mirror, displaying the
human face and body as disguised, slowed down, sped up, or moving forward or backward
in time.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, dozens of artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman,
Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus, John Baldessari, Ana Mendieta, Nil Yalter,
Chris Burden, Valie Export, Peter Weibel, Martha Rosler, Marcel Odenbach, Jochen Gerz,
Ulrike Rosenbach, and others began to explore the performative potential of the video
camera to, as Bill Viola described, develop and understand the self (Viola 1981 [1995],
71).16 What is key in the work of so many diverse artists using essentially the same tech-
nologies is that through the camera and monitor, the gallery increasingly became a site
of performance. With the spectator proving to be a central component in not only the
reception of an artwork, but also the creation of it by being made aware of the processing
and manipulation of observation by technical instruments like the camera, including the
audience as performer in the action became a possibility. Paik had begun to explore this
in the 1965 New School performances, as well as others, but suddenly, with the aid of
portable technology, such experimentation made a further conceptual leap by placing the
audience into a precarious position among themselves as performers, the artist, and the
technology itself. Such techniques are important to describe here, as they would also have
a major impact on the use of video within more traditional theatrical performance
contexts.
Beginning with Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) and continuing with Funnel
(1974), Volcano Saga (1987), and Sweeney Astray (1994), the work of, for example, visual/
performance artist Joan Jonas is emblematic of the direction of self-revelation that video-
based performance practice would take. Having first studied art history and sculpture,
Jonas, like many artists at the time, was quickly drawn to performance, as it afforded

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the possibility of working with multiple artistic elements (sound, image, space, gestures,
objects) simultaneously. “From the beginning, the mirror provided me with a metaphor
for my investigations as well as a device to alter space, fragment it and to reflect the audi-
ence, bringing them into the space of the performance. . . . Later, after visiting Japan in
1970 I bought a Portapak and began to make video tapes. This device enabled me to add
another reflexion and to relate to the audience through close-up on the live transmission,
CCTV system. The monitor is an ongoing mirror” (Jonas 1990, 367).
Jonas was one of the mavericks in the integration of video into performance work.
Many of her pieces, which not ironically took place at The Kitchen in the mid 1970s,
pioneered techniques that would continually crop up in similar alternative performance
practice in the following decades: sculpture-based spaces dotted with monitors and projec-
tions coupled with live and prerecorded images of the artist interacting with camera and
environment.

The Spectator on Camera

Another early attempt to bring the gallery audience into the space of performance by way
of the television monitor was the work of visual artist Bruce Nauman. Trained in sculp-
ture, Nauman began examining the potential of the camera and monitor to record private,
almost ritualized actions of himself in his studio in many key works in the late 1960s. It
was his series of corridor pieces, beginning with Performance Corridor in 1969, however,
that pulled the viewer into a vertiginous relationship with themselves enabled by televi-
sual tricks. Breaking with the static reception of the artwork via the live camera, Nauman
set out to embed and implicate the viewers in the experience of the artwork, while
constructing a disorienting unease and complicity between them and the space they
inhabited.
In an early exhibition of the corridor pieces at the Nicholas Wilder gallery in Los
Angeles in 1969 (perhaps the first video exhibition in a West Coast gallery), Nauman
demarcated the gallery space with a series of six narrow corridors, three of which were
navigable by the visitor/performer. Cameras mounted atop both the passable and empty
corridor walls continually pumped live feeds of the environment to stacked monitors at
the end of the passageways. Thus, the visitor/performer was confronted with a perplexing
labyrinth of live and prerecorded images. The feeling of presence and absence, of seeing
and proprioceptively experiencing the same space with one’s body, and then just as sud-
denly seeing the same space as an empty void, caused many visitors and critics to articulate
emotional states ranging from suspicion to fear and dread.
The most notable of the corridor incarnations, Live/Taped Video Corridor (1970), first
installed at the Whitney Museum, had perhaps the most profound effect; one, that in a
now often-cited statement was described by critic Margaret Morse as a feeling akin to
having experienced that her body “had come unglued from my own image” (Morse 1990,
153). Nauman’s deceptively simple environment consisted of two plywood walls, approxi-

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mately 11 meters long and 8 meters wide apart with two monitors stacked on top of each
other and positioned at the end of the corridor. A previously taped image of the empty
corridor played on the bottom monitor and as the participant to the installation cautiously
inched her way down the narrow passage, the visitor’s live image was revealed on the
top one. Yet, like a technological Tantalus, the participant’s image became smaller the
closer that he came to the monitor, due to a live security camera positioned at the far end
of the corridor and outfitted with a wide-angle lens watching the space. The viewer,
while becoming the performer/subject to the work, simultaneously performed with the
camera/monitor.
Although Nauman’s complex of architecture, media, and performer-spectator percep-
tion appeared to function in a purely conceptual manner, it is critical to keep in mind
the palpable, felt impact generated by the affect of technology and the visitor/performer
operating in tension with each other. Nauman’s corridor installations as well as other
video works featuring himself engaging in repetitive and banal but altogether disturbing
activities also operated with the same phenomenological effects. The spectator was turned
into performer not only unwillingly, through the instrument of the camera, but also into
the object of other observers’ performances. As Nauman himself stated, “it’s very easy to
describe how the piece looks, but the experience of walking inside it is something else
altogether which can’t be described. And the pieces increasingly have to do with physical
or physiological responses” (Nauman 2005, 120).
Like Nauman, the video artist Dan Graham also harnessed the camera and monitor to
generate situations amplifying the performative role of the spectator. An articulate writer
and critic in addition to his artistic practice, Graham began to explore video in the early
1970s as part of a larger inquiry into the roles established between public and private
space and the influence of architecture in shaping these domains. Examining television’s
and video’s functioning as window and mirror in projects such as Picture Window Piece
(1970), Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), Time Delay Room (1974), and Three Linked
Cubes—Interior Design for Space Showing Video (1986), Graham embarked on a series of
video-based performance works researching the role of the observer in relation to the
monitor.
In many of his pieces, Graham carefully orchestrated the technologies of video, as well
as two-way glass and mirrors, time delay, and feedback to interrogate the processes of
observation in relation to electronically projected images on the screen. Challenging the
assumption that what passes on the monitor is both taking place in real time and space,
Graham directly placed the act of observing the monitor itself as the performance.
“A video monitor’s projected image of a spectator observing it, depends on that spectator’s
relation to the position of the camera, but not on his or her relation to the monitor,”
wrote Graham, “A view of the perceiver can be transmitted from the camera instanta-
neously or time-delayed over a distance to a monitor which may be near or far from the
perceiver’s (viewing) position in space and time” (Graham 1990, 179).

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 The Monitor and the Stage
If the gallery increasingly became the site for technologically mediated performances
between visitors and environments, with very few exceptions the proscenium theater was
not particularly interested in the fracturing of the live by the technical monstrosities of
video. Influenced by the work of 1960s gurus like Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin, Peter
Brook, and the Living Theater, the experimental theater world—particularly in the
United States—was more obsessed with the sacredness of the performer and a stripped-
down, poor-theater aesthetic not reliant on electronics [Performance in the Realm of the
Technical Image, chapter 2]. The gradual transitioning of television technologies into
theatrical performance thus heightened the interesting tension between the use of such
technologies within the theater versus the performance contexts emerging from the experi-
mental visual, musical, and media arts.
During his early work in the mid 1960s, Paik also ventured beyond the site of alterna-
tive gallery performance and into more traditional stage environments. Most notable was
his collaboration on Merce Cunningham’s and John Cage’s sensor-driven interactive dance
performance Variations V (1965), where the artist briefly moved beyond the monitor,
projecting his distorted magnetized TV images in large scale as part of a frenetic visual
backdrop accompanying Stan Vanderbeek’s experimental films, sensor-driven music by
Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma, and Cunningham’s sensor-driven improvisation
[Cunningham’s Techne, chapter 6].

Svoboda’s CCTV Experiment

Paik’s move to the more traditional world of the performing arts with Variations V was
not the first use of televisual technologies as an integral part of the postwar performance
landscape. One of earliest documented yet now-forgotten examples of the use of televisual
images in theatrical performance was Josef Svoboda’s [Kinetic Scenes, chapter 2] scenic
design for a production of the contemporary Italian composer Luigi Nono’s opera Intolle-
ranza, staged by Sarah Caldwell at the Opera Group of Boston in 1965. Although not
featuring a television monitor as part of the visual scenography, Svoboda’s production is
one of the earliest to make ingenious use of CCTV (closed-circuit television) and magnetic
tape that enabled the live recording and playback of the stage action together with large
video projection.
A joint collaboration with MIT and the Boston public TV station WGBH (the same
station that later facilitated the development of Paik’s and Abe’s video synthesizer in
1969), the use of television technology in Svoboda’s production was far advanced for its
time. Described by the composer as less of an opera and more of a “scenic action,” Nono’s
Intolleranza was a series of short scenes utilizing Brechtian techniques such as voice-over,
projected slogans, texts, and documentary footage in an effort to forge an encyclopedic
archive of the cataclysms of the twentieth century.

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 Svoboda’s production utilized CCTV technologies, which at the time were the privy
of large broadcast institutions and universities such as MIT, in order to transmit both live
and prerecorded images onto the stage. “In the Boston theater,” wrote Svoboda, “I was
able to put my hands on equipment and facilities that I previously could only dream
about. Part of the dream was industrial television with the possibility and capability of
reproducing whatever was being shot” (Svoboda 1993, 79).17
In the production, Svoboda projected live images of the performers, who in real time
would confront their distorted or negative/inverted video doubles. He also used these
CCTV recording and playback technologies to record and delay stage actions as well as
broadcast the action of some of the singers, who were located in TV studios 5 kilometers
away from the actual performance site. One of the most riveting uses of the technology
was the possibility to turn the live TV cameras onto protesting crowds outside of the
opera house and project 5 m s 6 m images with the aid of powerful black-and-white
Eidophor video projectors. In essence, this use of live documentary footage, what Svoboda
termed “TV from the City,” shifted the entire form of the opera from a historically con-
strained artwork to the feeling of a live TV broadcast.
Another use of the television camera for Svoboda was the ability to turn it onto the live,
seated audience and thus make them implicitly part of the action. This effect was used at
particularly poignant dramatic moments during the production, such as the recitative of a
young African American singer singing a civil rights protest song. Accompanied by New
York Times archive footage of KKK lynchings in the background, Svoboda projected the
staring audience onto the large back screen and, using color inversion technologies, began to
populate the soon-incensed audience with color-inversed black doppelgängers.
What is also worth noting is that Svoboda managed to employ television within a
traditional operatic context in 1965, using its mode of production to fundamentally
influence the making and reception of the opera. The opera was produced not only in the
traditional site of the rehearsal studio and stage but also in the television studio, where
editing and directing choices were dictated by the stream of image possibilities coming
from the cameras. Even if Svoboda’s production seems to be an anomaly for its time due
to the scenographer’s own expertise in developing modern technologies for a theater
setting, it was inevitable that televisual media would soon have a profound impact on the
traditional stage.

Video Scenography: Video Free America and Chelsea Theater Center

One of the earliest examples of an established theater integrating video technologies into
stage production was the avant-garde, Brooklyn-based Chelsea Theater Center. At the
time one of the most adventuresome theater companies in the United States, and in resi-
dence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chelsea began collaboration with the alternative
San Francisco video collective Video Free America (established in 1970) and its founders

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Skip Sweeney and Arthur Ginsberg.18 Through a personal connection between Ginsberg
and Chelsea producer Michael David, Video Free America became video artists in resi-
dence at Chelsea in 1971, creating what Sweeney termed “video sets” for a series of land-
mark theatrical productions between 1970 and 1974 and being one of the first artist
groups to bring the language of the growing alternative video art scene to bear on the
traditional theater context.
Over the course of three productions at Chelsea, Heathcoat Williams’s AC/DC (1970),
poet Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (1972), and the American premiere of Austrian playwright
Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1973), Video Free America developed a suite of techniques for
the sculptural incorporation of monitors into the scenographic environment and the use
of live video technology. AC/DC—an avant-garde, McLuhan-inspired early 1970s play
dealing with the sensory overload generated by mass media—featured nineteen television
sets integrated into director Robert Kalfin’s frenetic mise-en-scène while Ginsberg and
Sweeney manipulated live video feedback in addition to the use of prerecorded material
and instant replays of stage action.
The next project, Allen Ginsberg’s dramatization of his own unstagable poem dealing
with the Hebrew prayer of lament Kaddish, continued the integration of video into the-
atrical mise-en-scène but utilized a tryptic of large projection surfaces turned on their
sides, in addition to CCTV, live cameras, and filmic images. Moving the action backward
and forward in time, Video Free America’s direction also used video technologies to mirror
the stage environment, slowing down and speeding up scenes, thus irreparably altering
the flow of real theatrical time. What video finally brought Kaddish and the group’s most
challenging Chelsea experiment—German director Carl Weber’s staging of Austrian
enfant-terrible Peter Handke’s notoriously difficult work Kaspar in February 1973 with
actor Christopher Lloyd—was the ability to show multiple perspectives on the stage, to
have the camera’s point of view influence a live event.
Weber’s production of Kaspar would be a milestone in the subsequent use of video
technology’s integration into live theater contexts. Based very loosely on the German
legend of Kaspar Hauser, a boy who was raised in a cellar completely in isolation and who
could speak only one sentence when he wandered into the world at the age of seventeen,
the 1967 play depicted the construction and destruction of a human being through the
medium of language.
Over the course of the production, the audience became witness to the conditioning
of the character Kaspar (who appeared autistic) by way of off stage voices or prompters
who bullied, tortured, coaxed, interrogated, and forced Kaspar to become “normalized”
through a series of absurd exercises and virtuoso language games. With its themes of
social control, Weber, a former assistant to Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, professor
and professional director in Europe and the United States, transplanted the play from a
European to an American context that specifically addressed the normalizing power of
television.

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Figure 4.3 Video scenography for Kaspar (Peter Handke). Chelsea Theater Center, Brooklyn Academy of
Music. Brooklyn, NY. February 1973. Directed by Carl Weber. Video by Video Free America (Skip Sweeney
and Arthur Ginsberg). Photo Amnon Ben Nomis.

The production itself continued Video Free America’s experiments by integrating

monitors directly into the architecture of the stage scenography: this time, a scaffolding-
like set that featured two vertical rows of rotated televisions on each side of the stage and
a strip of seven televisions mounted at the top of the proscenium itself (figure 4.3). The
video material ranged from prerecorded television clips that would interrupt the action
(Godzilla was a favorite), prerecorded segments with Kaspar and prompters featuring
disembodied images of ears and mouths, and, finally, live CCTV feeds of the stage action.
The use of the live camera and a matrix router that could send the images to the battery
of monitors helped establish multiple perspectives of the event for the viewers (showing,
for example, a side view frontally) and, simultaneously, created a visual sign for the media’s
power as an instrument of control.

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 The sheer complications of working with analog gear within the fluidity of a rehearsal
process coupled with the inability to edit the video as one would edit film led to a complex
series of technical issues for the production. The continual incorporation of the live and
the prerecorded was short–circuited, as the taping took place near the tail end of rehears-
als, leaving little stage time for the complex choreography of the image onslaught. Every
change to the video, which today is taken for granted due to the facility of NLE (nonlinear
editing) software, had to be laboriously rerecorded on stage.
Last was the unexpected challenge of finding an actor who could perform with his/her
own video image over the course of an entire evening. Weber eventually chose Lloyd (who
would go on to achieve international fame playing the absentminded character Doc Brown
in the Back to the Future films) due to his split-second comic timing and virtuoso ability
to interact with both Handke’s extremely precise and absurd language and the actor’s
video doppelgänger—a task that even Lloyd admitted was extremely difficult.19
Although audiences generally received the production well, many critics were at a loss
to understand the television monitors that they felt violated the sacred space of the theater.
In particular, German critics who saw the production were shocked at the use of technol-
ogy, judging it to rob the purity of live presence seen so essential to distinguish theater
from televisual media. But Kaspar set a precedent not only through the use of video in
more traditional theatrical settings, but also through its attempt to integrate technological
apparatuses fully within the dramaturgy of a theatrical text. Here, both technology
and “content” were integrally related and played off each other in a seamless manner.
Furthermore, Video Free America’s connection with Chelsea was a rare example of cross-
pollination between different scenes: alternative video and the traditional stage.20
There was no doubt that others began deploying video technologies in the traditional
bastions of the theater around the same time after the early attempts of Svoboda and Video
Free America laid out the language and techniques for the use of video within live per-
formance over the coming decades. Even if the technological sophistication of the machin-
ery radically changed with the development of color video, the camcorder, and digital
video in the 1980s, the inventory of techniques for the televisual monitor and live camera
in performance from their start in the 1960s to the peak period of use in the 1980s and
1990s remained relatively unchanged.

The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène

Culled from the visual arts, live art, and theater, the techniques by which video was utilized
in performance reads like a laundry list of the early experiments that we have discussed.
Video could be used in performance settings to (1) invoke the cultural phenomenon of
television or, more broadly, the media (video as a sign), (2) articulate the tension between
the live and the recorded, (3) articulate the tension between lived stage and media time
and fragment its expected continual passage, (4) challenge the line between the public
and the private, (5) invoke the image and experience of surveillance, (6) occupy sculptural

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space (as a light source, for instance), (7) provide multiple perspectives and points of view,
(8) demonstrate the tension between presence of the flesh and blood performer and absence
of the body, (9) emphasize the utter artifice of the theatrical event, and (10) act as a
microscope, closing in on and recording elements unbeknownst to the human eye (a
system of repetition).
Suddenly, in the 1980s in the United States as well as in Europe, Canada, Japan, and
Australia, the performance stage was awash in video images. In her work Les Écrans sur la
Scène, the French theater historian and theoretician Béatrice Picon-Vallin estimated that,
for example, in Montréal, Canada, alone from 1981–1986 the number of performance
works utilizing video exploded, with some twenty-five productions in 1986 using video
and monitors. By the 1980s, performance practices with video had successfully fused the
visual context of the monitor as a sculptural object normally found in the gallery or
(increasingly) museum with the conscious, popular invocation of a mass, suburban
medium. Nevertheless, what the deployment of the video apparatus accomplished was to
exacerbate the tension between the flatness and frame of the electronically generated media
image and the lived three- and four-dimensionality of the stage.
The approach of San Francisco–based performance and visual artist Laura Farabough,
for example, was exemplary in exploring this tension. Farabough, who began using video
with her company Snake Theater (cofounded with Chris Hardman) in the mid 1970s,
continued such mediated explorations at a larger scale with Nightfire Theater in the
1980s. Seeking a full integration between the live stage event and the televisual image,
Farabough used the monitor to invoke the banality of American suburban life brought
on by television as well as to frame formal experimentation with the integration of live
actors and their video doubles and multiples.
Influenced by visual artists such as Bruce Nauman’s work at the Nicholas Wilder
gallery with its almost violent appropriation of the media object of the television into a
high art temple, Farabough pushed the envelope between video and the live performer in
a series of productions such as Obedience School (1983), Liquid Distance/Timed Approach (LA
Olympic Arts Festival, 1984), Under Construction (1985), Baseball Zombie (1985 and in
collaboration with Video Free America), Investigation through a Window (Tokyo, 1987),
and Bodily Concessions (1988–1991).
Her 1982 work Obedience School, an examination of postcapitalist American suburban
paranoia, created a completely synchronized, external performance running on video; what
Farabough referred to as a “time prison.”21 Using the video apparatus in architectural/
sculptural configurations (Under Construction and Baseball Zombie) as well as a device to
reveal the artifice of the stage and the internal emotional lives of the performers,
Farabough’s manipulation of the video image functioned as a distinct counterpoint to her
stage action, generating a completely different performance space, albeit simulated, for
the spectator inside the realm of the monitor against that taking place on the actual,
physical stage.

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 At the same time, in New York City, a similar explosion of interest occurred among
theater artists who rapidly embraced video in the effort to alter the perception of the live
performer. Originally trained in sculpture and film, New York–based artist John Jesurun’s
earliest self-authored plays appropriated the languages of video and film and directorially
applying them to stage conventions to destabilize the line between live theater and media
realities.
Although not yet directly incorporating video technology, his long running serial
soap opera/play Chang in a Void Moon, staged at the Lower East Side Pyramid Club from
1982–1983, used techniques harvested from video and cinema such as abrupt scene
changes to simulate edits and placing actors in unusual configurations (on their backs,
sides, in the air) to simulate the multiple angles of camera point of view, particularly
from a bird’s-eye-perspective. Jesurun then moved on to more elaborate forms of televised
theater, utilizing combinations of live actors and performers on multimonitor setups in
projects such as White Water (1985) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1990) or the
more perverse Slight Return (1994), in which an individual trapped inside a room was
recorded by five CCTV cameras that projected the images to a distant audience. Within
these productions and others, Jesurun manipulated video to regain both the sense of
intimacy lost in theatrical space (actors would be “face to face as it were with the
audience”) as well as to reveal and conceal gestures and expressions from individual
performers not necessarily visible to the naked eye without the help of the camera’s
magnifying characteristics.22
Squat Theater [“New Formalisms,” chapter 2] also deployed the television monitor as
part of their attempt to fragment the fragile line between fiction and (media) reality. In
the collective’s most notorious production, Andy Warhol’s Last Love (1978), staged in
their New York 23rd Street storefront theater/living quarters, a live camera that was
trained on the storefront window at the street transmitted images of pedestrians
who stopped to stare into the Squat performance space, while a seated audience in the
back of the theater were witnesses to both the video image and the real image simultane-
ously (figure 4.4). Squat’s combination of monitor, mirrors, camera, and the (real)
storefront window overlooking the street scene outside of the theater in Andy Warhol’s
Last Love was, in many ways, prototypical for the manner in which live audiences
were forced to confront the swelling uncertainty of image-mediated experiences in live
performance.
At the same time but in a more sober vein, the avant-garde theater collective Mabou
Mines, extensively examined the possibilities of live interaction with the video image
in a single work: Lee Breuer’s and Ruth Maleczech’s 1983 “performance poem” Hajj,
an interior monologue by cofounder Maleczech. Facilitated with the help of Sony and
performed at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Hajj employed cameras and
monitors ingeniously inset within a triptych of mirrors as a device to recall and reconstruct
lost memories.

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Figure 4.4 Squat Theater. Andy Warhol’s Last Love, 1978. Photo © Theodore Shank.

Sitting within a realistic bedroom set surrounded by the mirrors, Malaczech’s virtuoso
performance of an old woman painstakingly recalling the movement of her life was com-
plemented by live and manipulated video doubles so that the actress’s actual mirrored
reflection melded with her own electronic simulacra. In fact, Hajj’s play on recalling the
past through the medium of camera and image helped manifest yet another aspect of video
in performance—its ability to invoke, record, play back, and manipulate memory, sug-
gesting filmmaker Chris Marker’s musing from his 1982 Sans Soleil: “I ask myself how
people remember if they do not make movies or photographs or tapes, how mankind used
to go about remembering” (Marker 1983).
Another contemporary stage artist who became widely known for his integration of
video into theatrical mise-en-scène was the American theater and opera director Peter
Sellars. Influenced by contemporary artists like Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman, Sellars
shifted back and forth between art world–inspired use of video as sculptural element
within his elaborate opera and theater mise-en-scène and a more directly political invoca-
tion of the monitor as a contemporary instrument of media control.

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 While still an undergraduate at Harvard, Sellars was known for his scandalous updating
of classical theater and opera texts. Already using television sets playing supermarket ads
in his adaptation of Mayakovsky’s socialist satire The Bedbug at Harvard in 1979, Sellars—
as artistic director of the now-defunct Boston Shakespeare Company between 1981 and
1983—used video as a key dramatic element in his 1983 production of British composer
Peter Maxwell Davies’ rarely seen chamber opera The Lighthouse. Running on three moni-
tors, video segments of storms, sand, water, and blasts of light dramatically punctuated
Davies’ story of the discovery of an abandoned lighthouse off the coast of Scotland in 1900
and the mysterious disappearance of the three caretakers who ran it.
The invocation of a natural landscape, of an image space outside of the physical border
of the theater, reached an apotheosis in Sellars’s 1992 Salzburg festival production of
Messaien’s Saint François d’Assise [Architecture Machines, chapter 2]. Told in twelve scenes
or tableaux, the opera examined the life of St. Francis of Assisi through a synesthetic
mingling of color, light, and complex rhythmic and timbral sound. From the start, Sellars
imagined the employment of the screen and television in particular as a contemporary
homage to the polyphony he saw as representative of the stained glass windows of medieval
art in the production. “Video screens are the stained glass windows of our epoch . . . the
screen creates a surface as flat as stained glass where spots of color unite to form an image-
metaphor” (Picon-Vallin 1998, 64; my translation).
“The flashes, the movement of the camera, the change of perspective,” emphasized not
only an experience of visual polyphony in the production, but also video as an integral
part of the opera would be “an expression of a world in perpetual change” (Picon-Vallin
1998, 64). Originally conceived to be displayed on a massive Sony JumboTron display used
in stadiums, the technology’s cost prohibition for even the world’s largest music festival
forced the design team to rethink the video mise-en-scène to being displayed across thirty-
eight video monitors, thirteen of them literally suspended in the air at various heights
over designer George Tsypin’s towering set.
The slow movement of water, clouds, fire, birds, and abstract light played across the
multiple suspended screens and a battery of monitors on the actual stage stacked into
sculptural forms of crosses, gates, and walls suggested a kind of electronically mediated
transcendentalism. “As God never finished in his creation of the world,” stated Sellars,
“we are immersed in a continual creation—that is what I want to evoke” (Picon-Vallin
1998, 65).
Though video could express a Heracleitan world in continual flux in St. François,
Sellars’s 1996 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—not surprisingly but
appropriately set in Venice, California—during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los
Angeles, used video in a more overtly propagandistic manner. Delivering a blistering
critique of twenty–four-hour CNN culture and freely appropriating the camera/monitor
techniques of his theatrical peers (in particular, the Wooster Group), Merchant was told
on a mostly barren set with the exception of tables, chairs, and a row of nine monitors

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suspended over the stage, placed on the floor, and hung over the audience. With the aid
of live cameras, actors who turned away from each other to speak were optically captured,
suddenly reunited together and exploded into multiple copies on the television screens
while prerecorded news footage (most notoriously, an endless series of helicopter shots
from CNN surveying the riots in progress) displayed a twentieth-century media imaginary
of Merchant’s severe comments on seventeenth-century race relations. For Sellars, both the
sign and affective tenor of video forcefully demonstrated the fracturing and reduction of
human experience through the media.23

The Wooster Group’s Televisual Gesamtkunstwerk

No exploration of the interplay of video and theater would be complete without discussion
of the New York–based collective The Wooster Group, perhaps still the most internation-
ally well-known theatrical ensemble to work toward the total integration of video tech-
niques into the contemporary mise-en-scène. Inspired by the Group’s use of televisual
media, Peter Sellars stated in 1986 that “The Wooster Group is speaking the language
the theater will speak fifteen to twenty years from now. I’m talking about the vocabulary
of stage language, of what a set looks like, how lighting behaves, how sound works, how
video works, how all of those things go into creating a total work of art” (Bartow 1988,
283).
Emerging out of director Richard Schechner’s 1960s radical theater collective the
Performance Group, The Wooster Group (named for their space on Wooster Street in
Soho, New York) was founded in 1974 by Spalding Gray, Elizabeth LeCompte, Willem
Dafoe, Peyton Smith, and later Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, and Kate Valk. In order to
create a theater of simultaneity “where we can talk on the phone, look out the window,
watch TV, and be typing a letter at the same time” (Wooster Group 1981), The Wooster
Group’s collective working methods generated a controversial series of formally radical,
multilayered productions that explored the contemporary political and social ethos and
underbelly of late twentieth century American culture.
Using sampling techniques applied to existing, sacred texts of theater authors such as
Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Eugene O’Neill, and Anton Chekhov combined with
the detritus of popular visual and aural culture, the Group’s entangled productions
emerged with a sense of the frenzy and bricolage of contemporary, electronically dislocated
life facilitated by way of a intricate choreography of highly skilled performers, video,
sound, space, and light under the direction of LeCompte.
Many admirers of contemporary experimental performance look to The Wooster Group
as the originators of video in a theatrical context but we have seen that this is far from
the historical reality; the television set played a critical role in the Group’s work, but was
only one of many elements vying for the spectator’s attention. In fact, one of the earliest
uses of video within the Performance Group/Wooster Group configuration was a curious
1975–1976 project directed by Schechner (and featuring LeCompte as an actress) entitled

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The Marilyn Project, which used live television cameras and a series of mirrors in order to
double and reflect the action taking place on the televisionstudio–like stage and on two
monitors hung from the ceiling.24
After Schechner’s departure, it would not be until 1981 that the television would
reemerge as one focal point in The Wooster Group’s fragmented stage universe. Although
the Group worked with slide and film projection from 1975 onwards, the earliest
use of the monitor dates back to Route 1 & 9 (1981), a high-octane shredding and reas-
sembly of classical Americana playwright Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which featured
the performers in blackface and unearthed (if not wholly intentionally) contemporary
deep-seated racial stereotypes and the buried political hegemony underneath Wilder’s
mythic portrait of America. Route 1 & 9—as well as subsequent productions, including
L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points) (1986), a sampling of Timothy Leary’s conversations
about his Harvard LSD experiments in the 1960s—collaged with a rapid-fire version
of Arthur Miller’s Salem witch trial/Joseph Mc Carthy–inspired The Crucible, Frank
Dell’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1988), a radical deconstruction of Flaubert’s 1874
poem “The Temptation of St. Anthony” fused with Lenny Bruce monologues, Brace
UP! (1989), an elegiac take on Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, and the group’s famed
reinterpretations of Eugene O’Neill (The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, featuring
performer Kate Valk in blackface and kabuki kimono), among others, all prominently
extended the full range of theatrical possibilities between the monitor and the live human
performer.
The TV and microphone acted as central technological motifs in the Group’s work;
however, these apparatuses functioned less as technological beings for the sake of technol-
ogy and more as Brechtian estrangement devices: electronically enhanced distancing
systems that both removed the historical-cultural weight of the performed texts while
interrogating them with technical systems to make them more present. In The Wooster
Group’s world, the television set served multiple functions: as an object moved about the
stage, a machine for visual inscription, a technical instrument enabling the amplification
and attenuation of stage relationships, and a screen for the live display of performing
simulacra and popular culture.
Subject to the same ruthless deconstruction and transformation as the group’s dizzying
array of textual sampling forays and forever ensconced as one element in designer Jim
Clayburgh’s (and later, Ruud van de Akker’s) endlessly changing modular sets constructed
of platforms, overturned tables, pulleys, aircraft cables, and chairs, the TV monitor made
a ubiquitous appearance in The Wooster Group’s media-theatric world but was also con-
tinually subject to defamiliarization itself. For example, in Fish Story—a 1993 epilogue
to Brace Up!—one of the televisions was used to hold a samovar, while in Brace Up!,
televisions were placed on tracks embedded in the stage floor, shoved and pushed toward
and away from the audience like so many used packing boxes or discarded furniture items
(figure 4.5). During the production of Brace Up!, video designer Chris Kondek actually

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Figure 4.5 The Wooster Group. Brace Up!, 1991. Pictured (l–r): Scott Renderer, Jeff Webster (on large
monitors), Paul Schmidt (on small monitor), Kate Valk. Photo © Mary Gearhart.

employed neutral density filters as gels mounted on the television monitor screens to
lessen the harsh technological effect and quality of the monitor.25
Although from the naïve observer’s point of view, The Wooster Group’s productions
appeared to be chiefly concerned with technological experimentation, from the start
LeCompte’s interest in video was less the gee-whiz factor of innovation for its own sake
and more interest in its role as a contemporary cultural icon combined with the ability
to record moments and play them back.
One crucial characteristic of video in the Group’s work was that it could be used to
record and document events and encounters between the performers and the director that
took place on stage during rehearsals. Indeed, the very “live” qualities attributed to The
Wooster Group’s work—its chaotic world veering between complete disorder and an odd
sense of order—derived partially from the performers’ highly skilled ability to both play
themselves, shift acting styles at machine-gun speed, and incorporate their own lives and
the Group’s working process into the creation and production process.
What the introduction of Sony’s Hi8 camera in the mid 1980s and the continued
evolution of “prosumer” (high-end consumer electronics) video did was provide The

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Wooster Group with wider access to machines that previously had been restricted to the
well-endowed video infrastructures of public television stations and community media
centers. Similar to the manner in which the Portapak video camera in the late 1960s
shifted the technical-aesthetic possibilities of an entire generation of artists, the ability to
purchase a cheap, light Hi8 camcorder that was less sensitive to theatrical lighting color
temperatures than its bulkier cousin the Portapak gave the group the ability to record
their private working process in rehearsal. This recording of process thus enabled not only
the re-review of rehearsals post hoc but more fundamentally, provided raw material for
incorporation into the public mise-en-scène.
Another crucial development in video technology in the 1980s was the introduction
of the affordable Panasonic WJ-MX50 mixer, a device that provided the ability to mix
and dissolve two channels of video live and thus allow the group to play more fluidly with
the time structures in performance through techniques such as cross-fading, luma, and
chroma-keying. Like the artistic opportunities provided by prosumer video cameras, the
introduction of video mixers to the consumer market in the late 1980s gave LeCompte
and her collaborators the capacity to create seamless transitions between different types
of material: from the live performer on-camera in the room to prerecorded images of the
live performer or samplings of movies and other cultural desiderata. With these technical
possibilities, LeCompte (and others) could work with video without being a technician
herself, unlike earlier use, which required the video artist to be technician and artist
simultaneously.
Treating the monitor as an object critical to the scenographic mise-en-scène, the col-
lective also continued to fine-tune existing as well as pioneer new techniques for the
integration and manipulation of video images in their performances. The close-ups of
television, the presence of an actors’ face on a monitor that only the audience was privy
to, the doubling of live actors, and the recording/playing back of absent performers were
some of the multitude of concepts that had been started decades earlier but lay in wait
for more sophisticated machinery and the creative context by which to exploit such
machines.
In addition to video performing its predestined role as electronic magnifying glass,
distorter, and transformer of the human performer, it also served as texture—as something
that LeCompte and Chris Kondek (responsible for video up until 1990) stated was not
necessarily tied at all to the content of the work, but rather as associations derived from
particular moments in which the screen could provide iconic counterpoint to live stage
action. Video, according to LeCompte, could function as “music”—as a technique to
invoke a different set of tempi, rhythms, and densities in relation to other happenings on
stage (LeCompte 1994, 196). In Brace Up!, for example, the performance was periodically
punctuated with bursts from the onstage television sets playing Japanese samurai and
monster films—images that derived from rehearsals where the company watched such

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films, which provided a strong rhythmic and textural counterpoint to the quiet ennui
embodied in Chekhov’s text.
Another function of video in the Group’s work was spectral: to literally represent and
invoke the absence of performers who either were not present at particular presentations
or had died in real life. In the 1986 Boston showings of L.S.D., the monitor appeared on
the long inquisition like table with a prerecorded image of actor/director Michael Kirby,
who could not attend the performance and whose video image hence acted as a stand-in.
This technique reached a more mournful and poignant dimension in the revival of produc-
tions with videotaped images of actor Ron Vawter after the actor’s actual death from AIDS
in 1993.26
As video and sound grew more sophisticated in the late 1990s, the technical dimen-
sions of the Group’s work expanded with their increased use of digitally controlled and
produced media. In its more recent productions after 2000, the television in fact, started
to make a (slight) retreat from its role chiefly as a presentational device (although this
was still apparent) and more to a control system that could issue commands or provide
impulses to the performers, unbeknownst to the audience.
With the Group’s 2003 production of Poor Theater, a strange take/re-enactment of Jerzy
Grotowski’s legendary Akropolis production from the mid 1960s, sets of partially hidden
monitors were used chiefly as a prompting system for the actors, providing images of
gestures and movements from the recording of the original production in Poland that the
performers were required to precisely respond to. The same techniques were at work in
the Group’s ongoing experimental take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2006) and more radically
expanded with There Is Still Time . . . Brother (2008), an interactive, panoramic movie
projected on a 360 degree screen developed through Jeffrey Shaw’s Australian based
i-cinema research center.27

The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène II

Principally through The Wooster Group’s festival tours at predominantly European and
Asian performance festivals during the late 1980s and 1990s, either directly or indirectly
media stage work coming from the United States had a major impact on the direction of
experimental performance internationally. With the advantage of state cultural subsidies,
European artists and companies began developing performance works using video technol-
ogy that sometimes went far beyond their North American counterparts in terms of scale
and historical-political context. Some of the most innovative work with video and perfor-
mance emerging from Europe in the 1980s came from Italy, where an entire movement
of media-theater dubbed Nuovo Spettacolo arose.
Slightly later but still deeply influenced by the movement was the spectacular
work of the Milan-based collective Studio Azzurro, an ensemble of artists founded in
1983 by Paolo Rosa, Fabio Cifirino, and Leonardo Sangiorgi. Working across the

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domains of exhibition design, film, computer-augmented interactive environments, and
theater, Studio Azzurro emerged out of a photography collective (Studio Azzurro
Fotografia) interested in exploring the development of new image languages through
technology.
Marked by a rigorous historical dramaturgical approach to image material, the collec-
tive began working on video settings for theater and opera projects in the mid 1980s
named “video ambients” (video ambiente) that made links between the physical language
of the body and the immaterial nature of video.28 In order to “spread beyond temporal
and spatial limitations” of theatrical performance while “still constituting a specific form
of dramatic art,” Studio Azzurro’s video settings consisted of large-scale, multimonitor
sculptural environments as well as projected imagery that used developing video matrix-
ing technology in order to create images that would be sequenced across the banks of
monitors.29
Even if video artists such as Dara Birnbaum, the Vasulkas, Gary Hill, and Fabrizio
Plessi also used such multimonitor setups, particularly as the technology of switching
and routing of signals became more sophisticated, Studio Azzurro was one of the early
companies to bring such a strong visual signature from video art onto the performance
stage. Prologo a diario segreto contraffatto (Prologue to a Secret Counterfeit Diary), Studio
Azzurro’s 1985 dance theater collaboration with Giorgio Barberio Corsetti (the Italian
director and founder of the well-known Italian media art theater company La Gaia
Scienzia), featured seven actors and fifteen monitors stacked in various vertical configura-
tions and thirteen live cameras that captured the live performers, creating a seamless flow
between the live stage action and the video setting. With the cameras grabbing movement
and dramatic scenes from actors on and off stage, actions that took place in the real stage
setting continually overflowed onto the stack of monitors. The dust that an actor blew
out of his hand, for example, could suddenly appear to travel across a vertical tower of
screens.
Studio Azzurro extended the multimonitor setup in original theatrical projects like
Primo Scavo (1998), a dance work featuring a giant wheel of sixteen side-by-side monitors
and in their large-scale music/theater work Ultima Forma di Liberta il Silenzio (Silence as
the Last Form of Freedom, 1993), staged in an outside quarry and featuring two massive
multimonitor cubes that appeared to rise out of the ground. Similar to Studio Azzurro,
video was incorporated in Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s experiments developing a “drama-
turgy of stage objects” rather than conventional theatrical narratives. As founder of La
Gaia Scienza, one of the stalwart groups in the Nuovo Spettacolo (also including Falso
Movimento and Magazzini Criminali), Corsetti’s interest in “presenting atmospheres” led
to collaborations with Studio Azzurro as well as his own work in the late 1980s and
1990s.
With the monitor appearing as the rule rather than the exception on stage toward the
end of the 1980s, international theater and performance directors as diverse in cultural,

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economic, and sociopolitical contexts as Reza Abdoh, Robert Woodruff, Ivo Van Hove,
Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, René Pollesch, Gob Squad, Lucien Pintile, Forkbeard
Fantasy, Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ping Chong, and
Travis Preston; composers such as Robert Ashley and Steve Reich (with video artist Beryl
Korot); choreographers like Meg Stuart, William Forsythe, London’s DV8, Anna Teresa
de Keersmaker; solo performers like Bill Irwin and Laurie Anderson; theater companies
like Théâter de Complicité; and the younger “next-generation” Wooster Groups such as
the New York–based Big Art Group and the Builders Association set about to incorporate
video technologies into their experimental mise-en-scène. Even more traditional theater
directors like Peter Brook, who had showed little interest in electronic technology in his
groundbreaking stage work for the RSC in London and later, at the Bouffes du Nord
(C.I.R.T.) in Paris and abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, also turned to the monitor in his
1993 production/adaptation of Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
entitled L’Homme Qui. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the use of video, particularly in
younger directors’ productions on German state theater stages, alone led the influential
journal Theater Heute to comment on whether there were any German productions without
video cameras and monitors on stage.
Lest you think that video’s use was restricted to the small avant-garde performance
coterie, the 1990s also brought the move of performance and video into the entertainment
mainstream. Whether through collaborations between popular artists and avant-garde
artists like Robert Lepage’s staging of Peter Gabriel’s Secret World tour in 1996, Broadway
spectacles like director Des McAnuff ’s 1993 adaptation of the Who’s classic rock opera
Tommy (a production that featured an entire video monitor matrix framing both sides of
the proscenium), or video in the Broadway production of Largely New York by new vaude-
villian performer Bill Irwin, electronic images became just another technoscenic element,
like computer-controlled lighting and automated digital sound, to be increasingly used
by the popular culture entertainment machine.

The Monitor and the Architect

In the late 1980s, architecture as well became obsessed with the video image’s performa-
tive possibilities, particularly through architects’ affinities to the ideas of early video
artists’ connections to architectural-performative experimentation. The video monitor
featured a prominent position in the much-lauded Glass Video Gallery designed by
Bernard Tschumi for the center of the northern Dutch city of Groeningen. A long walk-
through transparent glass box planted in the middle of the city and featuring embedded
monitors running various programs from artists, Tschumi’s glass structure unmistakably
recalled Dan Graham’s 1970s and 1980s experiments in its emphasis as a site of watching
from inside and outside, simultaneously.
The electronic confrontation between the performative image, the public, and the video
screen was more sharply articulated in Diller Scofidio’s experiments in public spaces.

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The team’s 1996 video installation Jump Cuts at a San Jose, California, United Artists
movie multiplex attempted to replace the movie marquee with a series of twelve LCD
monitors installed on the cinema’s outside façade and featuring live surveillance of the
inside stairwells, escalators, ticket booths, and concession stands. Diller Scofidio aimed
at an even bigger scale with the installation of their public art project Facsimile on the
front façade of the Moscone West convention center (a center that opened in 2004) in San
Francisco. Installing a 5 m s 9 m LED screen that in theory, could be latitudinally and
longitudinally moved across the building façade by way of a vertical steel armature, the
oversized video surface attempted to beam prerecorded images of convention delegates
mixed with live images taken from a camera positioned on the top part of the screen and
focused into the building out into the urban center of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena
district.
A similar strategy was also at work in the pair’s 1999 reimagining of the Brasserie
restaurant in New York City in collaboration with designer Ben Rubin. Time-delayed
images of patrons entering the restaurant from revolving doors captured by a hidden
security camera were fed to an array of fifteen flat-panel screens poised in a row above the
restaurant’s bar. Notwithstanding that the sites of these installations were embedded into
the urban wild, they still intrinsically played with earlier video art tropes, particularly
the capturing and projection of everyday life as public spectacle under the gaze of panoptic
systems of control.30
Possibly the ultimate statements to complete the video image’s transformation
from avant-garde performance device to mass specularity was capped by Irish rock
group U2’s use of thirty-six onstage monitors during their 1992 CNN-esque Zoo TV
tour, or, even more fittingly, Bill Viola’s work for the industrial band Nine Inch Nails’
Fragile tour in 2003, which featured the artist’s larger-than-life elemental images of fire
and water emitted over three high-resolution, 23-meter LED panels suspended over the
stage.
With its rows of monitors, four massive screens anchored into a scaffolding-like set
construction, a suspended East German Trabant automobile doubling as a Vari*lite pro-
jector and lead singer Bono waving a video camera into his face, projected over multiple
screens, in a post–Berlin Wall riff on the Narcissus myth, U2’s Zoo TV tour quickly
reminded one that the experiments with video in a stage setting that dated back to the
1960s had come full circle in the 1990s, some twenty-five years after video’s creation.
Prefaced by digital technology, however, another wave of experimentation lay on the
horizon. With the introduction of mass-market digital video cameras and computer NLE
systems appearing in the mid 1990s and the increased resolution of high-resolution
plasma, LED displays and high-definition (HD) video at the start of the 2000s, one could
see then-unexploited possibilities, not only for increasing the technical accuracy of the
video image in performance (via HD) but also advancing the possibilities for its real-time
computational manipulation.

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 The Architectonic

In direct contrast to the small scale of the video image and its imprisonment within the
box of the monitor, the projected image on a screen yielded a remarkably different per-
ceptual effect, able to take on architectural dimensions and be mapped onto a multitude
of surfaces. What was lost in terms of the video image’s repeatability across multiple
channels was gained in scale: the ability to match or dwarf the size of the live performer.
With the emergence of the projected image and its characteristic architectonic scale, a
history that first precedes the televisual one and then later runs parallel to it, the live
performer’s mostly unchallenged position as the center of the stage universe was suddenly
put into question, forever becoming only one element in a much larger mediated space.
It is conceptually as well as politically difficult to separate the development of projected
images from the technical apparatuses of lighting and projection that enabled such
illusionism and image magic.31 As early as 1907, the Swedish expressionist playwright
August Strindberg described the use of projected images as a central element in stage
design—a desire that, despite several attempts, remained unfulfilled, due to the imma-
turity of lighting technology at the time. In 1876, the German lighting engineer Hugo
Bähr constructed a unique optical projection system that involved the use of painted scenes
on rotating mica disks that when set before powerful arc lamps projected moving images
onto the cyclorama. Bähr’s device, which quickly found itself into the scenic inventories
of international theaters, proved a first for the use of moving, albeit painted images in a
stage environment.
Likewise, the Spanish/Italian Renaissance polymath and inventor Mariano Fortuny
revolutionized the possibilities of stage lighting and, with it, projection, through his
research into indirect lighting techniques. His 1904 patented indirect lighting system,
the Fortuny dome, comprised electrically controlled, moveable arc lamp instruments indi-
rectly focused on colored pieces of silk. Ambient, colored reflections from the silk would
then be projected onto a half-spherical cyclorama, making it possible to create even spreads
of ambient light in multiple colors and shifting the visual scenery from dawn to dusk.
Enabling the creation of even levels of light across the cyclorama, Fortuny’s system
brought the ability to create indirect, reflected areas of light without shadow, through
the sheer power of the arc lamp technology.

Cinefication and the Stage

The year 1923 marks a milestone in the use of the moving image in relation to human
performers. Experiments with film projection on the theater and opera stage already were
taking place between 1910 and 1912 in Germany, with attempts to use projected filmic
images in variety revues as well as productions of Wagnerian operas to invoke moving
images of nature against painted backdrops.32 Most of these attempts, however, were
minor in comparison to the deployment of architectonic projections in the hands of theater

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artists like Piscator in Berlin in the 1920s and, to a lesser but still significant extent,
Meyerhold in Russia at about roughly the same time.
In chapter 1, I described in detail Constructivism’s fascination with the mechanical
technologies of the newly dawning industrial age, but it was the cinema, in particular,
that generated palpable excitement from directors like Meyerhold, Foregger, and
Eisenstein. Constructivism sought to utilize the cinema not only through staging per-
formances that appropriated filmic techniques but also by directly incorporating the
screen into the dramatic content and structure of the mise-en-scène itself.
“The Constructivist introduces the cinema screen into his installation system so that
the director can use it to enhance the propaganda aspect of the play,” wrote Meyerhold
in 1923.33 Meyerhold’s desire for what he termed a cinefication of the theater was undoubt-
edly linked to the revolutionary hopes that he and the larger Soviet avant-garde had in
the moving image’s power and persuasion to connect to the proletarian masses—the same
persuasion that would later be so forcefully rendered in Eisenstein’s films like Strike! and
Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 poetic tribute to the nascent industrial modernism of
the twentieth century, The Man With the Movie Camera.
Furthermore, the Constructivists’ interest in the materiality of mass industrial produc-
tion was immediately evident in the way that the screen and moving image were deployed
in performance work; particularly, in how film as both image and material were played
with and commented upon. Eisenstein’s famous incorporation of an actor walking through
the projection screen with film in hand as the coda for Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man
was the first in a long series of works that played with the physical medium of film itself
and culminated with the work of structural filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Michael
Snow in the late 1960s.
Figuring prominently in the only remaining photographic records of Meyerhold’s
production work in the early 1920s, the image of the hanging screen suggests that projec-
tion had already begun to be exploited for its full potential in connection to the stage.
Yet Meyerhold’s imagination of what the cinematic image could do in a revolutionary
theater outstripped his practical ability to deploy it. “[We will use] every technical means
at its disposal, will work with film, so that scenes played by the actor on stage can alternate
with scenes he has played on screen” (Meyerhold 1966, 186).
The historical records, however, suggest that for whatever reason (most likely a techni-
cal one), projection played a relatively minor role in Meyerhold’s work. For example, out
of Meyerhold’s enormous oeuvre, only three productions on the historical record used
projection—Earth Rampant (1925), D.E. (1928), and The Mandate (1929)—and these were
restricted to still image only (figure 4.6). Despite the technical issues, Meyerhold’s vision
of the cinematic image as a kind of image architecture, a living billboard of designed
slogans and texts, helped define a crucial characteristic of projection within theatrical
mise-en-scène in the 1920s: the projected image tied to the promotion of a revolutionary,
socialist agenda.

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Figure 4.6 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Lyubov Popova’s production of Tretyakov’s Earth Rampant, Moscow.
Meyerhold State Theater, March 1923.

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Figure 4.7 Erwin Piscator. Fahnen (Flags). Volksbühne, 1923.

This viewpoint was simultaneously explored during the same period with Piscator’s
work at the Volksbühne and later at the Piscator Bühne (figure 4.7). Certainly, we have to
acknowledge the director and his stage designer Traugott Müller as perhaps the first artists
to fully incorporate projected film as an integral element of the theatrical mise-en-scène.
Yet it is important to understand the dramaturgical motivation behind the technology.
Not realized on financial grounds, Piscator imagined the use of film in the theater as early
as 1919.
In 1927 in The Political Theater, he more explicitly outlined the dramaturgical-political
context for projection—specifically, film. For the director, the projected image functioned
in three distinct manners: (1) didactic, (2) dramatic, and (3) editorial/commentary. The
didactic use of film presented the viewer with objective facts—historical information
about the subject on stage. In this context, the projected text, slide, or moving image was
given a documentary function. In contrast, through what Piscator called “the playing of
a part in the development of the stage action and a substitute for the live scene,” the dra-
matic function of the projection suggested its full incorporation into the dramaturgical

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fabric of the stage event (Piscator 1978, 238). The gauze-constructed screen could archi-
tecturally divide up and slice through the action, increasing its tempo and “delivering”
dramatic impact through the rapid-fire iconic play of cinematic time structures.34 In addi-
tion to its documentary and dramatic functions, film also served the similar role of the
Greek chorus—as an instructional commentary on the stage event, addressing the specta-
tor directly while accompanying the action.
Piscator’s use of text and image to comment upon and/or contradict the stage event
was also appropriated and further developed by his dramaturge, the playwright and direc-
tor Bertolt Brecht, and the stage designer Caspar Neher, who began to deploy a similar
technique with projected titles and images in their own theatrical productions during the
mid to late 1920s. In a 1931 text entitled “The Literarization of the Theater (Notes to
the Threepenny Opera),” Brecht stated that the use of projected titles was “a primitive
attempt at literarizing the theater . . . moreover, the use of screens imposes and facilitates
a new style of acting . . . as he watches the projections on the screen, the spectator adopts
an attitude of smoking and watching” (B. Brecht 1978, 43–44).
Alongside projected titles, which functioned as literary commentary to scene changes
or the dramatic action and announced a set of opinions that could resonate or contradict
what the spectator would be thinking, Neher extended the graphic effect of projection to
include still images and drawings that also could provoke a dialectical relationship
between stage events and large format screen ones. In a potential foreshadowing of the
use of live camera projections of onstage performers, Neher’s projections, as Brecht wrote,
would “adopt an attitude towards the events on the stage; as when the real glutton sits
in front of the glutton whom Neher has drawn. In the same way the stage unreels the
events that are fixed on the screen. These projections of Neher’s are quite as much an
independent component of the opera as are (Kurt) Weill’s music and the text. They
provide its visual aids” (B. Brecht 1978, 38).
The stage’s movement, in a relatively short time, from being awash in expressionist
effects and pastoral images created by Bähr’s rotating disks to become a site of media
documentary—the (sometimes) visually harsh, stripped-down propaganda of large-scale
texts commenting on the action or images of mass revolt—more than suggests the popu-
list aura that surrounded moving images blown up and embedded into stripped down,
anti-illusionist stage environments.

Projected Propagandas
Through the influence of directors like Meyerhold, Brecht, and Piscator who turned bill-
board, placard, and agitprop posters into projected images to advance revolutionary social-
ist agendas, graphic or newsreel stylistics became the reigning aesthetic forms for dramatic
propaganda. The majority of these experiments took place in Germany and Russia in the
1920s but their influence would soon carry across the Atlantic. In the 1930s, Piscator’s
techniques were absorbed by the short-lived but highly influential Federal Theater Project,

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one of the artistic components of the U.S. government’s Work Projects Administration
(WPA), a broad initiative founded in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal policy and
designed as a strategy to employ workers hit by the Great Depression in 1929.
Under the leadership of the powerful former Vassar professor Hallie Flanagan, the
Federal Theater Project sought not only to put unemployed theater professionals back to
work but also to create living dramas that could critically address significant social issues,
ranging from race and class, to labor politics, poverty, and the abuse of power. With
generous subsidies from the U.S. government that insulated the initiative from commer-
cial market pressures, Flanagan focused on works demonstrating “the struggle of many
different kinds of people to understand the natural, social, and economic forces [for] a
better life for more people.”35
Similar to Piscator’s work, one of the initiative’s central projects, the Living News-
paper, created a new kind of documentary performance that deployed technological means
such as projection, dramatic lighting effects from a single spotlight, constructivist-
inspired settings and quotations from theatrical forms as wide ranging as shadow puppet
theater and the circus to address specific social concerns, then labeled as the documentary
influence. Working within a formulaic structure that involved the framing and invocation
of a particular controversial yet socially relevant problem (e.g., housing cooperatives,
health, labor, and race relations), a historical narrative of its causes, and finally a presenta-
tion of possible solutions, plays such as Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), Injunction Granted!
(1936), Spirochete (1937, about the conquering of syphilis), and Power (1937) created a
populist form of entertainment within a broader sociopolitical conscience.
Moreover, the Living Newspaper’s projected environments of slogans, texts, charts,
maps, statistics, cartoons, and newsreel footage strangely resemble our current obsession
with the representation of information (numbers, binary digits, graphs, equations, etc.),
weighing in as one of the central devices to create connections between the media-
activated masses and the traditions of stage craft–based storytelling. Although the
majority of Living Newspaper productions took place in New York due to financial con-
straints, the form was also encouraged and occasionally tested in other locales across the
United States, with varying degrees of success.

Robert Edmond Jones’s Theater of the Future

In the Living Newspaper form, Piscator’s application of filmic image projection as docu-
mentary and didactic medium reached a mass public, but the use and impact of projected
media for more strictly artistic ends was also not lost on the direction that stage design
might take in a future America. In a series of writings published as The Dramatic Imagina-
tion in 1941, stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, already known for his luminously
evocative sculpting of stage environments for playwright Eugene O’Neill’s moody expres-
sionist dramas, predicted a future fusion of projection and dramatic form. “In the simul-
taneous use of the living actor and the talking picture in the theater there lies a wholly

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new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself,” wrote Jones
in a 1941 text entitled “A New Kind of Drama.” “Motion pictures are our thoughts made
visible and audible. They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts
do, and their speed, with their flashbacks-like sudden rushes of memory-and their abrupt
transitions from one subject to another, approximates very closely the speed of our think-
ing” (Jones 1941, 17–18).
In following his own ideas for a cinefication of the stage, in which “some new play-
wright will presently set a motion picture screen on stage above and behind his actors
and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious which
together make up the world we live in,” Jones’s vision of a mediated theater significantly
departed from overt politically didactic visions, instead encompassing a richly expression-
ist universe where the screen functioned to peel away the deeper layers of human con-
sciousness (Jones 1941, 18).
This interest in the potential of filmic technologies to create a new dreamlike stage
performance reached its apex in a series of four lectures given at Harvard in May 1952
entitled “Towards a New Theater.” In one of the talks, subsequently entitled “Theater of
the Future,” the scene designer already foresaw what we today take for granted: the
increasing shift toward stage architecture composed of humans interacting with and being
dwarfed by fleeting images on screenal surfaces. “The drama of the future will deal, not
with objective experience or subjective experience but with both varieties of experience
at the same time, expressing our essential duality in a new theatrical idiom, involving the
simultaneous use of the stage and the screen” (Jones 1943).

Czech Cine-Scenography I: Burian’s Theatergraph

Akin to Jones’s expressionist vision (which came some twenty years later) and in strong
contrast to the explicitly propagandistic use of projections in Russia and Germany, a quite
different vision of filmic media in performance arose in the Czechoslovak Republic. Even
as the rise of National Socialism in Germany effectively ended both formal experimenta-
tion and cultural sentiments toward Communism, in the late 1920s the Czech scenogra-
pher E. F. Burian had already begun work on a system that would become a harbinger
for much subsequent work in projected image architectonics. Critical of the bare, unaes-
thestic, and didactic use of projected media in Germany and influenced instead by direc-
tor/designer Gordon Craig’s and Adolphe Appia’s notion of a theatrical synthesis of
elements such as text, music, light, and space, Burian synthesized a theatrical experience
more in line with the expressionist experiments in Wagnerian operas that had taken place
in Germany in the early 1910s.
In effect, Burian’s Theatergraph system attempted a complete integration of human
performer and projected image while attempting to eliminate the screen’s rectilinear
borders. According to Burian, the Theatergraph would be “theater with static and film
projection, coherently and dramatically integrated into the directorial-scenographic

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Figure 4.8 E. R. Burian. Schematic for Theatergraph system. Prague, 1936.

conception.” Though the Theatergraph system was based on 1930s film technology, the
system also depended on other materials, particularly “the discovery of transparent projec-
tion screens covering the front of the stage and allowing for a simultaneous viewing of
the actor and the filmed image on the screen” (J. Burian 1975, 30).
From the standpoint of today’s multiscreen, computer-automated and computer-
synchronized projection systems, the Theatergraph apparatus was relatively simple
(figure 4.8). The system consisted of precise control of light and image through the use
of four projectors (two front film and one slide and one slide from the rear) and had two

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screens: one of a gray, scrim-like gauze that covered the entire opening of the front pro-
scenium and was used for both slide and film projection, and another that was poised at
an angle upstage and could frontally be projected on from the stage-right wing. Combined
with sophisticated lighting techniques that were used in tandem with the projected
images, Burian and Kouril could literally make their actors appear and disappear into the
foreground and background surfaces, surrounding and immersing them in an expressive
choreography of light and image.
Debuting in Prague in a 1936 production of the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s
notorious 1896 Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), the Theatergraph employed projec-
tions not for their Piscatorian didacticism or as information to set the scene, but to gener-
ate an expressive landscape of textures—an environment that would, at times, make the
performers indistinguishable from the projected light and surfaces catching and holding
it. Other productions that made use of the Theatergraph (Eugene Onegin in 1937 and
Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther in 1938) explored different spatial configurations
between performer and image, ranging from placing actors before the front screen to
dividing up the screen into a landscape upon which multiple projections were
displayed.
More important was the way in which Burian and Kouril imagined the relationship
of the screen to the performers. “Alongside the theatrical research work of Piscator and
Traugott Müller,” wrote the theater design historian Denis Bablet, “the experiments of
Burian and Kouril helped pave the way to new theatrical forms in which the projection
screen and colors no longer characterized stage design. These came to be replaced by
architectural structures, light, and projected images. A new civilization of audiovisual
communication was born” (J. Burian 1975, 154).
Projection, as Bablet later stated about Burian’s work, would no longer occupy a central
point of focus, as a billboard, but would rather expand “like light across the multiple
surfaces.” In effect, what Burian attempted to accomplish already foresaw late-twentieth-
century and twenty-first-century holographic-inspired visions of floating images on water
vapor or highly compressed air in the need to transcend the rigid frame of the projection
screen entirely, moving from Piscator’s use of it as a surface prop positioned besides or
behind the performers and instead toward the screen’s dissolution in a total environment
of lighting-ensconced media.
In contextual terms, projection for Burian was used sparingly in order to highlight
key dramatic moments and in this sense, it served a dramaturgical rather than a purely
decorative function. Projection was what Czech theater historian Jarka Burian called “a
dramatic supplement” (1975, 31), one used to transmit another level of emotional context
outside of but inspired by the text being staged. Projection media could act as a
memory device for the viewer, recalling previous scenes as well as a technique to reveal
the underlying thoughts of a character (much as Robert Edmond Jones had imagined
it) or as a direct ersatz to live performers. In other words, the content of Burian’s

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light-enabled images was not separable from their embedment into a total live perfor-
mance reality.

Czech Cine-Scenography II: Svoboda-Radok

Even to this day, the most advanced use of projection in the early post–World War II
period also emanated from Czechoslovakia, an unsurprising fact, given the enormous
influence of E. F. Burian and other scenographers on a subsequent generation of Czech
scenic designers. Many of these experiments were indeed not just throwing images on the
stage but were instead elaborately conceived visual machineries. The most well-known
were the pioneering Laterna Magika projects of Josef Svoboda and the Czech director
Alfred Radok in the late 1950s.
As previously seen in chapter 2, Svoboda’s interest in new technologies to reinvent
scenography carried over from materials and lighting and into televisual and large-scale
projected media. Originally developed by Svoboda and Radok (who—not incidentally—
had been an assistant to E. F. Burian in the late 1930s) for the Czechoslovak pavilion at
the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, the Laterna Magika was by far the most internationally
successful Czech contribution to the increasing interest in technologies of projection in
the live performing arts arising in the 1950s and 1960s.
Deriving its name from Athanasius Kircher’s early device, Laterna Magika was a techni-
cally complex form constituted by numerous mobile projection surfaces in combination
with live performers that, according to Svoboda and Radok, attempted to create what the
artists described as a polyphonic theater. “We would articulate the relations between actions
on a screen and on the stage as neither mechanical nor illusionary, neither illustrational
filmed projections (à la Piscator) nor a naturalistic illusion of reality. Film would remain
film and the stage the stage; we would simply exploit the manner in which we joined the
actions on stage with those on the screen” (Svoboda 1993, 110). A merge between theater,
film, dance, and media exhibition, the early success of Laterna Magicka at Brussels in 1958
helped carve the way for hybrid-media events to take their place among the pantheon of
prestigious yet less technically sophisticated exhibits at high-profile venues such as world
expositions as well as in theaters and opera houses accustomed to more traditional perfor-
mance forms.
Like Burian’s work, that of Svoboda and Radok specifically exploited newly developing
technologies available at the time, including motorized, diaphragmatic curtains (to change
the size and shape of the projection surfaces); treadmills, for mechanically moving the
performers in rhythmic relation to the projected images; anamorphic lenses, for projection
onto cinemascope screens for frontal, wide-angle use; multichannel stereo sound; and the
mechanical ability to rapidly position a series of screens with highly reflective surfaces in
almost any conceivable geometric configuration. The first version in Brussels in 1958
featured a synchronized setup of three film and two slide projectors (projecting 12.7 cm

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slides) along with the ability to tilt one projector off its axis in order to deflect its beam
to the moving screens.36 Despite this overly complex sounding apparatus, Svoboda and
Radok’s artistic goal was a seamless aggregation between live and filmed action; a “simul-
taneity, a synthesis and fusion of actors and projection,” in which one depended on the
other for its life and meaning (J. Burian 1971, 83).
In contrast to E. F. Burian’s application of the Theatergraph as a scenographic instru-
ment for staging traditional theater texts, the technological idiosyncrasies of the Laterna
Magika demanded a wholly new kind of dramaturgical and perfomative form. If Laterna
Magika thus had to devise scenarios that made dramatic sense in which actors and projec-
tions could interact with each other, then any shred of theatrical realism or traditionally
constructed narrative was to be eschewed in favor of more formally stylistic devices,
such as a detailed exploration of rhythm and degrees of motion between screen and
the stage.
For example, a 1959 Laterna Magicka program entitled “rhythms” was a detailed
examination of different rhythmic theories, utilizing film footage from industry (machines),
sports, and dance and featuring a array of live dance performances ranging from ballet to
modern and gymnastic exercises. In later years, the system, under Svoboda and Radok
as well as others, also tried to explore operatic scenarios (an adaptation of Tales of Hoffmann
in 1962) and fairy tales (Prague Carnival from 1973 and The Lost Fairy Tale from 1977).
The influence of the still-running Laterna Magika’s “search for an expressive stage
embodiment for film” (Svoboda 1993, 115) is not to be underestimated. Its advanced
exploration of technologically enhanced form coupled with non-narrative experience acted
as a subtle if not pointed political statement in the aesthetically stifling, post-Stalin
atmosphere of socialist realism. The project’s wide international popularity and exposure
also provided catalysts for other later forms of similarly media saturated, location-based
entertainment, such as the Disney and Epcot theme parks. In recognition of its influence,
Laterna Magicka eventually moved to its own specially equipped space under the auspices
of the Czech National Theater in 1973 and held long-term residencies in locations as
diverse as Canada, France, the USSR, Belgium, and the United States during the 1970s
and 1980s.
Despite the fact that Svoboda most likely viewed the Laterna Magicka as an extended
laboratory for researching the relationship between the live and the filmic and the pro-
jected and the architectonic, the system’s commercial appeal, technical complexity, and
economic demands constrained it to its initial form as an entertainment revue. Like so
many similar technically dependent performance forms in the earlier twentieth century,
the infrastructure demands of Laterna Magicka prevented it from becoming a flexibly
deployable system outside of its own context. As Svoboda reported to his biographer Jarka
Burian, however, there was a more fundamental problem with the system’s form, con-
strained as it was by the technology of the day.

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 The integration of actors and filmed images (many times of the actors themselves) was
even made more difficult in that the film segments had to be planned and shot months
in advance, leaving little room for adjustments in rehearsal. The dependence on a medium
that could not easily be changed therefore essentially froze the very spontaneity inherent
in the form of live performance. Perhaps for this reason, in the mid 1960s, Svoboda himself
began to explore the possibility of Laterna Magika techniques using newly developing
televisual technologies in performance, starting with the previously discussed Intolleranza
and followed up by a 1968 Munich production of Carl Orff’s opera Prometheus, which
employed live video feeds projected onto a monumental angled screen surface that also
served as a scenic element. Such televisual technologies also resurfaced in Laterna Magika
productions in the 1980s. Although Svoboda and Radok continued to work periodically
on the project, Svoboda took its basic form and applied it to other stage contexts, includ-
ing straight drama, opera, and spin-off installation/exhibition projects such as the equally
famous Polykran and Diapolyekran setups for Expo ’67 in Montréal and Expo ’70 in Osaka,
which will be discussed shortly.

Projection in “The New Theater”: 1960s

While the American theater stage fixated upon Broadway spectacles of the 1950s or
kitchen-sink realism of writers such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (who ironi-
cally had described the use of slides in an earlier version of his play The Glass Menagerie),
the plastic arts were being shaken up by evolving counter-cultural artistic movements
such as Action Painting, Happenings, Earth, and Environmental Art hand in hand with
the politically charged climate of the 1960s. Dancers, experimental musicians, writers,
visual artists, and adventuresome theater/performance artists began to rediscover the
techniques that Piscator, the Dadaists, and now the Czechs had already brought or were
bringing to a level of dramaturgical and technical sophistication decades earlier.
In a 1966 Tulane Drama Review article entitled “The Uses of Film in the New Theater,”
editor and artist Michael Kirby acknowledged the debt to earlier pioneers like Piscator
and the Bauhaus but also described at length the experiments of a new generation of
artists who were simultaneously moving away from both film and traditional theater.
Kirby’s focus centered mainly on noted visual artists employing projected media in per-
formance such as Allan Kaprow, John Cage, visual artist Milton Cohen, the experimental
music collective the ONCE Group, visual artist Red Grooms, Dadaist Al Hansen, Robert
Blossom’s Filmstage, sculptor Jim Davis, and in particular, sculptor Robert Whitman
(Kirby 1965, 50–53).
Sculptor Allan Kaprow’s Happening—which was defined as a “pan-artistic phenomena”
in which the borders between art forms “would cross each other’s paths at various and
unexpected places”—is centrally acknowledged as a free-form and unrehearsed event.
Kaprow’s initial 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which took place at the Reuben Gallery in 1959
and involved the “participation” of six “performers” and seventy-five audience members,

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however, was a tightly pre-scripted sequence of actions; a “program” featuring slide
projections on the gallery walls under the clear authorial control of Kaprow himself
(Kaprow 1995, 219).
Around the same period, visual/sonic artist Milton Cohen’s intermedia Space Theater,
based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, explored filmic constructions in live performance through
a specially designed assembly of prisms and mirrors attached to a flywheel that could be
rotated in space and receive a barrage of images directed from slide and film projection
systems. Cohen wished to “precipitate a seeing through the ears and a hearing through
the eyes . . . to exploit contemporary technological means to broaden mystery and subvert
the machine” (James 1987, 363).
Another central figure working with projection during the 1960s was the American
mixed-media and performance artist Carolee Schneemann. Trained as a painter and associ-
ated at first with the Fluxus movement, Schneemann’s “kinetic theater” integrated the
formal techniques of the happening with her own interest in the performing body. In
projects such as Night Crawlers (Montréal Expo ’67), Ilinois Central (1968), and Snows
(1970), among many others, Schneemann tirelessly examined the dynamics between
spectators and event, not only working with film (both for its formal aspects as well as
its ability to change the shape and dimensions of a physical environment) but also with
the human body itself as a screen and surface within the performance—a technique that
would soon be appropriated by countless other artists.
In her Montréal Expo ’67 performance Night Crawlers, for example, Schneemann and
an onstage partner engaged in a series of tasks, including the removal of foam rubber
stuffed inside a Volkswagen in front of a film depicting horrors from the Vietnam War.
Later, during the performance and surrounded by projections and sound, the audience
physically moved into the center of the performance area, where they were invited to tear
down elements of the scenery, including the projection surfaces, thus enforcing a more
direct interaction between the spectator and the screen.
During the same period, the performance experiments of sculptor Robert Whitman
also expanded and challenged the boundaries between live action and projected media.
Originally trained as a sculptor, Whitman’s installation-performance events toyed with
the line between real performance and its filmic, projected representation, one of the
central avant-garde tropes of the 1960s that would become an essential element of experi-
mental performance’s technological-dramaturgical toolbox. Whitman was part of the
group of artists working in the happening scene with Allan Kaprow; his earlier “Cinema
Work” pieces such as Shower, Window, and Bathroom (1963–1964) integrated projection
technology and live performance elements with static sculpture in the attempt to animate
quotidian objects and transform them. Shower (1964), for example, featured a real shower
stall with working water, upon which was projected a 16 mm film loop of a nude per-
former showering. The 1960 piece American Moon placed the spectators into long tunnels
that also acted as both exterior and interior projection landscapes.

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 Working within gritty, alternative, artist-run galleries and lofts in New York City,
Whitman soon devised a series of live theater works that continued his exploration of live
and played back procedures. The most well-known of these projects, Prune Flat (1965),
which was first shown in the Expanded Cinema festival at experimental filmmaker Jonas
Mekas’s Film-Makers Cinematheque and later off Broadway, was designed for a more
conventional theatrical proscenium setting, and featured three female performers in white
costumes, whose own images were projected onto both performers as well as onto a white
screen that hung behind them. Reconstructed for performance in 2004 at the DIA Center
in New York City, Prune Flat was an early but advanced example of the kind of interplay
between live space and image that would take hold in the coming decades with the
advancement of media technology. Although Whitman labeled his performance projects
“theater works,” they clearly departed from narrative drama as such, instead attempting
to harness multiple media in the service of events that Whitman called “non-verbal
theater, using a vocabulary of space, rhythm, scale, and formal plastic elements that com-
municate the image without words. The work of doing the piece is the work of revealing
the image.”37
Along with dozens of other experimental artists and filmmakers, the work of Cohen,
Schneemann, and Whitman was also profiled in media theorist Gene Youngblood’s
Expanded Cinema (1970), another seminal text of the period, which detailed the fomenting
movement between projection and performance. Like Michael Kirby’s descriptions of the
new theater of media in the Tulane Drama Review, Youngblood’s notions of intermedia
theater and expanded cinema also tried to capture the hybrid nature of integrating film into
physical environments involving live performers. Drawing from both cinema and theater,
intermedia theater was, in the final analysis, neither genre. “Intermedia Theater is not a
‘play’ or a ‘movie’; and although it contains elements of both, even those elements are not
representative of the respective traditional genres” (Youngblood 1970, 365). For Young-
blood, new experiments with cinematic media and performance guaranteed that there
would no longer be any pure form of these genres, but only hybrids, and that future
artistic forms lay in such mixing.
The kinds of intermedia performances that Youngblood and Kirby described rapidly
evolved in the international alternative performance scenes and suddenly began to find
much wider and popular acceptance at the tail end of the 1970s. In the popularization of
projected media in live performance, for instance, arguably no one had a more widespread
impact than artist/musician Laurie Anderson. Armed with a musical upbringing and a
sculpture MFA from Columbia, Anderson gained recognition for her solo works in the
1970s, performing in the burgeoning downtown New York performance art scene.
Anderson’s mammoth United States I–IV, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music (BAM) in 1983, was a watershed event, bringing projected media out of
downtown lofts and into high-profile international performance venues. Spanning both
the upper echelons of both high (BAM) and popular (Warner Bros. records) culture, United

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Figure 4.9 Laurie Anderson. United States, 1983. Courtesy Laurie Anderson/Canal Street Productions.

States was a sprawling four-section collage, operatic in scope, told over eight hours. With
wall-to-wall music by Anderson (seventy-eight songs), United States functioned as an
almost paradoxical anthem to the foibles and seductions of technologically augmented
society and featured a continual moving backdrop of projected slides, film, and video
behind the musicians as well as on objects and the performers themselves (figure 4.9).
In an almost ironically retro turn, although many of the images utilized by Anderson
appeared to have a 1980s techno sheen to them (clocks, charts, numbers, and texts),
perhaps unknowingly, they also invoked the same kind of visual displays from earlier uses
of screen-based projection. Hailed at the time by critics who marveled at the work’s visu-
ally formal innovations, the play between two-dimensional human performers and flat,
one-dimensional projections had already been heavily explored in the previous seventy
years. What United States I–IV did do, however, was begin to bring media techniques
from performance practice into the wider realms of popular culture, simultaneously solidi-
fying and historicizing the form.
Anderson’s subsequent forays into visual media theater, such as Home of the Brave (a
live concert film from 1983), the Nerve Bible tour (1995), and the even larger-scale Songs
and Stories from Moby Dick (1999) upped the technical ante in terms of projection technolo-
gies. Freely borrowing from the visual arts, her 1995 Stories from the Nerve Bible tour

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blended elements of art gallery video installation with rock concert–scale projection envi-
ronments, featuring Anderson backed by a field of rear screens, a stage of vertically aligned
television monitors downstage, and a series of hanging projection surfaces in the form of
a cube and a sphere, seemingly inspired by video artist Tony Oursler’s work with the
projection of faces onto spherical geometries and the video matrix installations of
Gary Hill. Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick, did
not break much aesthetic ground in terms of media deployment but continued the same
use of projections as earlier works, albeit with increased technical sophistication and
coordination.
While Anderson was one of a handful of major forces in the media-savvy New York
avant-garde performance world to explore media theater on a large scale, the work of other
well-known experimental theater artists like Robert Wilson (with the 3D-inspired Mon-
sters of Grace) and Richard Foreman that had already created an international stir in the
1970s, spurned the use of projected images until the end of the 1990s.38 In 2006, for
example, after many years of exploring how to transform performance space by means of
low-tech devices, Foreman began a series of experimental “film/performance” projects in
which he began to more fundamentally explore the relationship between what he called
“a self-contained, full-length film” in relationship to a live orchestrated performance
taking place in front of the film. His first experiment, entitled Zomboid!, and the 2007
follow-up Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! attempted to break new
ground not only in using film to create a series of tableaux vivant that performers could
play “within” but also to generate a theatrical score that acted as a mechanism to drive
and shift the live performance.39

Projection as Design
The increasingly popularity of projection made it no longer sacrosanct to the avant garde
but also open to Broadway and the staid American regional theater scenes in the mid
1980s, becoming so commonplace that the new term projection designer was coined.40
Exploring new notions such as “live movies” (Malone and White 2006) or visual libretti
(Jerome Serlin), projection designers mainly based in the United States such as John
Boesche, Wendall Harrington, Jerome Sirlin, Kirby Malone, Jan Hartley, Laurie Olinder,
and others began to combine slide projection and film with computer-controlled automa-
tion to create enormous projected environments.
Exploiting cutting-edge projection technology—such as high-lumen PANI projectors
and new show control technologies that enabled the high-speed dissolving and fading of
slides such that static images would appear to be in motion—projected scenery supple-
mented and heightened physically-constructed stage scenographies, but in many cases
literally came to replace the set because of cost factors (Istel 1995). The aesthetic effect
that the acceptance of projection design as a craft and discipline in and of itself had on
performance was, in many ways, similar to the earlier and gradual acceptance of other

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“ephemeral media” such as light and sound.41 Like mechanically driven scenography, the
dynamic layering of static and moving images on surfaces and exploitation of optical
perceptual phenomena like persistence of vision could serve equally well in constructing
the visual illusion of a total environment.
Similar to Burian and Svoboda’s earlier research and creation, projection design tech-
niques had the effect of removing the four-by-three aspect ratio of the screen as a discrete
and separate element upon which media was projected (as the film screen in Meyerhold’s
and Piscator’s productions suggested) and instead uniting image and performer into a
mediated landscape—what projection designer John Boesche labeled “a really interesting
container for the actors to stew in” (Mauro 2003).
Using layers of hung scrim and hidden architectural features such as steps and plat-
forms, designer Jerome Serlin’s early work with director George Coates [New Formalisms,
chapter 2] gave the appearance that performers were floating in the air or occupying
the windows of projected buildings as they moved behind and inside Serlin’s large-scale
projected images. Serlin also designed a full projection-only environment for Philip Glass’s
and playwright David Henry Hwang’s 1988 chamber opera 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof,
the first of many film-driven spectacles that would feature live soundtracks with projected
images and a trend that started with Glass’s soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi in 1982.
By the 1990s, projection-driven and/or -augmented scenography reached a similar level
of ubiquity as the use of video and the television monitor in international experimental
performance contexts, resulting in companies in Europe, Canada, the United States, South
America, Asia, and Australia basing entire productions around such techniques, eager to
reexploit the precedents of earlier history as well as new formal possibilities.42
Quickly glancing at the diverse groups of artists and companies active in the interna-
tional limelight in the last two decades of the twentieth century, such as the United
Kindom–based Station House Opera, Forced Entertainment and the film director Peter
Greenaway, Quebec’s Robert Lepage and Carbone 14, Japan’s Dumb Type, France’s
Jacques Polieri, Spain’s La Fura Dels Baus, the USA’s Ridge Theater, Nightfire, Gertrude
Stein Repertory Theater, Mark Reaney’s iEVR, Impossible Theater, Theater X, Ping
Chong, George Coates Performance Works, The Builders Association, Three Legged Dog,
Temporary Distortion and Paul Kaiser/Shelly Eshkar, Italy’s Falso Movimento, Societas
Raffaello Sanzio and La Gaia Scienzia, and dozens of others whose work heavily relied on
projection-based technology immediately gives us a sense of the scale and impact that
contemporary image media had on the worldwide performance scene.
Slide-based technologies had somewhat of a popular resurgence in the projection design
landscape of the 1980s as well, not in the least due to their relatively lower cost and higher
resolution than large-scale video projection at the time, but these too were soon to be
technologically superseded with video and PC-based digital editing systems that could
quickly streamline the entire image-making production process. Although film continued
to be used, video’s advantage as a lower-cost alternative, its ability to be synchronized,

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and, most important, its real-time possibilities was quickly taken advantage of, particu-
larly as higher-resolution and higher-contrast LCD, DLP (digital light processing) and
DLA (digital light array) projectors emerged.
Based on these higher-end projection technologies, new playback media ranging from
DV (digital video) to DVD and HD coupled with the possibilities of live recording,
editing, and mixing with real-time video poured directly out of the computer’s processor;
the screen as a discrete, standalone scenic element made a strong comeback in live per-
formance work created by theater makers, choreographers, composers, visual and media
artists, opera directors, and even architects during the last decade of the twentieth
century.
Yet, was this supposed comeback of the screen premeditated by the possibilities as well
as difficulties inherent in the medium of display technologies? In other words, the ability
of video projection to deliver higher-resolution images continually encountered the diffi-
culty of projecting an image (as multiple artists attempted to do) that was not based on
the aspect ratio of a television or computer screen. Technically, if the nature of slides
involved the use of photographed images that could be shot, colored, and layered such
that the edges could vanish and the image could envelop space without a distinguishing
frame, the sheer rectangularity of video projection acted to reinforce both the flatness of
the video image and its deliberate distinction from human performers.

Stage as Screen
At times, it appears that some artists set out specifically to exploit the inherent tension
between the quasi-cinematic-televisual aspect ratio of the frame within a frame—the
screen set within the larger frame of the stage proscenium—and its ability to be greater
in scale, scope, and resolution than human performers. Perhaps no better example can be
given of such screen-driven techne being exercised to its nth potential than the case of video
artist Bill Viola’s espace scénique for a 2006 production of Wagner’s epic opera Tristan and
Isolde at the Paris Opera de Bastille.
Working with high-lumen video projectors supplied by the display corporation Barco
and shooting in 35 mm film that was transferred to HD video, Viola succeeded in creating
what may have been the largest video projections ever to the grace the stage of an opera
house. Projected onto a 6 m s 11 m suspended screen upstage, Viola’s extraordinarily
high-resolution projections of human actors set adrift in landscapes of fire, water, forests,
oceans, and deserts consciously called up associations and tensions between different eras
of image technology: the painterly intricacies of Renaissance art dueling with the
16 : 9 aspect ratios and the extreme pixel saturation of HD video. Viola’s video space
functioned not only as a parallel and poetically associative narrative to the minimally
staged production, which more often than not receded into the background, but in
many ways, as a cinematic replacement for the physically realized production itself, with
the singers and orchestra arrayed on stage and in the house to provide expert musical

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accompaniment and tableux vivant stillness for the immense movement and scale of
human performers on the glowing HD backdrop.43
Viola’s work for Tristan demonstrated both the potential and problems of utilizing
extremely high definition projection, but it certainly was not the only project that aspired
to bring up-to-the-minute digital imagining technologies into a live performance context.
During the same period of time in which much performance work depended on projected
imagery as a key scenic element, artists deployed live and large video to demonstrate
associations and divergences between human performers and their filmically reproduced
and manipulated images, strategies that, as we have seen, were already at work in earlier
video art practices. Artists also took advantage of the extraordinary capability of live
digital video to manipulate time on a scale that went beyond the small form factor of the
monitor. By controlling the flow of temporality in the image sequence at the precision of
milliseconds, or slowing down, speeding up, or time-delaying the live combined with the
prerecorded, creators could play with extreme time distortion, on the screen and in the
public’s experience, on a massive scale.
Likewise, the incorporation of technologies of the cinema into the live theater experi-
ence in the 1920s in order to capture audiences whose perception had rapidly been trans-
formed was mimicked by digital technologies, which provided live performance the
opportunity to incorporate the techniques of digitally augmented fin de siècle blockbuster
cinema such as modeling, rotoscoping, green-screening and compositing, morphing, and
other processes.
These technical possibilities allowed live action to fuse seamlessly with computation-
ally generated environments on the screen as well as screens alight with CGI (Computer
Graphic Image) effects to overflow into physical performance spaces. A sampling of late
twentieth century performance work that played with such technologies not only reveals
the extent to which hybrids between live video, the computationally manipulated, and
the CGI image had been thoroughly integrated into contemporary performance practices,
but also demonstrates how we have come to be more than merely reliant on such image
technologies to make performance appear to follow the current zeitgeist—and how such
technologies have subsumed us.
Two New York–based companies, the Big Art Group, run by director Caden Manson
and the collective The Builders Association, help exemplify the tendencies and tensions
of the screen in performance of the twenty-first century. Formed in 1998, Manson’s Big
Art Group created what the director called real-time film, “a conceptual model collapsing
performance, television, and movies using live action and video. It examines the use of
image in entertainment, the experience of the image versus its manufacture, and the split
between surface and interior” (Caden Manson/Big Art Group 2001). Big Art’s phalanx of
real-time film pieces, Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2003), House of No More (2004), Dead Set
(2006), and Cinema Fury (2007–2008), all conspicuously used a syncretic, simultaneous
mix of live action on stage and live video on screen, while taking on such emblematic

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Figure 4.10 Big Art Group. House of No More, 2005. Photo © Caden Manson.

genres of trash culture such as slasher B-movies, soap operas, crime thrillers, and reality
TV.
In earlier works like Shelf Life and Flicker, the stage was composed of three large,
shoulder-high projection screens that visually masked and cut off the performers’ bodies,
while three fixed video cameras manipulated by the actors delivered a stream of live images
to the screens, constantly exposing the simulacrum of the event and rendering live action
into blasts of image and sound bites. Big Art’s later works, such as House of No More,
however, moved into the postproduction territory of Hollywood mechanics by utilizing
green-screen technology to composite the performers in real time into filmic settings
(figure 4.10). In a green-screen box that acted as a film set, Big Art’s live and camera-
mediated performers jumped between settings and characters at breakneck speed, while
spinning out an elaborate audiovisual narrative of mediated deception.
The other group that self-consciously and at times ostentatiously worked with large-
scale projection technology was the cross-media theater company the Builders Association,
formed in 1993 by former Wooster Group dramaturge Marianne Weems, which sought
to fuse classic texts with the expressive tendencies of television, film, and architecture in
order to “extend the boundaries of theater.” In contrast to Big Art Group’s unabashed,
frenetic appropriation of technology meeting popular trash culture, the Builders Associa-

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tion’s work searched through the underlying mechanisms of surveillance and power
structures enabled by digitally augmented super-modernity.
In a series of productions such as Jump Cut/The Last Hour (1996), Jet Lag (1998),
Alladeen (2002), SuperVision (2005), and Continuous Cities (2008), the company used
projected images to explore the age-old media questions of fiction and reality, real and
simulacra, and live and reproduced. Inspired by a passage from philosopher and architect
Paul Virilio concerning electronic media’s collapsing of time and space, the group’s
1998 production Jet Lag, conceived and executed in collaboration with Diller Scofidio
[Architecture Machines, chapter 2], explored two disjointed narratives: the story of British
sailor Donald Crowhurst, who, having failed in his mission to sail around the globe,
eventually simulated his journey with fake news reports, and that of Sarah Krasner, an
American grandmother who flew 167 transatlantic flights in the space of six months to
protect her grandson from the child’s father and his psychiatrist and subsequently died
of jet lag.
With actor Jeff Webster in front of a continually rocking screen upon which were
projected horizon-line ocean images in part 1 and animated sequences fusing CGI jet
plane interiors and with landscapes of “nonplaces” (Augé 1995) such as the Brussels airport
in part 2, Jet Lag’s main visual trope featured live performers on stage, arranged in minimal
settings evoking an airport control tower, sitting before projected images of themselves
and traipsing a uneasy relation between electronic seduction and blank numbness.
SuperVision (2006), done in collaboration with the digital architecture studio dBox,
explored the disconnection of electronically mediated life further, this time examining
identity fraud in a post-9/11 age of computer-enabled data mining in a by now almost
clichéd mise-en-scène of actors positioned behind computers onstage while being simul-
cast live into a projected field of information architecture systems, flowcharts, Cartesian
grids, data graphics, and live feeds.
In explicit contrast to Viola’s humanism, in which the screen acted as digital canvas
for the representation of extreme passions of human existence, the screens in Big Art
Group and the Builders Association consciously severed the human body from its position
in real time and space. Whereas Big Art literally hid the performer behind the screen,
which functioned both as subterfuge and mirror (another trope from video art history) for
human images cut up and enhanced by the computer, the Builders Association gradually
reduced the screen to no more than a giant display surface upon which the human visage
was only meant as a backdrop for the ambient overlaying of data.
The Builders Association’s overall mise-en-scène suggested that perhaps the final
destiny of the screen in performances about technology was that of the simulacra of simu-
lacras; a state in which, as Friedrich Kittler once reminded us, “numbers and figures
become the key to all creatures” and the reproduced and or/simulated human visage
is transformed into a flurry of meaningless, disembodied pixels and numbers (Kittler
1999, 19).

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 Having become a standard element of the theatrical technological toolbox, the screen
in twenty-first-century performance practice is now marked by digital media’s imprint
where the position of the human performer in relation to it is increasingly questioned.
Who performs and where should our media saturated and accelerated gaze fall? Does the
performer gradually become dematerialized by the electronic fog of the increasingly real-
istic digital image, having become a corpus delicti for photons and pixels, or have the
architectonics of the projected image sufficiently overwhelmed the human body so that
the screen itself now becomes the new site and body of performance?

The Performative Screen

The stage consists only of four massive (3 m s 4 m) screens, turned on their sides in por-
trait perspective. With the stage reduced to a flat projection surface, scaling upwards in
height but not in depth, the traditional spatial demarcation between spectators and stage
becomes dictated only by the proximity of the viewers’ eyes and bodies to the expected
audiovisual onslaught, which appears inevitable. Lasting approximately forty-five minutes,
the performance is a study in extreme reduction of sensory perspective, human visage,
spatial depth, and time.
At first sight, the screens are occupied by projections of the jittering face of the Japanese
performance artist Akemi Takeya, who appears to be stuck in the visual equivalent of a
skipping record. As the performance gets underway, however, the jittering turns to spas-
modic motion (figure 4.11). Scratching, fragmenting, granulating, and resampling the
images in a breathtaking display of media disintegration, the initial projected representa-
tion of the image and sound of the human visage is continually reformulated anew in real
time. It is a virtual opera with no scenography and no singer per se; the only music pro-
vided is the vocalization of screams on the originally shot footage, now subjected to
extreme electronic modulation, distortion, and transformation.
Describing an experience that he ascribed to the works of painter Francis Bacon, Gilles
Deleuze stated that “as a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the paint-
ing”; the affect of image and sound merging into one through machine manipulation
generates “the action of forces upon the body” (Deleuze 2005, 40). In a double transfor-
mation, both in replacing the human form of the actor that occupied the space in front
of the screen onto the screen itself and the human performing in front of the camera, the
reassembled, projected body that reemerges in the performance reaches its machine-age
apotheosis.
Its epileptic contractions no longer occur in the physical body but in the projected
Körper (body) whose genesis relies on the high-powered light issuing from the four syn-
chronized projectors and tape decks, where phase drifting enables such out-of-sync spasms
to take place. At times, the almost stroboscopic motion of the image and the acoustic
intensity of the auditory environment envelop the spectator’s body with hurricane-like

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Figure 4.11 Granular Synthesis/Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich. Motion Control Modell 5 (1994–
1996). Photo Bruno Klomfar and Gebhard Sengmüller.

force, transferring the flickering, pulsing, interlaced image into the body as an attack on
the nervous system.
The event described previously, a live performance from the former Viennese-based
partnership Granular Synthesis entitled Motion Control Modell 5, exemplified an entire
genre of screen-centric live performance that arose in the 1990s. Going by various names
such as live cinema, performance cinema, synthetic cinema and audiovisual (a/v) perfor-
mance, the genre that emerged owed its genesis to the early and later days of experimental
cinema, the underground energy of the club and techno scenes where Mensch-Maschine
relationships were long in practice, as well as to a particular twentieth-century obsession:
the endless quest for synthesis between the auditory and the ocular.
In what composer and film critic Michel Chion labeled synchresis, the “forging between
something one sees and something one hears . . . a mental fusion between a sound and a
visual when these occur at exactly the same time,” sound and image became unified, the
dazzling results thrown onto the screen and distributed through loudspeakers (Chion
1994, xvii–5).
Chion refers to techniques between the synchronization of sound and image in film
sound design, but his description could equally be applied to the diverse set of practices
from artists and designers who generated the kinds of audiovisual performance events that
swept onto the screens and walls of clubs, media festivals, alternative gallery spaces, and

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museums in the 1990s. These performances, like Granular Synthesis’s described earlier,
could have been conjured up only from instruments of postindustrial technology: the von
Neumann architecture (CPU and Memory), the CRT, the LCD, and computer code, which
more often than not resembled numerical babble rather than language. It seems, in fact,
that in Denis Bablet’s description of E. F. Burian’s revolutionary Theatergraph (which we
encountered exploring the architectonic projected image in the last section) that the
replacement of the projected image as a representation “by architectural structures and
light” guaranteeing “a new civilization of audiovisual communication” had finally arrived
(Bablet 1975, 154).
In opposition to Burian’s Theatergraph, which still depended on a relationship between
performer and projected surface, the various genres of audiovisual performance replaced
the actor as the center of the world. Lost amid the tangle of machines, the human per-
former’s role was usurped and transformed by the artist-technician for whom performance
was a process of trackpad or mouse manipulation—the tweaking of infinite banks of
parameters designed to filter, sample, blur, cloud, vibrate, shatter, saturate, and granulate
image and sound.
Such audiovisual performances scrambled the locus of who or what was performing,
tipping the balance of concentration to the screen as the center of attention, while the
manipulators of mice and keyboards, mixers and outboard effects boxes effectively stood
in the background. As the Bauhaus theater design student Heinz Loew with his mechani-
cal stage environment suggested [Total Theaters of the Bauhaus, chapter 1], the perform-
ers of the future would be the technicians who would operate the technical apparatus of
performance: “It would seem that a task for the future would be to develop a technical
personnel as important as the actors, one whose job it would be to bring this apparatus
into view in its peculiar and novel beauty, undisguised and as an end in itself” (Gropius
1961, 84).

Expanded Cinema: The Screen as Environment

Analog real-time collage, and assembly and manipulation of images begun in the early
days of cinema, along with later developments in video art, were two of the key artistic
impulses for the rise of the expanded cinema movement in the 1960s: a movement that
produced works not wholly cinema or wholly theater but that nonetheless demanded a
live audience. Denoting a host of different activities across different countries, expanded
cinema in general attempted to restore the original eventfulness and experimental atmo-
sphere that early cinema had possessed before it became standardized by Hollywood-
driven narrative.
Partly seeded by the excitement around Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which included
different elements of projection on screens outside of a strict cinema context as well as
experimental film, expanded cinema involved artists as diverse as experimental filmmakers

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and performers such as Jonas Mekas, Anthony McCall, Michael Snow, Valie Export, Peter
Weibel, Stan Vanderbeek, Paul Sharits, and many others. Drawing its energy not only
from the political climate of the 1960s but expanding alternative cultural consciousness
as well, expanded cinema, according to the book of the same title by Gene Youngblood,
was defined “not as computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projec-
tions,” but rather as “life’s process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest
his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes” (1970, 41).
Pushing film and projected images into new environmental contexts, Youngblood’s
work became a state-of-the-art document that detailed the wide range of experimental
impulses stemming from artists in the 1960s. Among these was the experimental film-
maker Stan VanDerBeek, who encountered John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and the former
Bauhaus painter Josef Albers while studying at Black Mountain College in the 1930s and
is known today principally for his early development of computer-generated films with
computer scientist Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs in the 1960s.
Together with his numerous animated films and scenery for the early children’s inter-
active game show Winky Dink and You, VanDerBeek developed a multiprojection environ-
ment and consequent research program at his house in Stony Point in upstate New York
that he dubbed the Movie Drome. The Buckminster Fuller–influenced, dome-shaped space
proposed an environment where a hemispheric screen would replace the standard one-
dimensional flatness of film, enveloping visitors lying down on the floor with a total flow
of images—what the artist called the environment’s “visual velocity” (VanDerBeek [1966]
1970).
Removing the borders of the screen from the visitors’ visual field and thus, transform-
ing it into a quasi-architectural surround space was also a common theme in the work of
the anonymous collective/commune USCO (The US Company). Founded by the German-
Jewish Nazi refugee poet Gerd Stern, engineer Michael Callahan, and painter Steve Derkey
(Durkee) along with associates such as Jud Yakult, Stewart Brand, VanDerBeek, and
others, USCO eventually set up shop in an abandoned Garnerville, New York, church
(dubbed the “Psychedelic Tabernacle”) not far from VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome. USCO
gained notoriety in the 1960s through both their kinetic, psychedelic performances across
the United States, Europe, and Canada involving live, electronically programmed mon-
tages of light projection, strobes, slides, oscilloscopes, film, and audio and the close con-
nection and influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and impresario/producer John
Brockman.
In particular, it was Brockman, an investment banker, producer of the first New York
Expanded Cinema Festival in 1965 and later in the 1990s, an agent for many of the
so-called “digerati” (the digital elite), who was chiefly responsible for USCO’s involvement
in the creation of Murray the K’s “World.” An early high-tech, multilevel disco/multi-
media entertainment environment organized by Brockman and staged by USCO, and at
first, DJ Murray “the K” Kaufman in a Garden City, Long Island, airplane hanger (the

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take-off site of Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight), the World became a labora-
tory for consciousness-changing experiments with cutting-edge technologies.44 “The
World” was in fact, so successful as a multimedia event that it was eventually featured
on the front page of LIFE magazine on May 27, 1966 (Brockman n.d.).
Engineering exploration of the differences between the closed-ended structures of film
and theater, in which a performance would have a defined beginning and ending, and the
creation of temporally open-ended event environments, which one writer labeled “hyped
up rooms intended for psychiatric purposes” (Stern 2000), USCO successfully managed
to live an alternative, communal lifestyle while simultaneously performing in establish-
ment cultural and academic institutions such as MIT and the Whitney Museum. The
group, which disbanded after the 1960s, also acted as a one of a handful of cross-over
collectives between the alternative art world and the growing pop culture and music
scenes, where the fractured political climate of the 1960s gave way to utopian revolution
through new technologies bringing about new consciousness.
Live sound and image manipulation events of the kind advanced by artists like
Vanderbeek and USCO, however, were only part of a much more widespread embrace of
projection-based performances in an atmosphere pervaded by chemical substances, Eastern
mysticism, and media-soaked counterculture. Already, figures such as filmmaker Jordan
Belson and composer Henry Jacobs had explored audiovisual performance’s mystical and
sensory side through their influential series of multichannel, synthetic image-enhanced
“Vortex” concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco between 1957 and
1959.
Less than a decade later, kinetic and hallucinogenic events like USCO member
Jud Yalkut’s sculptural projection performance Dream Reel (1969), Jackie Cassen and
Rudi Stern’s kinetic light compositions, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground’s
Exploding Plastic Inevitable sensorium (1966), Jeffrey Shaw and Theo Botschuijver’s
expanded cinema performances such as Movie Movie (1967) that were constructed of
inflatable projection surfaces, Aldo Tambelini’s Black Gate Electro-Media Theater, and
filmmaker Ronald Nameth’s projection environment for John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s
1969 intermedia concert/performance HPSCHD would stand as key examples of projects
that exploited the ever-increasing interest in the live manipulation of image, sound, and
projection before such experimentation occurred in the larger echelons of popular
culture.
In particular, Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD could be seen as a prototypal and monu-
mental event in the history of live image/sound performance. Staged in May 1969
over the course of five hours in a massive assembly hall at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, the composition performance featured 7 live harpsichords, the
manipulation of 208 computer-generated tapes, 64 slide projectors using more than
6400 slides, 8 film projectors showing 40 movies onto a 340-degree circular screen,
several other massive rectangular screens hanging from the ceiling, and an audience

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of several thousand who freely wandered about during the indeterminately long
spectacle.45

Synchresis in the 1960s: The Performance of Sound and Image

Simultaneously, Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and Fillmore West in San
Francisco as well as the legendary Newport Jazz and Monterey Pop festivals became the
equivalent mass culture centers for a similarly themed exploration of expanded conscious-
ness through audiovisual means. Alongside the psychedelic music of artists and bands like
Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Muddy Waters, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Traffic,
Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band, and numerous others came the legendary spec-
tacles of light and projection that accompanied the music.
Created from combinations of 16 mm film, slides, DC motor–controlled color wheels,
and liquid dyes and oils floating on top of 3M overhead projectors by artists like Tony
Martin, the Brotherhood of Light, John Whitney, Jr., and Peter Wynne-Wilson, Joshua
Light Show, Joan Hills, and Mark Boyle, much of this psychedelic visual work was essen-
tially wallpaper for the bands involved. The performances that took place, however,
already involved the live manipulation of visual material in concert with the music such
that a kind of rhythmic and visual synesthesia might take place, no doubt aided and
amplified by hallucinogen-fueled audiences. Similarly, while their father John Whitney,
Sr., a pioneering computer animator, was working as an artist in residence at IBM, his
sons John Whitney, Jr., and Michael were already developing multiscreen projection
environments for the Grateful Dead (1966–1967) and the Monterey Pop festival, explor-
ing the idea of “performance films”: “rather than just one strictly composed film but
multi-images whose relationships could be improvised in real time. You would ‘play’ as
you felt” (Youngblood 1970, 229).

Moving Image Spaces

The most spectacular examples of the performative use of moving images within spatial
environments between 1950 and 1970 arose in the least “alternative” places: the World’s
Fairs of Brussels (1958), New York (1964), Montréal (1967), and Osaka (1970). Taking
place in environments that Michael Kirby described as being composed of “slide, overhead,
and opaque projectors being combined with film projectors of all kinds and sizes . . . and
multiple screens providing the audience with different viewing angles and simultaneous
presentation of images or 360-degree projection [which] forces the viewer to make per-
ceptual choices,” many screen-based works at world expositions inherently drew on earlier
precedents, like Abel Gance’s three-screen presentation of his epic Napoleon in Paris in
1927 as well as the rapid technical advances in audiovisual culture (Kirby 1966, 58).
Framed by the potential of the screen as an environment through which performances
could unfold in front of a live audience, the events designed by artists and designers such

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as the Eames brothers, Joseph Svoboda and Emil Radok, Francis Thompson, and IMAX
cofounder Roman Kroitor, among others, were highly complex and logistical operations
that either pushed state of the art technology to its limit or developed new systems. In
one case, for example, the array of new filmic-performance hybrids developed for the 1967
“Man and His World”—themed Montréal international exposition were far ahead of their
time in both formal and technical terms.
Known for their advanced utilization of projections integrated with live performers as
seen in chapter 1 and here, Czech theater designers such as Svoboda also developed new
largely non-narrative, screen-only performances without human actors geared toward the
mass global audiences that visited the Expo sites of Brussels, Montréal, and Osaka. First
created for the Czechoslovak pavilion in Brussels in 1958, Svoboda’s and collaborator Emil
Radok’s (brother to Laterna Magika co-inventor Alfred Radok) Polyekran (literally, “multi-
screen”) projection system involved the creation of a performance constructed only from
screens and images—according to Svoboda, a “pure projection form.”
As Svoboda’s answer to the immersive nature of widescreen film in the 1950s, Poly-
ekran’s eight carefully positioned and hung square and trapezoidal surfaces, whose suspen-
sion wires were hidden by black velvet masking, were designed to emphasize the screen
as screen: an empty surface in an empty space that during the performance (a ten-minute
promotional film for the Prague Musical Spring Festival), would come alive through pro-
jections appearing from eight slide and seven film projectors, synchronized through means
of electronic tape and an elaborate multichannel auditory environment.
Svoboda further developed this multiscreen direction in his complex Polyvision exhibits
at Expo ’67 in Montréal, which consisted of four short and entirely different audiovisual
projection performances that could be spatially navigated by the audience to form a total
experience. The first work, Symphony, designed by Svoboda himself, consisted of 35 mm
film and slides projected onto a series of fixed screens and rotating cubes and spheres that
could be moved in both horizontal and vertical directions, creating the illusion of images
suspended and revolving about their axes in space.
Other components of the Polyvision environment were projection spaces with over-
lapping and moving rectangular surfaces (The State of Textiles) and a film, but the most
spectacular of the performances was Radok’s Birth of the World, featuring Svoboda’s
Diapolyekran system. Working on an improvement to the original Polyekran, Svoboda
created a screen in relief: a 16 m s 7 m wall constructed of a mosaic of 112 cubes, each
capable of 0.5 to 1 meter of independently addressable forward and backward motion and
each installed with two automated 35 mm slide projectors (figure 4.12).46
Through relay control, each of the 224 slide projectors was able to flash through its more
than eighty-slide library at almost five times per second and could be individually
addressed. Controlled by an instruction-encoded tape and utilizing more than thirty
thousand slides in the ten-minute performance for an audience seated on the floor in front
of the screen, Svoboda’s and Radok’s show centered not only on the individual, rapid-fire,

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Figure 4.12 Josef Svoboda. Diapolyekran. Montréal Expo ’67. Photo Josef Svoboda. Courtesy of DILIA,
Prague.

high-resolution picture elements (i.e., pixels) that constituted the image mosaic, but also
in the mechanical performance of a screen apparatus that attempted to “disintegrate the
projection surface and to compose and estrange its relief profile in new ways” (Svoboda
1993, 106).
In addition to Svoboda’s work, other innovative cinematic performances at Expo ’67
included Canadian filmmaker Roman Kroitor’s massive multiscreen Labyrinth for the
Canadian pavilion, an early IMAX prototype that featured an environment where the
spectators could observe two colossal, 15-meter-tall projections from overhead balconies,
one vertical and another projected onto the floor. Canadian filmmaker Francis Thompson,

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who had won an Academy Award in the United States for his three-screen cinematic event
To Be Alive at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, returned with a six-screen film for the
C.P.R. Cominco pavilion entitled We Are Young, depicting teenage life through multiple
camera and screen perspectives. The Canadian pavilion also featured yet another large-scale
filmic event, Walt Disney Studios’ twenty-two-minute, Circle Vision 360-degree film
Canada 67, which wrapped the standing audience of 1500 in a circular configuration of
nine screens with images obtained from nine synchronized cameras—an event that was
first deployed as a permanent attraction at Disneyland in California in 1955.
Expo ’70 in Osaka and subsequent World’s Fairs would also serve as testing grounds
for further cinematic performance projects from Svoboda, Radok, Kroitor, and others.
Kroitor, for example, who cofounded IMAX with a commission from Fuji Film for a
pavilion, and Donald Brittain would go on to make the first IMAX film in Osaka in 1970:
the large-screen Tiger Child, which was shown to audience members who were carried
through the theater on a rotating turntable to view the film. Even as all of these projects
featured fixed media (i.e., film), the construction of large, specialized environments for
their display and the fact that audiences would gather to not only watch projections but
be immersed in an architectural spectacle/event provided precedents for much new media
artwork that merged multiscreen performances within exhibition contexts without human
performers in the coming decades.

The 1990s: Live Cinema, Performance Cinema, and Real-Time Video

What was aesthetically and conceptually radical about Svoboda’s and others’ elaborate
projection works throughout the postwar and distinctly analog period was the maturation
of screen-based performances that went beyond standard narrative cinema along with the
invention of technical instruments that enabled their realization. In the Polyekran, for
example, both technological machine and the resulting output of image and sound were
codependent upon each other. While these audiovisual apparatuses relied on the infra-
structures of theaters, festival halls, and exposition pavilions, a new breed of artist inter-
ested in the screen as performance instrument and site but working in a completely
different techno-socio-economic context than that of the 1960s started to appear in the
period after 1990.
Going by a long litany of names such as audiovisual performance, real-time video, live
cinema, performance cinema, and VJ culture, these multiple genres of screen-based per-
formance were the result of two particular strains of technocultural development: (1)
breakthroughs in digital computation, particularly the development of hardware and
software components for the capture, processing, and manipulation of image and sound,
and (2) the international rise of techno/club culture, which rapidly exploited such
technologies.
The most profound technological shift was the introduction and wide distribution of
digital-based systems for the creation and processing of images. Whereas less than a decade

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earlier the computational power required to manipulate a matrix of 307,200 pixels (640
s 480) at 8-bit resolution was formidable, if not impossible, and required the capacity of
mainframe computers, by the mid 1990s, accelerated development of processors, graphic
cards, and software (the creation of standard, commercially available software environ-
ments for both offline, nonlinear editing of video and real-time image processing) changed
the framework of working with video and graphics. The introduction of relatively low-cost
laptop computers by companies such as Apple Computer in the 1990s (the first G3 por-
table in 1997) and NLE hardware and software such as Avid, Media 100, and, later,
Apple’s own Final Cut Pro enabled image manipulation at a previously unimaginable
scale and detail.
In comparison to the heterogeneously assembled analog systems used for projection-
based performance environments in the 1960s, artists exploring image transformation in
the 1990s essentially worked with the same suite of software tools deployed by commercial
enterprises such as film and TV, graphic design, and multimedia studios. What access to
such systems did was rapidly introduce the possibility of manipulating moving image
material at almost microscopic levels of temporal and spatial control, providing the ability
to break it down into constituent components and in the course of this process, to rewrite
the previous temporal and spatial laws surrounding analog media.
If expanded cinema arose from the desires of experimental filmmakers to explode cin-
ematic forms, the aesthetic of performance-based audiovisual work partially emerged from
the VJ culture that had arisen in the 1980s. Originally a term popularized in the early
days of MTV to describe a “video jockey,” the video equivalent of a DJ (or “disc jockey”),
who essentially played the new form of music videos, much of the later VJ culture
appeared around the house music scene in an effort to give equal weight to sound and
image as central elements in the overall spatio-physical ambience of clubs.
Arguably, early club visuals played second fiddle to DJ culture, almost as a throwback
to the light painting and lava lamp aesthetics that populated 1960s psychedelic concerts.
What the club scene did provide, however, was an alternative social gestus that directly
led to new aesthetic expression through audiovisual fusion, catalyzing innovative forms
of communication that operated at powerful, nonverbal levels of affect, and at the same
time encouraged different collective models of production.
Driven by developing computer technologies and designer drugs like MDMA (also
known as “ecstasy”), club and rave culture soon traded the cultural protest of the 1960s
for an almost hedonistic mindset delving into new forms of perception. As the club scene
shifted toward commercialization in the early 1990s, the audiovisual impulses and socio-
aesthetic frameworks that had originally been seeded by club practices crossed over into
other contexts, either by individual VJs creating DIY (do-it-yourself) modes of aesthetic
practice or by those working with computers in areas outside of dance culture, such as
graphic and multimedia design, digital filmmaking, and architecture, whose leisure time
was spent in the alternative, technologically constructed ambience of club experience.

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 The ideas and models that a postindustrial generation of creators took with them from
club culture into an internationally connected scene of alternative art spaces, galleries,
commercial design and multimedia shops, festivals, museums, and cultural institutions
were thus a fusion of radical social and communications possibilities combined and filtered
through the technology of the digit. An interest in the live, performatively constituted
image and sound began to yield work whose basis was framed around artists’ manipulat-
ing visual and sonic material solely inside the computer and projecting such material
onto a screen in front of live spectators. Furthermore, techniques of sampling, cut and
paste, layering, recombining, and granulating inherited from electronic music technology
quickly became cultural paradigms, applied with equal aplomb to image material.
In contrast to the site specificity of artists like Vanderbeek or USCO, who prepared
total media environments for days on end, the audiovisual scenes that sprung up in the
areas of digital culture were aided by a global system of circulation and dissemination
through media/music festival circuits racing to support and exhibit such work so as not
to be left out of the larger technocultural zeitgeist. Festivals such as RESFEST (San
Francisco), Ars Electronica (Austria), DEAF and Sonic Acts (Netherlands), Elektra and
Mutek (Montréal), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Pixelache (Finland), Netmage (Italy),
Dissonanze and Mixed Media (Italy), Cimatics (Belgium), Sonar (Spain), and One_Dot_Zero
(UK) depended on the aesthetics of fluidity and nomadism generated by portable technol-
ogy—the ability of individuals to move globally, carrying laptops and portable mixers
from one venue to the other, only to move rapidly to the next presentation in a country
thousands of miles away.
Made possible by an exquisite embodiment of the machinic, the emerging arena of
“retinal aesthetics” brought with it a flood of performance forms, constructs, and subse-
quent experiences that once again exploited the tripartite tension of the screen, the live
spectator, the human performer, and the computer itself. This entanglement of screen,
viewer, performer, and machine was perhaps most clearly articulated in the media perfor-
mances of the Austrian group Granular Synthesis.
Formed in Vienna in 1993 by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger and German-born
Ulf Langheinrich, the Granular Synthesis collective became known in the international
media art world for the acoustic and visual intensity of their large, screen-driven perfor-
mances, which applied both the philosophy and techne of sampling, remixing, looping,
and granulation to disintegrate and assemble anew images of the human form extracted
from recording sessions with real-life dancers and performing artists.
In early performances such as Modell 3 and Modell 4 (1992–1993), the duo worked
with video and audio recordings of the moving head and voice of the dancer Michael
Krammer, which was subsequently subjected to a similar treatment, as in the digital
synthesis technique of granular synthesis from which Hentschläger and Langheinrich took
their moniker: a process of breaking sound samples down into microcomponents or
“grains” that could be infinitely rearranged to form a new temporal continuum.

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 This process was taken to a more intensive degree of articulation and control with the
use of an Avid online system for the group’s Motion Control Modell 5 (1995), with which
the face of Akemi Takeya, multiplied across four screens, underwent a real-time Francis
Bacon—like transformation through the microscratching, granulation, and fragmentation
of image and sound into smaller and smaller temporal and spatial cells.47 Whereas media
theorist Sean Cubitt described the early mechanism of the cinematograph as a device in
which “the human vision of the audience is synchronized with a machine perception in
the process of formation” (Cubitt 2004, 30), Granular Synthesis’s computational-age
apparatus, which rendered the human image into a twitching and jerking Frankenstein-
like animal-machine went a step further, yielding what Hentschläger labeled “inappropri-
ate hybrid personas”—a step toward electronic possession, where image and sound, screen
and flesh, matter and pixels were pushed to degree zero.48
The group’s 1998 performance POL as well as subsequent works signaled a marked
shift from figural representation of the face and increasingly toward fields of colored
abstraction. With the use of customized MIDI-controlled software in which video was
accessed in real time directly from hard disk, allowing for direct audiovisual granulation,
the barely visible visage of singer Diamanda Galas was beamed over seven screens in
oscillation between all-too-brief moments of recognition and abstract figuration, poised
on the brink of visual/acoustic perception in what Timothy Druckery described as a “post-
corporeal, post-optical interface working at sensorial limits” (Druckery 1997).
Granular Synthesis’s detailed research—into the explosion of image scale and sound
projection between the spectator’s perception and position in relation to the planal screen
surface—in many ways proposed the ultimate conundrum to live performance. If POL’s
performative disintegration of recognizable images into pure fields of noise, lines, and
color removed the human form from the screen, the event in essence also sought to dis-
solve the line between the subject of viewing (the spectator) and the object of its gaze
(the screen), making performance no longer the theatron (the place or event of seeing), but
rather a “state of mind.” That the screen as a holder of projected image would move to
the pure abstraction of color and line in Granular Synthesis’s final works like Feld and
360 or in Hentschläger’s and Langheinrich’s later solo projects, vanishing into architec-
tural dimensions surrounded by fog engulfing the spectator (as in Hentschläger’s 2005
Feed and 2008 installation Zee) or video-generated spaces (Langheinrich’s Drift), suggested
one future direction of projection as something that one inhabits rather than observes
from without.
Other artists during the early part of the twenty-first century, however, also produced
audiovisual performances that relied on the screen as physical architecture, metaphor,
landscape, ocular attractor, and perception machine. The former Montréal-based partner-
ship Skoltz-Kolgen created in the “retinal diyptic” Flüux:/Terminal, which consisted of
two side-by-side screens upon which projected media were controlled live by the two
artists in the back of the room, audiovisual interferences through bursts of sound and

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Figure 4.13 Skoltz-Kolgen. Flüux:/Terminal, 2003. Photo © Skoltz-Kolgen.

image while spitting out the aesthetics of the digital in rapid-fire succession: wireframe
objects, deforming lines, and kinetic splines that seem to behave without human interven-
tion in a designed landscape of noise, static, signs, numbers, texts, and grids (figure 4.13).
As an exercise in the production and dissolution of binaries between audio and image,
each performer occupied a screen in Skoltz-Kolgen’s virtuoso digital pyrotechnic
display, resulting in a fight between image and sound that left the audience almost
hypnotized.49
Likewise, the Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda framed his audiovisual concert works such
as Formula (2001), C4I (2005), and Datamatics (2006) as performances, even though little
or no manipulation of material took place in real time, the performance brought into
being by the press of a button on a DVD player or mini-DV camcorder. Ikeda’s forty-
four-minute performance concert Formula, which won the prestigious 2001 Ars Elec-
tronica Golden Nica for Digital Music, was based partly on visuals and lighting inspired
from Dumb Type’s OR theater performance in collaboration with Shiro Takatani. Set in
an environment where the screen was mirrored in a white linoleum Marley floor under
occasionally flashing strobes, Formula as well as later works, like Ikeda’s music, was an
exercise in digitally enabled precision coupled with extreme minimalism: a projected
landscape reduced to the bareness of signals and data such as moving points, crosshairs,

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lines, and endless rows of binary digits that sought a complete synchronization between
acoustic signal and moving photons.
What then constituted the “performance” in Skoltz-Kolgen’s or Ikeda’s complex but
mostly prepared in advance visual and sonic orchestration of machines? Did it live in
waiting, fastidiously prepped in the machine and ready to take its place on the screen
with the human operator’s tasks reduced to the push of a laptop’s spacebar or the press
of the play button on the DVD player? What signified “live,” now that the stage was
reduced to the pixel and the stretched canvas, to lights, speakers, and projectors; devoid
of human presence, yet still generating the excitement and pulse of a performance hap-
pening in the here and now?
Although one genre of audiovisual screen performance leaned toward the extreme preci-
sion of playback, another emerging genre sought the real-time creation of an audio/visual
event in situ. Taking impulses from VJ culture and inspired by techniques of collective
improvisation from the noise and free jazz music scenes, much of the activity involved
the direct manipulation of video and audio material through software.
Dubbed live cinema in Europe and performance cinema in the United States, such new
audiovisual movements were defined by Dutch progenitor Hans Beekman as follows:

A form of performance art in which a human performer manipulates sound and image in synergy
through movement, for an audience. The technological backdrop of Live Cinema is one of
daily technological innovation in the audio/visual field. The process of digitalization is most
developed in the realm of electronic pop culture, where equipment is compact, user friendly and
affordable. All these factors have led to a new artistic practice, where the usage of hardware, such
as samplers and computers, have led to new artistic genres and ways to approach art. (Beekman
2007)

The move toward an aesthetics of real-time processes in the production of live cinema
performance was chiefly spurred on through the availability of software environments like
Max, an IRCAM-developed and later commercially distributed graphic object–oriented
software application that was used by musicians to create control structures that imple-
mented the MIDI protocol [Interactive Systems, chapter 5] as well as early Apple
Macintosh–based video processing tools such as Imagine (developed at STEIM) and
Videodelic (San Francisco).50
The introduction of so-called third-party Max objects that could access the QuickTime
video engine—such as nato.0 55, by the entity called NN (Netochka Nezvanova) in
1999, Soft VNS (developed by Canadian artist and engineer David Rokeby), GEM (a
graphics programming environment written for Pure Data, an open source version of
Max), and Jitter (video objects developed by Max’s later distributor Cycling ’74 in San
Francisco in 2002)—were essential tools that provided a common programming lingua
franca and framework for real-time audiovisual practitioners.

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 Almost overnight, artists, collectives, and scenes appeared organized mainly around
common Max-based software platforms becoming digital bricoleurs. Collectives interested
in improvisation within the live performance context—such as 242.pilots (a collective
started by H. C. Gilje, Kurt Ralske, and Lukasz Lysakowski and named for an object in
nato.0 55), the Vienna- and Berlin-based farmersmanual, Brussels-based Telcosystems,
as well as dozens of other individual artists from North America (Sue Costible and Joshua
Clayton, Scott Arford, Scott Pagano, and Chris Musgrave all in San Francisco, and
Johnny DeKam, Kurt Ralske, Benton Bainbridge, Golan Levin, and Zachary Lieberman
in New York), Canada (PurForm, Ray-XXXX, Defasten, Louis Dufort), Europe (TeZ,
Semiconductor, Coldcut, Visual Kitchen, Rechenzentrum, Otolab, Signal, Byetone, Frank
Bretschneider, Scanner, Untitled Sound Objects), Eastern Europe and Russia (Domnitch
and Gelfand), Japan (Ryoichi Kurokawa, Responsive Environments), Australia, and else-
where engaged in manipulating live video feeds and signals or building algorithmically
driven “patches” (graphic-based object programs) and performance instruments that would
enable combined machine and human improvisation.
The aesthetic range of this real-time video movement cannot be summarized in a few
sentences for like other audiovisual forms, a plurality of approaches appeared with no one
dominant idea or technique. 242.pilots, for example, was inspired by the musical process
of jamming; what video artist and cofounder H. C. Gilje called “the making of a live film
with a soundtrack at the same time.”51
Another major aesthetic force driving the real-time video scene was the obsession with
software code, a movement mirrored in the fact that an entire subsection of real-time
video practice was gestated by next-generation artist-geeks schooled in computer science,
electronic music, and engineering, which helped generate aesthetic practices around meta
explorations of code and data itself.
Audiovisual performance based in the aesthetics of code most notably emerged in the
works of artist-engineer Golan Levin. Levin, who trained under designer John Maeda at
the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group, developed software tools that
enabled the real-time manipulation of computer graphics and audio and made his audio-
visual performance projects such as Scribble (2000), Dialtones: A Telesymphony (2001), and
Messe de Voce (2005) mainstays at digital media festivals like Ars Electronica during the
2000s. Creating “painterly interfaces for audio-visual performance,” Levin’s Audio-Visual
Environmental Suite (1998–2000) comprised what the artist called “an inexhaustible and
dynamic audiovisual substance” (Levin 2000): code that enabled a performer to treat image
and sound in a highly abstract, textual manner that gave fluid life to digital floating lines,
skeins, blobs, and tendrils, all in real time.
Another movement within the audiovisual coding scene amplified its processual char-
acteristics through the revealing and subsequent use of errors and glitches. This aesthetics
of data was represented in performance by screens filled with broken ASCII code, visual
aliasing, bit placement errors, and similar artifacts of the computational age. Discussion

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of the video image as signal or mathematical array of pixels surpassed earlier discussions
on representation and meaning, while visual vocabularies effortlessly veered between
heavily signal-processed images of pure abstraction (architectural structures, light streaks,
layering of numbers, texts, letters, and 3D texture-mapped shapes) and more figurative
images. Simply stated, the impact of computational technology and its next generation
of adherents who programmed such software led to an obsession with the lower levels of
the machine—a sometimes almost fetishistic fascination with digital processes and their
collective aesthetics derived from source code.
The conceptual intricacies of code and rigors of mathematics drove collective investiga-
tion into software-structured performance. Still other collectives, predominantly in the
United Kingdom, took their visual/aural aesthetic cues from high-end visual production
work in commercial arenas such as music video, advertising, and multimedia production
like the London-based design agency Tomato and other British “media collectives” such
as the Light Surgeons, UVA (United Visual Artists), and D-Fuse. By 2006, the culture
of live audiovisual work had been so thoroughly integrated into screen-based performances
that the D-Fuse collective issued an entire book detailing the history of VJ culture.52
The transition from expanded cinema to VJ/live video/real-time video cultures was one
marked by both continuities as well as dramatic techno-cultural-political ruptures. With
the basis of artistic production firmly anchored around hardware and particularly around
software, the live audiovisual scenes were driven by the social mechanism of DIY practices
among their participants; DIY suggesting the creation and sedimentation of conditions
for such experimentation to take place, from the authoring of software to collective orga-
nizing, curating, publishing, and dissemination by artists themselves, either in situ or
over collaborative online networks.
The future direction of screen-based performance appeared secure. The screen had
become as accepted in the cultural vocabulary of performance, with or without a stage or
human performer, as the proscenium had after its permanent introduction in 1618 at the
Teatro Farnese in Parma Italy. Yet a central tension remained. Was the screen simply a
surface upon which to cast the results of infinitely complex processes that took place on
a stage without actors, except for those who sat behind the machines, or was the screen
perceived by such artists as something else—simultaneously a new stage and instrument,
where physical space and screen space were one in the face of the increasing possibilities
of twenty-first-century computation?

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 5

Sound

The growth of musical art in any age is determined by the technological progress which
parallels it.
joseph schillinger, “electricity, a musical liberator,” modern music, 1931

The clarion call for a new machinic century that, as mentioned, inexorably transformed
the theatrical, architectural, and cinematic arts, also vividly overtook the sphere of music
and sound, resulting in newfangled electromechanical instruments and experimental
composition practices that intermingled musicians, machines, procedures, and processes
to forever shake up the staid concert hall. Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend the
influence of electromechanical technologies in sound making without recognizing the
radical shifts that recording-based technology, from the gramophone and magnetic tape
to studio wizardry, and later digital computers had on its production, consumption, and
distribution.1
By now, it is more or less accepted that these principally studio-based techniques
incalculably changed acoustic creation and listening practices, but how did they alter the
nature of musical performance, specifically using such technologies in situ? Did new
instruments and processes reshape the experience of musical performers and audiences,
shifting the concert hall from a passive arena of listening to an interactive zone of impro-
visation between sound-making technical apparatuses and their players?
The origins of such formal and technical transmutations already revealed themselves
at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, if not earlier. Western Common Practice
music had long been undergoing a radical tonal shift, culminating in the dodecaphonic or
twelve-tone row structures of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and, later,
Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Fundamentally breaking with the hierarchies of Western
harmony by using all twelve chromatic pitch classes equivalently and thus destroying the
anchor of a tonal center for the listener, the three Austrian composers set the precedent
for the twentieth-century blurring of music, sound, and noise—one that would reach its
articulation only with John Cage’s manifesto “Credo: The Future of Music” some twenty-
five years later.2

New Instrumentalities for Performance (1900–1933)

In the earlier part of the twentieth century, public performances of new machine-age
instruments were met with disbelieving ears accustomed to the sonorities of nineteenth-
century Romanticism. Not only did the riotous first Parisian performance in 1913 of Igor
Stravinsky’s percussive savagery in Le Sacre du Printemps shake up bourgeois ears, but also
a similar fate greeted the Italian Futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s premiere of Risveglio
di una Città (Awakening of a City) in 1914. Along with their ocular-dominated dianissino
architecttura and scenodynamic stages, the Italian Futurists also championed the clatter,
bang, and din of industrial noise as part of their utopian machine aesthetic. “Ancient Life
was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of machines, noise was born,”
wrote Russolo in the opening salvo to his 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” (Russolo
2004, 10).
Russolo’s desire for music contemporaneous with modern industrial experience mani-
fested itself in the machines of his day: “the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons,
the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on tracks” (Russolo 2004, 12). For
Russolo, the advancement of music and culture as a whole was intimately intertwined
with the development of the machine itself, provoking the possibility of new sounds
and modes of hearing through what he called “futurist ears.” The “evolution of music
is comparable to the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with
man . . . today, the machine has created such a variety and contention of noises that pure
sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion” (Russolo 2004, 11).
The multiplication of new sounds thus paralleled the multiplication of the machines that
either made or inspired such sounds.
Russolo’s Futurist music of noises went beyond a new attentiveness to the “soundscape
of modernity,” as Emily Thompson has labeled it in her book of the same name (Thompson
2004). In the urban wild, the ear became accustomed to the rancor and blast of subways,
trains, automobiles, and iron works, while inside the concert hall a new battery of noises
were emitted from new instruments or intonarumori. The “intoners” or “rumor makers” of
Russolo’s new orchestra of the future were constructed noise machines consisting of boxes
holding metal strings excited by a rotating wheel. Still driven by human operators, these
devices made their first public appearance in Italy between 1913 and 1914 in performance
events staged before flabbergasted crowds getting their first taste of the future of machine
sonance.
Russolo saw his noise orchestra countering what he called the public’s “profound disil-
lusionment” before the modern orchestra’s “paltry results,” but his urge to include sounds

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outside of the orchestral canon was already being exploited by others, namely the Ameri-
can composer George Antheil. Antheil’s early instrumental works, like Second Sonata—
Airplane (1923) and Third Sonata—Death of Machines (1920), were inspired by the violent
cacophonies and rhythmic chugging of machines and caused violent riots in the European
cities in which they were first performed.
His most notorious work, the high-decibel, twenty-minute Ballet Mechanique (1923)
originally designed as a soundtrack for painter Fernand Léger’s film of the same title, was
scored for an ensemble featuring three xylophones, four bass drums, a gong, two pianos,
a siren, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, and sixteen electrically synchronized
player pianos—a technical feat that proved impossible to execute, causing the composer
to later rewrite the score for four human pianists. Deemed to be inappropriate as the
soundtrack for the film, Ballet Méchanique nonetheless had its premiere in Paris in 1923,
causing almost as big of a ruckus as the catcalls and screaming that greeted Stravinsky
and Russolo.

Cahill’s Synthesizer

Russolo’s and Antheil’s machine inspired sound was only part of a whole series of innova-
tive, never-before-heard instruments ushered in at the early part of the century with Dr.
Seussian names like Telharmonium (1900), the Chorocelo (1909), the Optophonic Piano
(1916), Theremin/Aerophone (1917), the Sphaerophon (1924), the Dynaphone (1927),
the Ondes Martenot (1928), the Hellertion (1929), La Croix Sonore (The Sonorous Cross,
1929), the Helliophon (1936), the Hammond Novachord (1939), and the Trautonium
(1930). All of these inventions had one thing in common: they all demanded new
ways of playing them and forged novel relationships among technology, the performer’s
body, and the listener’s ears, and in the process, expanded the overall range of musical
sonorities.3
Just as Russolo was introducing the possibility of noise into music, slightly earlier
American inventor and attorney Dr. Thaddeus Cahill was constructing one of the first
electronic instruments to manifest through sound what the physicists Jean-Baptiste
Fourier and Hermann von Helmholtz had theorized two centuries before: the perfect
production of sinusoidal waveforms across all frequency ranges from an electrically based
machine. Trained in music at Oberlin Conservatory, Cahill’s now legendary Telharmo-
nium or Dynamophone was an apparatus so large that it weighed more than two hundred
tons and occupied thirty boxcars when transported to New York in 1906 for its first
public performances.
An exceedingly elaborate but also flexible instrument for its time, the Telharmonium
used Fourier’s principal of additive synthesis, in which more complex, polyphonic tones
could be built up from the manipulation of simple frequencies or individual harmonic
partials. Seeking to “generate music electrically with tones of good quality and great

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power and with perfect musical expression,” the first version of this device was constructed
from a series of thirty-five rheotome alternators—tone wheels with small ridges that, when
rotated close to a magnetic coil, produced alternating current that was subsequently con-
verted into sound (Holmes 1985, 34).
Varying the size of the ridges to obtain different frequencies, Cahill’s synthesizer—as
described in his 1896 patent “Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing
Music Electronically”—was controlled and played by a seven-octave, thirty-six-chromatic-
note, velocity-sensitive keyboard interface (figure 5.1). After obtaining funding support
for a much larger apparatus, Cahill’s later version used in performances in New York City
extended the number of alternators to 145 (the inventor originally imagined 408!), the
number of keyboards to two, and the square footage needed to house the gargantuan
instrument to an entire floor in the Holyoke, Massachusetts, building.
Cahill’s inventiveness went beyond just tone generation, as he imagined the transmis-
sion of his electrical instrument through paper horn-like speakers connected to telephone
receivers and carried over telephone cables in an age without electronic amplification.
With his transmission of sounds from one space filled with volumes of equipment to
another with the simple presence of a loudspeaker linked to a telephone receiver, Cahill
was already conjuring up the sound of disembodied spirits and phantoms that would mark
the use of tele-technologies as well as foreshadowing the infamous electronic tape concerts
of the 1950s, where audiences sat in concert halls only to be greeted by a stage full of
tangled wires, speakers, and equipment without a human performer.4
Ambitious and unstoppable, Cahill imagined a far more lofty future for the Telharmo-
nium than just as a new instrument for the concert hall of the electric age, instead forming
an entire company (New York Electric Music Company) to carry out his plan to beam
the instrument’s sounds (“Telharmony”) to hotels, restaurants, cafés, libraries, offices, and
private homes utilizing the existing telephone network. Cahill’s hulking machine had its
premiere in a performance given over the telephone wires from Holyoke to New Haven,
Connecticut, in 1906, but it was not until the move to its own Telharmonic Hall in New
York that larger audiences got their first taste of electric music’s future.
Although no recordings remain, ear-witnesses noted the purity of the tonalities that
emerged from the instrument as well as its ability to imitate the sounds of acoustic instru-
ments through its additive techniques.5 The instrument’s sonic output was unrivaled for
the time, but Cahill’s plans for wired transmission ultimately ran aground when it was
discovered that the music of dead composers whom Cahill played on the device leaked
over into real telephone lines during performances, interrupting conversations, and later
even naval transmissions. This technical glitch along with the Telharmonium’s high
maintenance sunk Cahill, and by 1911, the New York Electric Music Company was all
but gone.
Despite its failure, Cahill’s instrument was the first in a long series of electrically
developed musical devices in the first decades of the century. In addition to the Wurlitzer

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Figure 5.1 Thaddeus Cahill. Telharmonium patent US 000580035, 1897.

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185
organ and later the Hammond organ, both of which employed similar concepts for sound
production, other more exotic performance devices began to appear, including the French
musician Maurice Martenot’s Ondes Martenot, a monophonic, keyboard-played device
developed in 1928 that used the principle of heterodyning oscillators to produce pitches
that could be electrically manipulated.6 A favorite of avant-garde composers like Olivier
Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, and Edgard Varèse later in the century, the instrument’s pitch
could be altered in real time with a pull-tab ring attached to a variable capacitor that ran
the length of the keyboard, thus producing microtonal intervals.
Another oddly named instrument of the period, the Trautonium of German engineer
Dr. Friedrich Trautwein, was capable of producing even more precise frequencies with
harmonically richer sawtooth oscillators, whose pitch was controlled by a performer chang-
ing the resistance on a metal wire by pressing down on its surface and thus completing
the circuit and triggering the oscillator. Originally designed to mimic the human voice,
the Trautonium’s oscillators were routed through a bank of formant or band-pass filters
that produced vowel-like sounds due to the sharp filtering of most of the side-band
frequencies produced by the oscillator. Like the Ondes Martenot, the Trautonium was
also exercised in concert performance, namely by Richard Strauss, the German composer
Paul Hindemith who wrote a Concertino for Trautonium and String Orchestra (1931), and
most famously, by Trautwein’s student Oskar Sala, who was rumored to have composed
the bird-like sounds on the machine for Hitchcock’s film The Birds in 1963.7

New Gestures—Theremin’s Ghosts

The early instruments described so far all provided the possibility of new electronic
timbres, yet all of the devices’ keyboard-like interfaces were clearly in line with the exist-
ing performance techniques of traditional instruments. It was in the twilight of the
October Revolution in Russia, however, that the engineer and inventor Lev Sergeyevich
Termen (also known as Léon Theremin) was constructing a machine that proposed a
radically new gestural relationship between electric instrument and human performer. As
a “musical use for electricity,” the Aetherphone—or theremin, as it would be called—
operated on a wholly different principal than the mechanical systems of traditional
orchestral instruments.
Appearing like a rectangular box on legs with an antenna on one side and a stiff piece
of looped metal sticking out of it on the other, the theremin output an almost pure
sinusoidal tone in the range of five octaves, with the presence of side-band frequencies
giving the sound a richer timbre. Using the principal of heterodyning that Martenot
would also later employ, Theremin devised a technique by which a human performer
could control the frequency and amplitude of audible frequencies generated by radio
oscillator interference between 0–2000 Hz by moving her hands inside an electrical field,
thus causing changes to the two parameters.

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 Altering the frequency of the tone on the vertical axis and the amplitude on the hori-
zontal with a careful choreography of gestures within the sensed field, the theremin’s
performer could achieve an almost extraordinary level of expression, with musical effects
like vibrato (the modulation of frequency) produced by strange, wavering hand and finger
movements resembling those of a magician summoning sound out of the air. Decidedly,
the image of a performer gesturing and producing sound but touching nothing imbued
the theremin with a haunted presence, something exploited with its use in the soundtracks
of spooky Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
First exhibited at the Moscow Industrial Trade Fair in 1920, the theremin created a
sensation to the point that Vladimir Lenin invited its creator for a private demonstration
in the Kremlin. Theremin had applied several times for a patent in Europe for his “Method
of and Apparatus for the Generation of Sounds,” but it was not until his journey to the
United States in the mid 1920s that he was granted one. In fact, as an early example of
the mixing of the burgeoning electronics industry with the interest in new forms of sonic
expression, RCA Victor’s Radiola division commercialized a vacuum tube version of the
instrument in 1928. Under contract from RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse made
thousands of theremins in the late 1920s, attempting to promote them as “easy to play”
devices in “mom and pop” music stores, high schools, and even onsite church demos, but
the instrument was not a widespread success, due in no small part to the stock market
crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.
Together with the theremin’s widespread exposure came a series of virtuosos specifically
trained on the instrument, which succeeded in bringing it greater public attention. Called
one of the first pioneers of electronic music performance, Theremin’s American protégé,
prodigy, and muse, the Lithuanian-born Clara Rockmore (née Clara Reisenberg), devel-
oped a playing technique she labeled “aerial fingering,” allowing Rockmore to bypass the
clichéd glissandi that marked most theremin performers and enabling her to become the
instrument’s leading virtuoso interpreter.8
There was also a handful of known and less-known composers who recognized the
potential of the theremin to expand the sonic vocabulary of the time; among them was
Australian Percy Grainger, who orchestrated for traditional instruments and theremin in
three different scores in the 1930s; the Russian émigré and teacher to George Gershwin,
Joseph Schillinger; and the American composer Henry Cowell.
Cowell commissioned Theremin himself to create a new instrument called the
Rhythmicon or, more appropriately, the Polyrhythmophone, an early keyboard-based,
rhythmic sequencer that generated continuous rhythms from single keypresses. The
Rhythmicon was only one of a series of technological gadgets that Theremin developed
in the United States before KGB agents supposedly kidnapped and brought him back
to Moscow. Sent to a Stalin-sanctioned labor camp, Theremin was later employed by
the KGB to develop surveillance technologies such as telephone bugs for much of the
remainder of his life.9

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 Varèse and the Electronic Sculpting of Sound

Another fan of the theremin was the French-born composer Edgard Varèse. Although his
extant output consists of a scant sixteen orchestral works, two being completed posthu-
mously by his student Chou Wen-Chung, Varèse’s contribution to the technological
transformation of musical performance in the twentieth century cannot be underesti-
mated. Having studied in France, the composer lived the better part of his life in the
United States to which he immigrated in 1915.
Dissatisfied with the state of European art music at the time, Varèse began calling as
early as 1916 for the creation of new instruments to transform what he felt was a deadened
musical vocabulary at the start of the twentieth century. Through the laboring of “com-
poser and electrician,” traditions such as counterpoint and harmony would be replaced by
the movement of “sound masses of shifting planes,” sonic “transmutations,” and “zones
of intensities,” with the lines between music and sound increasingly blurring (Varèse
2004, 18).
Critical of Futurists like Russolo for wanting to simply reproduce the sounds of the
industrial age, Varèse sought “entirely new mediums of expression: sound producing
machines (as opposed to sound-reproduction).” Transformed to organized sound through
technical possibilities, music would no longer be straitjacketed by the “paralyzing tem-
pered system” but liberated by its planar and volumetric movement through space. As he
wrote in “New Instruments and New Music” (1936), new forms of sound projection
technology would enable “the feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of reflecting
back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light being sent forth by a powerful
searchlight—for the ear as for the eye.” (Varèse 2004, 18–19).
When much of Varèse’s early compositional output was lost to fire in Berlin, he essen-
tially started composing again from scratch upon his arrival in the United States. Early
works like Amériques (1918), Hyperprism (1922), Intégrales (1924), and Ionisation (1929; the
first piece for an all-percussion ensemble) featured traditional instruments; however,
Varèse was already attempting the materialization of “spatial music” through the creation
of large-scale blocks of tonalities generated by winds and percussion. Dispensing with the
melodic capacities given normally in orchestration by strings, these early works consisted
of dense, shifting waves with little development in the traditional sense, instead relying
on internal friction and kinesis between the flowing but fragmented lines of the winds
and the rhythmic and sometimes jarring accents of drums, crash cymbals, gongs, bells,
and even more exotic Asian percussion.
Yet, even with Amériques, his first work in America, and later the scarcely six-minute-
long Ionisation (1929–1931), Varèse had begun to extend his sonic explorations beyond
the traditional orchestra, first incorporating sirens as sound sources in anticipation of the
coming age of electronic sonorities. Invoking and celebrating the chaotic noise-scape of
New York and perhaps foreshadowing the coming destruction of the Second World War,

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the siren was also cherished by Varèse for its unusual spatial projection properties: its
“continuous flowing curve” and ability to disperse sound in hyperbolic and parabolic
projection patterns.10
In his quest for unusual sound, Varèse was also on the lookout for new electronic devices
that could fulfill his conception of “sound as living matter.” His 1934 work Ecuatorial
was originally scored for wind, organ, percussion, and two fingerboard-based theremins
(this made them easier to play)—the theremin being an instrument that Varèse saw great
potential in because, like the siren, it enabled the production of continuous gradations of
sound. Later, as it proved difficult to find the original RCA-built theremins, Varèse
rescored the piece for two Ondes Martenots, the instrument used as a siren substitute for
a Paris performance of Amériques.
Seeing the inherent connection between art and science by which science would be
“equipped” to give the composer what he needed to create new sounds, Varèse attempted
throughout the 1930s and 1940s to attract industrial and foundation support for research
into new forms of electronic sound production and diffusion. Applying to the Guggen-
heim Foundation and Bell Labs, Varèse passionately argued without success for access to
a studio with electronic equipment where he could research new acoustic techniques.
It was not until 1954, however, that the composer could realize his two greatest works
through technological means that he had earlier only dreamed about. The first perfor-
mance of Déserts, which integrated electronic tape and orchestral instruments into a post-
Hiroshima tapestry (“Music of the time of the H-Bomb,” as critic Nicole Hirsch called
it) was broadcast over Radio France in 1954 and immediately caused a scandal, almost
forcing the government withdrawal of subsidies from engineer Pierre Schaeffer’s electronic
music studios in Paris, where the tape portions of the work had been realized (Hirsch
1954).
Arguably, Varèse’s greatest work was still to come: the 1958 Poème électronique, an
eight-minute, purely electronic work for tape created for the Philips electronics cor-
poration Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Invited by the pavilion’s designers
Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis to compose a sound environment for its multimedia
interior much to the chagrin of Philips who wanted a more famous and “accessible” com-
poser, Varèse set about to materialize what he had only theorized in the early 1920s
at a none-too-easy level. Given the immense technical resources of the Philips corporation,
Varèse had to deal with a whole host of problems during the composition period
of the work, including an unfamiliarity with the state of the art equipment, which
made the process exceedingly slow, and the fears of Frits Philips himself that Varèse’s
work was too inaccessible to members of the general public who would visit the
environment.11
Even with the early consternation of its corporate sponsors, the Philips pavilion work
would go down as a historical event, attracting nearly two million visitors on the
commercial end during its six-month existence and setting a precedent for the transforma-

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 tion of entire spaces into instruments through the sophisticated technical integration of
sound, space, architecture, and media that we are still trying to understand to this day
(figure 5.2).12 Distributed and projected through approximately 325 loudspeakers inset
into the hyperbolic paraboloid and conoid geometries of Le Corbusier’s and Xenakis’s
architecture, Varèse’s multitrack composition of environmental noise, acoustic, and elec-
tronic structures highlighted by the dynamic spatial trajectories of sound transformed the
pavilion’s interior into an overwhelming, first-of-its-kind multisensory environment: a
space where one literally inhabited sound.13

Postwar Sounds: Serialism, Tape, and Signals

In the post–World War II period, there was a marked split emerging between what
composer Michael Nyman has dubbed as avant-garde versus experimental music, with
avant-garde exemplified by the rigid, highly structured realm of European serialism and
experimental by the more open, indeterminate processes of American composers lead by
John Cage (Nyman 1999, 1–30). Represented by Europeans such as the older French
master Olivier Messiaen and his younger pupils Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhauen,
composers became obsessed with extending dodecaphonic principles of the Second Vienna
School across the entire musical system to parameters such as duration, timbre, dynamics,
rhythm, and tone production.
Serialism, as it came to be known, worked with the permutational and combinatoric
aspects of the twelve fixed chromatic tones applied to “non-pitch elements: durational
rhythm, dynamics, phrase rhythm, timbre and register, in such a manner as to preserve
the most significant properties associated with these operations in the pitch domain when
they are applied in these other domains” (Griffiths 1981, 38). This seemingly unusual
approach to composition rapidly took off in Europe with Boulez and Stockhausen leading
the pack, as well as through American composers such as Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter,
Roger Sessions, and George Perle as early as the late 1940s. Serialism was chiefly pro-
pagated in the old world through the increasingly influential summer music courses
taught in the German town of Darmstadt starting in 1946, and reached almost dogmatic
heights of influence by the mid 1950s.
As serialism was gaining ground, another tradition that was driven extensively by new
recording technologies was beginning in Paris: the musique concrète movement lead by the
French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer had already experimented with recording
onto disks in the early 1930s, but the establishment of a sound production studio by
Radio France in 1948 enabled him to begin working with the tools of the recording studio
as a full-fledged compositional environment.14

䉳 Figure 5.2 Philips Pavilion. World Exposition, Brussels, 1958. Courtesy of Philips Company Archive.

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 Called musique concrète for its “concrete” use of real sounds, Schaeffer alchemized recorded
material into new sonic objects (l’objet sonore) by mixing, splicing, reversing, manipulating
and deforming existing sounds structures into wholly other acousmatic forms.15 Like
Russolo’s pleas for a music of machines, Schaeffer’s 1948 broadcast of his Concert
de bruits (Concert of Noises) was a landmark event, sharply splitting public opinion about
the new sonic possibilities of electronics and ushering in an era of studio-based
composition.
Schaeffer’s studio soon not only drew composers such as Pierre Henry, Varèse, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Xenakis, and others to a technical infrastructure in which to realize elec-
tronic-based compositions that would have been impossible outside of an institutional
setting, but also set off a trend in constructing new studios with such purposes in mind.
Following Schaeffer’s lead, German engineer Herbert Eimert established the first elec-
tronic music-making facility in Germany in 1951.
Ensconced in the state-subsidized WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) radio station
in Cologne, Eimert’s studio differed from Schaeffer’s in its emphasis on equipment
for the production of sound solely through electronically generated signals: oscillators,
filters, noise generators, and modulators. Given the interest in applying serial principals
to timbre, it was not surprising that composers like Stockhausen were quickly
drawn to extending the articulation and microcontrol of sound through electronic
procedures.
Unlike Schaeffer’s recording-based works, Eimert’s WDR studio focused on the syn-
thesis and analysis of sound from the bottom up, oscillator by oscillator. Early “sine wave”
works from Stockhausen such as Etude (1952) and Studie I and II (1953–1954) explored
the technical and artistic possibilities of additive synthesis methods, particularly the
generation of complex timbres from unusual frequency ratios. Although these and many
other compositions realized in Cologne were novel in their deployment of new sound-
making machineries, in many ways they still strongly maintained the separation between
electronic processes realized in the studio and music performed live with traditional
instruments.16
On the other side of the Atlantic, things were also not far behind, with the founding
of the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center by composers Vladimir Ussachevsky
and Otto Luening one year later in 1952, and eventually on the West Coast, with the San
Francisco Tape Music Center, founded by composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender
in 1961. Although dyed-in-the-wool serialists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions
also keenly explored combining acoustic instruments with tape-based composition, the
interest of the American school of serialists in electronic synthesis was decidedly less at
first in comparison to their European counterparts. Still, despite the fact that the early
electronic studios could almost infinitely extend the possibilities of instrumental composi-
tion, the fixed manner of studio processes ultimately ruled out working with electronics
in a real-time, improvisational manner.

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 Cage and Indeterminacy

In contrast to what Nyman described as composers interested in a “defined time-object

whose materials, structuring, and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance,”
the “American” indeterminacy movement emerged, exemplified by the figure of John
Cage, who stated that he was “more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in
which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field
delineated by certain compositional ‘rules,’ ” than composing in a traditional manner
(Nyman 1999, 4). Cage presides over the twentieth-century avant-garde as both exagger-
ated myth and demure father figure, Romantic-era genius and humble Buddhist, an artist
and thinker who is both under- and overestimated for his contribution to the field of
real-time, improvisational-based composition.17
Born in Los Angeles, Cage studied with Schoenberg in the 1930s, but soon after began
to reject the dominance of traditional musical strictures such as harmony, which he felt
constrained the processes of music making, performing, and listening. Seeking to move
toward a more radical form of composition, one in which “sounds could be themselves”
freed from the control and intentionality of the composer, Cage began his lifelong obses-
sion, utilizing chance procedures that would help “deny the habitual or the hackneyed by
developing techniques to restrain or condition the immediate process of choice” (Ryan
1992, 414).
As a result of his studies of Zen Buddhism under D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University
in the 1940s and familiarity with the work of the prominent Indian art historian Ananda
Coomaraswamy, Cage would become the ultimate promoter of a compositional school of
nonintentionality and indeterminacy, one less about the construction of an a priori, pre-
given outcome in a score and instead about the real-time performance and mediating
techniques employed to bring such an event into being.18 Composition for Cage was
“purposeless play . . . this play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring
order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation but simply a way of waking
up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s
desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage 1961, 12).
Coomaraswamy’s oft-cited statement that art should imitate nature in its manner of
operation, rather than its appearance, became—almost ironically, given Cage’s nondog-
matic attitude—gospel for the composer. In 1950, at the young age of thirty-eight, Cage
first explored chance procedures by developing charts to plot rhythms for a musical work
for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Coming to the realization that “I could
compose according to moves on charts instead of according to my own taste” (Tomkins
1965, 105), Cage’s artistic direction radically shifted toward the use and/or construction
of processes and systems designed to yield a purposeless music—one with the potential for
surprising outcomes not dictated by the composer and that climaxed with the infamous
4’33” in 1952, a piece consisting only of silence.

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 In addition to work with chance procedures derived from the I Ching, dice rolls, and
other games, Cage’s move toward indeterminacy increasingly drew him to the direct
incorporation of live electronics. Like Varèse, whose earlier work he acknowledged, Cage
also saw the future of music dependent on the potential of new “electrical instruments”
to create extraordinary organizations of sound. Working with the integration of micro-
phone recordings of test tones played back on variable-speed turntables in his Imaginary
Landscape #1 (1939), the composer became more attracted to the possibilities of live elec-
tronic manipulation than the fixed structure of tape.19
Imaginary Landscape #4 (1952), for example, consisted of a score for twelve radio
receivers “played” by twenty-four performers (two per radio) over a four-minute
duration. With scored notations determining only the tuning, amplitude, and timbre
of the radios, the piece, according to modern music critic Paul Griffiths, was not
only “indeterminate of composition” but also “indeterminate of performance” (Griffiths
1981, 68).
Cage would continue to experiment with tape-based material and chance procedures
in other works of the same period (Imaginary Landscape #5 and Williams Mix), yet it was
his 1960 Cartridge Music, a work of indeterminate length involving amplification through
phonograph cartridge pickups of various objects manipulated by the performers, that
helped usher in a new era of live electronic processes in performance.
Before Cartridge Music, Cage had claimed that the invention of magnetic tape suddenly
gave composers a new kind of haptic control over the medium of sound, but now, the
introduction of electronics manipulated by performers would help bring about an even
more radical experimental situation “in which any determination made by a performer
would not necessarily be realizable”—a “performance which would now be indeterminate
of itself” (Griffiths 1981, 125).

Live Electronics I: 1960–1965

At first, Cage’s ideas had little impact on the European serialist avant-garde. His later
appearance in Darmstadt, in 1959, however, suddenly aroused strong interest in indeter-
minate (what Boulez in contradistinction would later call aleatoric) processes, including
live electronics that would further blur the borders between composition and performance
and move away from both the rigid systems of total serialism as well as the objet fixé of
pure, tape-based musique concrète. Cage’s Cartridge Music as well as the lesser-known and
indeterminate score WBAI (1960) designed to be played by “an operator of machines,”
may in fact be some of the earliest pieces to incorporate live electronics in a stage setting.
These works were quickly followed during the early 1960s by other composers on both
sides of the Atlantic intent on exploring electrical transformation, including Stockhausen,
Cage collaborators David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur,
Maurico Kagel, and a decade later, even Boulez.

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 With compositions like Mikrophonie I and II, Mixtur, Prozession, Kurzwellen, Mantra,
Solo, Pole, and Expo, all composed in the 1960s and 1970s, Stockhausen rose as one of
the first major Europeans to fully embrace electronic manipulation, becoming a master
in the live processing of ensemble-based music. Focused on the three processes of
sound—production, recording, and transformation—Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I and II
involved the playing of a tam tam or gong with multiple objects and its simultaneous
real-time alteration by way of simple electronic filters and amplifiers controlled by a
potentiometer.
Larger scale works like Mixtur processed complete orchestral ensembles through ring
modulators controlled by sine wave generators, thus transforming the “familiar orchestral
sound into a new magical sound world” (Stockhausen). In contrast to the indeterminacy
“school” emerging in the United States, however, Stockhausen still maintained thorough
control over the performance event, giving precise notational instructions for the treat-
ment of the sounds.
Cage’s collaborator, the virtuoso pianist David Tudor, who had worked on Cartridge
Music in Cage’s second home in upstate New York, can be easily credited with being one
of the first seriously trained musicians to envision a wholly new type of music created and
processed live through electronic circuits. Trained as a virtuoso pianist and specializing
in the highly complex Klavier (piano) music of Boulez and Stockhausen, Tudor’s intensive
collaborations with Cage quickly lead Tudor to abandon piano as his main instrument
and move into the realm of circuit bending and hacking as necessary compositional
tools.
With Cage’s Variations II (1962), Tudor employed an intricate series of transformations
using contact microphone and phonograph cartridge–amplified piano techniques that
were directly derived from Cage’s “score”—a graphic series of simple dots and lines
printed on numerous sheets of transparent Perspex with the distance between the lines
and points representing a measurement of the five essential musical parameters: duration,
timbre, frequency, amplitude, time of occurrence, as well as overall structure of the event
(number of events).
Tudor’s amplification of the piano’s strings as well as his use of microphones as excita-
tion devices resulted in an extremely complex system of feedback loops and resonances in
which tiny changes in the system could potentially lead to large-scale, unstable effects—a
process that Tudor would continue to refine in later works such as Bandoneon (1966),
Rainforest (1968 and 1973), and Forest Speech (1976).20
In addition to his electronically generated feedback processes, Tudor was also one of
the first musicians to fully explore the use of output processing (figure 5.3). Working
with everyday sound sources, Tudor’s processes operated on the assumption that any sound
source could be transformed into a complex sonic event by outboard processing, which
included everything from electronic circuits to the manipulation of the acoustics of a live
space through equalization and other types of filtering techniques.21 Fluorescent Sound

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Figure 5.3 David Tudor. Generalized Electronic Circuitry Diagram for Rainforest IV (1973). Research
Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

(1964), the first composition signed under his own name, was an early work combining
performance and sound installation in which Tudor, through contact microphones, ampli-
fied and processed the switching sounds of 250 fluorescent fixtures going on and off for
a performance with Robert Rauschenberg at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm while
touring with Merce Cunningham’s company.
This transformation of everyday objects into rich sonic tapestries would increasingly
develop in the late 1960s in his ongoing development of live processed works in collabo-
ration with Cage and Cunningham (which continued until Tudor’s death in 1996) and
projects for the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) organization, founded by
Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver [E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey, chapter 8] and Robert

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Rauschenberg in 1966 to promote collaborations with artists and engineers. Most
important was Tudor’s creation of his own ensemble in 1973: the group Composers
Inside Electronics, which was a mix of artists and musicians whose explicit goal was the
building and use of circuitry for “alternating signal sources in real time” for live
performance.22
Another set of early pioneers engaged in the live electronic transformation of composi-
tion was the ONCE Group. Founded in 1961 by composers Gordon Mumma, Robert
Ashley, Roger Reynolds, George Cacioppo, and Donald Scavarda, ONCE emerged out
of several different creative contexts in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1950s, including
Ashley’s and Mumma’s Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music as well as Mumma’s
own unique cybersonic instruments for use with Milton Cohen’s projection-dominated
Space Theater experiments [Projection in “The New Theater,” chapter 4], and live concert
settings.
More to the point, ONCE was less a collective than a series of annual festivals from
1961–1965 that brought together the crème de la crème of international, experimental
new music and intermedia performance artists, and filmmakers in a partial attempt to
“decentralize” experimental music activities away from the urban strongholds of New
York, Paris, and even Darmstadt. A huge success with audiences who hungered for new
artistic expression, ONCE acted as a platform also for exposing audiences to new techno-
logical practices increasingly being deployed in the production of mostly live performed
music.23
In particular, Gordon Mumma’s cybersonic electronic devices, which were seen as
“inseparable from the compositions themselves,” acted as a model for much future devel-
opment in live electronic instruments. His use of electronic circuitry in musical perfor-
mance was not just an afterthought, but followed “systems concepts”: a “total configuration”
in which “sound sources, electronic modification circuitry, control or logic circuitry,
playback apparatus (power amplifiers, loudspeakers, and the auditorium), and even social
conditions beyond the confines of technology” were part of the compositional process
(Mumma 1967).
Mumma’s 1963 composition Medium Size Mograph, for 4 Piano Hands and Cybersonic
modification engaged in Tudor-like explorations of piano sounds transformed through live
amplitude modulation, and MESA (1966), performed by Tudor with Mumma on “cyber-
sonic console,” was a commission for Merce Cunningham in which the composer worked
with the live capture of sounds from Tudor’s bandoneon, transforming and spatially dis-
tributing the instrument’s inharmonic frequencies through a six-channel speaker system
in order to create a “duo between the Bandoneonist and the electronic circuitry” (Mumma
1967).
Above all, what Mumma’s and Tudor’s work suggested is a gradual but critical shift
of emphasis from the previously all-important inscribed form of the musical score toward
the real-time manipulation of parameters, both musical as well as those made possible

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through electronic circuits. Their work also brought forth a new model for composition,
one not pregiven by the composer as a distinct set of commands enslaved to the Western
hierarchy of pitch but instead based on the solo or collective manipulation of sound’s
timbral and spatial nature as a distinct phenomena in and of itself.

Toward Live Electronic Music-Theater I

Partially energized by the improvisational possibilities of live electronics, musicians and

composers began to incorporate dramatic-theatrical elements and mixed-media forms in
their compositional practices. Cage’s statement that all music eventually leads to theater
because “theater takes place all the time wherever one is” acted as a rallying call for
adventuresome composers and sound artists during the 1960s (Cage 1961, 174). Pulled
by artistic directions outside of the strict formations of “classical music” practice, these
experimentalists threw themselves with abandon into creating works that treated music
and sound as the chief dramatic elements of a performance/event and contaminated
the concert hall with stage props, improvisation, audience participation, musicians func-
tioning as actors (in addition to musical performers), visual projections, and other
techniques.
Despite the boldness of experimental approaches, the move toward music- and sound-
based theatrics was still a marginalized activity in the larger context of the modern music
world, which was split between the more established avant-garde, who extended existing
forms like opera, and younger composer-musicians, who brought together disparate media
to create new experimental genres that hybridized music and theater, often through
technology.
One trajectory was pursued by many of the largely Western European–trained compos-
ers of Stockhausen’s generation who became interested in the Gesamtkunstwerk of the
operatic form. Yet, despite the interest in expanding the musical language of opera
through the new compositional languages arising from serialism and postserialism, many
of these attempts still retained the dramatic stagecraft and orchestral vocabularies of tra-
ditional opera and rarely incorporated electronic processes.24 A second area of exploration
during the mid to late 1960s involved what composer and critic Eric Salzman called
“experimental forms of interaction between the concert stage and theater”—in short, those
kinds of “musico-theatrical performance works that clearly did not belong in the opera
house, the Broadway theater or the traditional concert stage” (Salzman 2000, 9).
In essence, composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Peter Maxwell Davies, Cage, Berio,
Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, George Crumb, and Dutch-born Dick Raijmakers,
searched for nothing less than a total “theatricalization of the concert hall,” in which
musical performers had to negotiate unstable conceptual and technological systems and
obstacles. Most of these theatrical works were small-scale, chamber-based events that,
while pushing the theatrical envelope, were still situated in a concert setting.

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 For instance, Stockhausen’s 1955 Gruppen featured three separate orchestras seated
across from each other in which sounds from one group were “flung” across the perfor-
mance space to the other musicians, imitating the spatial movement of sound normally
achieved through electronic means. Although many of the composer’s later works such as
Trans (1971), Inori (1973), Herbstmusik (1974), and his gigantic seven-day Licht opera
(1977–2003) feature mimes, musicians in costumes, unusual lighting, and specially
designed multilevel sets and theatrical props, Stockhausen’s theater work Originale
(1961)—a musical happening made up of eighteen scenes that could be performed ran-
domly and featuring David Tudor, Nam June Paik, and painter Mary Bauermeister—was
his only truly theatrical work that explored other media at the same hierarchical level as
music.25
Another major contribution to the field was the “instrumental theater” of the Argen-
tinian Mauricio Kagel. Frustrated in his attempt to set up an electronic music studio in
Argentina, Kagel emigrated to Germany in 1957. In works such as Sur Scene (1960),
Antithese (1962; a “play for one actor with electronic and public sounds”), Phonophonie
(1964), Tremens (1963–1965), Camera Obscura (1960), and Staatstheater (1970), Kagel
turned both musical and theatrical conventions upside down while incorporating elec-
tronic instrumentation and processes into his works that specifically served dramaturgical
purposes rather than just purely sonic interest. In Tremens (subtitled “A scenic montage
of a medical test”), one of his more notorious works, a live ensemble attempted to create
a mental scenography of delirium for a test patient by electronically distorting recordings
that the patient is subjected to in a small room. Other music theater works, particularly
by composers such as British-trained Peter Maxwell Davies, explored the transformation
of musicians into actors or props, extended vocal techniques, and the increased integration
of slides, film, and projected images as integral to the musical score.26
If these experiments expanded the aesthetic envelope of the concert hall, another group
of artists began to move away from its formalities altogether, instead establishing
themselves in the ever-growing intermedia scenes emerging from the visual arts. Taking
place in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo and involving musicians, “sound,” and visual
artists, international movements such as Fluxus and its Japanese wing Group Ongaku
picked up on Cage’s theatrics and dispensed with traditional roles of listening and
spectating.27 With happenings that fell between medias or what Fluxus participant
Dick Higgins labeled intermedia, Fluxus performances frequently involved human-laden
“compositions” incorporating sculpture, poetry, instrument playing, and social games that
resembled chance happenings and rule-driven events more than “concerts” per se and
sought to bring together the disparate and somewhat fixed worlds of musical and visual
performance in order to transform both into participatory, open-ended activities.
Another important center of gravity for mixed-media music-theater was Ann Arbor,
Michigan. Along with the ONCE festival, composers Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma,
Mary Ashley, and others also formed the loosely knitted ONCE Group, which ran from

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1964 to 1969 and specialized in the development of new mixed-media theatrical events
with a particular emphasis on live electronics as an integral dramaturgical component.
Ashley had already started to investigate the coupling of theatrical conventions with
electronic processes in his 1964 work The Wolfman, an anarchic piece in which the voice
of a “sinister lounge singer” is repeatedly subjected to feedback-based modulation that
built up a continuously changing live wall of sound.
With ONCE, he subsequently continued to explore what he called “electronic theater”
in such works as In Memoriam Kit Carson (1963), Combination Wedding and Funeral (1965),
Unmarked Interchange (1965), Night Train (1966), That Morning Thing (1967), and Purpose-
ful Lady Slow Afternoon (1970). Taking their works on tour around the United States,
ONCE mixed theatrical and media events as elements within the larger context of musical
compositions and assaulted audiences with their bold use of simultaneity, asynchronous
use of musical sound and live manipulated speech, reenactments of existing texts and
films, and everyday pedestrian performers.28
A majority of these Gesamtkunstwerk took place in North America, Europe, and Japan,
but there were also active movements emerging in Latin America, particularly in
Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, where younger composers shuttling back and
forth between Europe and their own countries were experimenting with mixed music-
theater forms within indigenous political and social contexts. Known for composing the
earliest electro-acoustic taped works in Brazil, Brazilian-born composer Jorge Antunes
also created a series of mixed music-theater works including Ambiente I (1965) and Cancao
da Paz (1965), both of which involved electronic tape playback as well as kinetic sculptural
forms and dramatic lighting, and Pequena Peca Aleatoria (1966), scored for voice, piano,
and theremin.
More recognized internationally was the work of Peruvian composer César Bolaños,
who was instrumental in setting up the first electronic music studio at the CLAEM (Latin
American Higher Studies Musical Centre of Torcuato DiTella Institute) in the 1960s. In
addition to tape music, Bolaños’s music-theater works such as Alfa-Omega (1967), I-10-
AIFG/Rbt-1 (1968), and Flexum (1969) also experimented with mixing dancers, slides,
lighting effects, and the amplification and processing of acoustic instruments, placing
them in a similar formal context to the work going on to the north.29

Live Electronics II: The Second Wave (1966–1980)

With the considerable influences of pop, rock, and jazz, the gradual eclipse of the domi-
nant postwar European avant-garde in favor of the new North American centers of New
York, Ann Arbor, and the San Francisco Bay Area and the ever-increasing position of
electronic technologies in the fabrication of sound, the socio-cultural-technical explosion
of the late 1960s that generated radical shifts in other artistic practices left no stone
unturned in the experimental music world. Suddenly, directly or indirectly, music was

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seen as a means of making politics by reflecting counter cultural mores of collectivity
versus the solitary genius hierarchy of lofty composer and lowly musician.
In Europe, collectives like Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV),30 AMM (1965),31 The Scratch
Orchestra (1969),32 and even Stockhausen’s own ensemble33 incorporated either commune-
like social principles with instruments such as the newly invented Moog synthesizer, brain
wave devices that could read EEG signals and heart rate sensors (MEV), and freely mixed
electronics, traditional instruments, jazz, oriental-influenced music into stream-of-
consciousness performances by what MEV cofounder Frederick Rzewski called “a new
musician,” whose role is that of an “organizer and re-distributor of energies” (Nyman
1999, 130). Slightly more organized than MEV, composer Cornelius Cardew’s AMM
sought to understand the production of sound itself by either creating new sonorities
through Cagean-prepared techniques or freely mixing acoustic and electronic noise into
stream of consciousness improvisation sessions of indeterminate duration.
In the United States, this “electronic collective” mentality was also apparent in groups
like the Sonic Arts Union (1966),34 the loose collective of musicians like Pauline Oliveros,
Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Larry Austin, and Terry Riley who collaborated on an
electronic music series (Sonics) in San Francisco and were later instrumental in founding
the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the New York–based Electric Circus (1970),35 La
Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, and David Tudor’s Rainforest and Composers
Inside Electronics projects.
In particular, Sonic Arts Union, which formed out of the ONCE Group in 1966 and
Tudor’s Composers Inside Electronics lead the way in establishing improvisation with
homemade circuitry as a legitimate form of music making. Experimenting with group-
driven as well as solo compositions from its individual members, Sonic Arts pioneered
composition as a dynamic process—one between the acoustic environment interacting
with live instruments in closed-loop systems of input and processing. While creating new
instruments through their signal processing fusion of acoustics with electronic circuits,
the members of Sonic Arts, particularly Alvin Lucier, also were fascinated with treating
acoustic space itself as a tunable instrument.
Using electronic processes to explore the areas of sound “that would never in ordinary
circumstances reach our ears,” Lucier’s performances involved the sonification of unusual
phenomena like alpha brain waves generated by an almost motionless sitting performer
(Music for Solo Performer, 1965; see figure 5.4), the vibration of surfaces captured by
sensors in an acoustically sealed space (Shelter, 1970), ecolocators carried by blindfolded
performers (Vespers, 1968), and in his most well-known work, the gradual increase of
resonances in a space through the continual overdubbing of a single spoken sentence
(I am Sitting In A Room, 1970). Similarly, the work of composer-performer Pauline Oliveros
during the same period also stressed the use of natural processes created by the acoustics
of real spaces as a supplement to the possibilities of electronically generated transforma-
tion of sound.

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Figure 5.4 Alvin Lucier. Music for Solo Performer. From Robert Ashley’s television opera, Music with
Roots in the Aether. Video copyright © Robert Ashley. Photo copyright © Philip Makanna. Used by
permission.

Additionally, electronics and amplification techniques being pioneered in the explod-

ing pop music scene by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix; psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd,
Soft Machine, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention; and more experi-
mental ones like the Velvet Underground would also have strong repercussions on those
outside of the rock world, blurring pop with the classically trained avant-garde (Minimal-
ism), jazz (Miles Davis’s and Chick Corea’s radical recording experiments and the down-
right surreal work of Sun Ra (who transformed jazz into electronic music), and other
forms.36 As evidenced by musician and artist Brian Eno’s onstage, real-time processing in
his early performances with the band Roxy Music in 1973, electronic transformation of
sound in performance was not only restricted to the classical avant-garde but had reached
popular music as well.37
One group of classically trained composer-musicians that was fast to exploit the
burgeoning technical developments in popular music was the loosely dubbed “minimal-
ists” on the U.S. West Coast and in New York. Although not employing the signal pro-
cessing and improvisational techniques common to many electronic ensembles at the
time, composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley,
and later John Adams, Paul Dresher, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, and Michael Galasso
were directly influenced by and quickly incorporated the technical devices of rock

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music such as tape loops and amplification and orchestrating works that combined
both traditional acoustic instruments with new electronic ones used in the pop world.
Furthermore, these composers distanced themselves from the academic complexity of
serial and postserial techniques, instead turning to studies of non-Western musical forms
such as Indian ragas (Riley, Young), African drumming structures, and Indonesian
Gamelan (Reich) in order to construct compositions that employed extremely simple
harmonic principles, techniques of repetition and phasing that, as Philip Glass claimed,
“must be listened to as a pure sound event, an act without any dramatic structure”
(Mertens 2004, 309).
What is perhaps more important, however, is the fundamental shift in the relationship
between composer and musician that the minimalist composers pioneered. Trained in
traditional music composition schools like Juilliard or UC Berkeley, Glass, Reich, and
Young also followed the trend of other collectives by founding their own ensembles as a
way of getting their music played and heard by contemporary audiences. As early as 1962,
composer La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate was the first
of the minimalist-formed musical ensembles dedicated to the performance of a single
composer’s music—in this case, the gradual and continuously evolving drone-like music
of Young.38
More prominent among the minimalist performance groups was that of the Philip
Glass Ensemble.39 Founded by Glass in 1967, the ensemble consisted not only of seven
musicians playing instruments like flutes, strings, and amplified organs, but more radi-
cally, starting in 1970, also a “sound designer,” the producer and engineer Kurt Munkacsi.
In another nod to pop music’s influence on the experimental music world, in Glass’s
concerts with his ensemble, Munkacsi was given an even more prominent position on
stage than the musicians: dead center at a mixing desk (which had become an instrument
in and of itself) where the on-stage monitor mix for the musicians as well as the acoustic-
electric mix for the audience could be continually adjusted as part of the performance.
Glass’s music for theater, dance, film, opera, and even television commercials would
become highly successful in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually making him one of the most
often commissioned avant-garde composers.40
Even though many of the more politically radical 1960s collectives like AMM and
Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra had dissolved by the mid 1970s, a growing number of their
former members began to be associated with universities, continuing their artistic and
research practices while teaching a new generation of musical experimentalists. Between
the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan
in the late 1970s, one of most lively scenes arose in the San Francisco Bay Area, where
David Behrman and Robert Ashley joined the faculty of the all-girls private school Mills
College in Oakland, California, teaching in the college’s graduate Center for Contempo-
rary Music at a time when advanced students were already becoming versed in electronics
and early computer programming.41

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 Another important scene appeared in Amsterdam in the late 1960s around the Dutch
composers Dick Raaijmakers, Peter Schat, Konrad Boehmer, Jan van Vlijmen, Misha
Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, and later, Michel Waisvisz. Frustrated
by the sterility and antiphysical nature of tape music, the group founded an informal
experimental research laboratory (the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Muziek or STEIM)
whose main objective was developing new technologies for use in live, real-time electronic
music performance.
Under the later directorship of Waisvisz, a radical former informal student of
Raaijmakers who joined the collective in 1973 and was interested in early circuit
bending, STEIM would become one of the only international centers devoted to the
development of electronically augmented instruments specifically designed for the
nuance and physical actions inherent to live stage performance (figure 5.5). In particular,
Waisvisz’s interest in haptic contact with electronics led him to develop the Cracklebox,
the first in a long series of touch instruments developed and sold through STEIM through-
out the 1970s and 1980s.
Intuitively played by the user making contact with a series of cheap electronic circuits
constructed out of unstable oscillators that allowed for the production of sounds, the
instrument’s rough and rebellious sonorities reacted against what Waisvisz described as
“the clean and high-tech quality of the electronic music from the fifties and early sixties.”
The Cracklebox’s “touched electronics” were soon deployed in numerous music-theater

Figure 5.5 Michel Waisvisz, 1971. Courtesy Kristina Andersen/STEIM.

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events in which floors, walls, bicycles, objects, costumes, and plants were linked up
with Cracklebox circuits and turned into playful and animate sound making substances
(Waisvisz 2004).

The (Micro) Computer Arrives

The numerous accounts of the history of computer sound have rarely focused on the impact
of computer-generated processes on live performance contexts, partially because the com-
puter’s initial connection with audio arose chiefly from industrial and academic research
contexts and not directly from musicians or composers’ experiments.42 The interest in the
live manipulation of sonic parameters through circuit bending and electronics “hacking”
at places like STEIM and Mills College, however, made it almost inevitable that compos-
ers would quickly become attached to the potential of cheap, portable microcomputers as
they became available in the mid 1970s. As legend has it, some of the earliest digital
computer-generated sounds were produced in 1957 by engineer Max Matthews at Bell
Labs as an extension of studies in computer-generated speech processes, quickly spinning
off entire research programs in areas as diverse as digital signal processing, music percep-
tion and cognition, psychoacoustics, and speech analysis.43
As early as the 1950s, however, composers were already imagining ways in which
computers could be used in the compositional process; if not through the generation of
sounds, then with algorithmic structures to generate potentially indeterminate and evo-
lutionary musical events. Greek-born, Paris-based composer Iannis Xenakis—critical of
the “linear polyphony” of the serialists, which, he argued, destroyed the potential for a
more detailed and complex micro-exploration of sound—began applying probability and
game theoretic decision models to composition.
Educated in engineering and mathematics, and having studied with Messiaen and
designed the Philips pavilion with Le Corbusier, Xenakis, like Varèse, was interested in
the architectural, spatial dimensions of sound, particularly its larger macrostructural
behavior. In early works like Pithoprakta (1956), ST/4 (1956–1962), ST/10 (1956–1962),
and ST/48 (1959–1962), Xenakis was already using his understanding of the computer’s
potential for high-speed calculation (in this case, an IBM 7090 mainframe) to generate
what he labeled stochastic compositions—probabilistically generated behaviors from
random numbers, which produced musical pieces of both intense structural complexity
as well as dense, dynamically wavering sonorities.
At the same time, while working on problems of statistical mechanics with the massive
ILLIAC mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chemist and com-
poser Lejaren Hiller also saw the potential of algorithmically generated compositional
techniques. In collaboration with his graduate student colleague Leonard Isaacson, Hiller
used programming techniques derived from the computation of polymer structures,
including probability functions, Markov chains, and other mathematical techniques to

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generate the Illiac Suite composition—the first machine-generated score with specific
contrapuntal and harmonic relationships determined by the computer.44
Even as a handful of computer-literature composers and engineers interested in music
painstakingly worked at Bell Labs in the mid 1960s to create the first computer-generated
sound-based compositions,45 the non-real-time, time-shared nature of computer technol-
ogy at the time coupled with the expensive human and technical infrastructure required
suggested that such machines were not exactly amenable to live manipulation on stage.46
Consequently, it took until the mid 1970s for digital technologies to become compact
and fast enough in processor speed and memory allocation for artists to engage them in
real-time performance practice.47
Not surprisingly, the first known use of cheap, portable computing technology for
real-time musical performance took place in the San Francisco Bay Area among the tech-
nology-savvy graduate students at Mills College’s Center for Contemporary Music during
the academic tenures of David Behrman and Robert Ashley. According to Behrman and
Joel Ryan, in contrast to the Bell Labs–like scientific research atmosphere across the bay
at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA),
the Mills scene was driven by an anti-authoritarian attitude combined with an experi-
mental atmosphere of tinkering and aesthetic curiosity.48
With the 1976 release of the KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor), an early microcom-
puter with about 1 kilobyte of RAM that was programmed by machine code and cost
around $245, hybrid hacker-composers soon began to combine their interests in live
performance and music composition with more arcane things like mastering the KIM-1’s
6502 microprocessor’s machine language by programming the device in hexadecimal
code. Like the famous Homebrew Computer club, further south in the dead center of
Silicon Valley, that rapidly spawned companies like Apple Computer literally out of
garages, the Mills scene also benefited from its geographic and aesthetic proximity to the
center of the worldwide technology industry as well as the still-counter-cultural, artistic
atmosphere reigning in Berkeley and San Francisco.
Considered the first “microcomputer network band,” the first organized group of KIM-
1 users included musicians such as Behrman, Jim Horton, John Bischoff, and Rich Gold,
who dubbed themselves the League of Automatic Composers. With a debut performance
in Berkeley in 1978, the League’s performances consisted of each human member’s KIM-1
networked together through flimsy, 8-bit parallel ports through which each device could
be used to generate its own sound as well as receive and process data from other machines
on the “network.” In the midst of such technical tinkering, the notion of “concert” was,
in effect, turned upside down, especially with the informal, biweekly performance events
that were later held at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts (figure 5.6).
Featuring casual drop-in sessions in which audiences would be treated to the compos-
ers’ soldering, hacking, and connecting of their computers and then listening to the results
of the machines communicating with each other, the League’s events were a cross between

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Figure 5.6 The League of Automatic Composers. Photo Eva Shoshany.

a hobbyist electronics fair and a geek show-and-tell that involved the production of sound
and circuits in a socially conducive atmosphere.49 As Chris Brown and John Bischoff
have written, the introduction of microcomputers marked, “the first time in history that
individuals could own and operate computers free from large institutions” (Bischoff and
Brown 2002).50
Based on the fundamental technological and economic shift that marked the move
toward microcomputers as compositional tools for real-time performance, other composers
outside of the Bay Area also became interested. Introduced to the KIM-1 by League musi-
cians—in particular, David Behrman—composer and improviser George Lewis sought to
translate his studies of both the improvisational nature of human interaction rituals and
his deep musical jazz upbringing into complex machine-language programs for early
microcomputers that “didn’t just respond with a predictable transformation” but could
be a costructurer of music, interacting in an unpredictable and musically rich manner with
the playing of traditional musicians (Roads 1985, 80).
Lewis’s interest in microcomputer technology was linked with his deeper fascination
in improvised music as both “a carrier for history and cultural identity” where “ ‘sound’
becomes identifiable, not with timbre alone, but with the expression of personality, the
assertion of agency, the assumption of responsibility, and an encounter with history,
memory, and identity” (Lewis 2000, 37).

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 Another early adopter of real-time systems was the composer Joel Chadabe. Based at
SUNY Albany, Chadabe was fascinated by the unstable, unpredictable relationships
between input, processing, and output that digital and analog systems engendered, begin-
ning to work with real-time processes as early as 1970.51 In the composition Echoes (1970)
for solo instrument and electronics, for example, sounds that were played from a score
with fixed pitches but open dynamics were fed by way of a microphone into an analog/
digital delay system, transformed, and then played back into the environment through a
multichannel speaker system.
With the results consisting of not simply the initial input but a transformation due
to the components and unpredictable behavior of the system (what he described as “the
system gives back something extra”), the performer and the system in Chadabe’s work
became mutually codependent on each other (Chadabe 1977, 7). Chadabe continued to
exploit such feedback loops in later compositions involving control of analog synthesis
through a digital system called Daisy in the studio, including Flowers (1975) and Play 1
(1977), in which a computer program controlled the behavior of an analog synthesizer,
and in 1977, in live onstage control of synthesizers (an expensive, early digital Synclavier)
with computers (Solo and Rhythms).

Interactive Systems: Composition Among Computers, Programs, and Humans

As collective authorship with electronics characterized much musical experimentation

with technology in the 1960s and 1970s, the next wave of innovation involved improvi-
sational systems between computers and human performers and between machines them-
selves. The appearance of portable desktop computing with increased processing power
and memory together with the MIDI protocol, which was established in 1983 and enabled
different manufacturer’s musical equipment to “talk” with each other, helped composers
almost overnight to manipulate synthesis and processing parameters with the aid of com-
puters in live, on-stage performance conditions.52
In creating what Chadabe called a system that “has an output that is virtually immedi-
ate in response to its input, making it possible to regulate the system during operation,”
real-time interaction fundamentally shifted composition paradigms from notational
systems to programming languages, communication protocols, and software environ-
ments, claiming that the musical instrument was, in essence, “an organization of software
and hardware” (Chadabe 1977, 5).
As Joel Ryan, one of the handful of real-time experts who also emerged from the
Mills scene, later remarked, the notion of more nuanced expression provided through the
possibilities of human-machine interaction was (and is) a strange paradox. Given that
one of the fundamental aspects of real-time interaction is to encode musical ideas
into a form that has no musical analog (computer code), one still has to transcend

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such levels of purely symbolic description (again, code) toward the possibilities of
musical invention through the embodied, temporal act of live performance itself (Ryan
1992, 414–418).53
Made apparent by the growing number of composers who almost by default became
technologists and programmers in order to coax machines into becoming musically inter-
esting partners, the advent of interactive, computer-augmented composition had a radical
impact on the role of composers, shifting them away from traditional score writing and
toward the role of technological inventors and innovators. “More than ever before,” wrote
American composer and technologist Tod Machover, “the composer is asked to play many
roles simultaneously: researcher, instrument builder, performer, theoretician, as well as
creator” (Roads 1985, 90).
Even as groups of musicians were freed from dependence on expensive research infra-
structures to create real-time performance, the shift toward software-controlled, real-time
digital synthesis also quickly became a central topic in the key computer music research
centers internationally. In 1977, Stanford’s CCRMA commissioned the construction of
the Samson Box, one of the first large-scale, real-time, hardware-based digital synthesizers
that could accomplish signal processing and synthesis by compositional parameters speci-
fied in a custom-written software language (Bill Schottstaedt’s Pla).
Another major locus for real-time computer music research was the Paris-based IRCAM
(Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), directed by Boulez from
1977–2000. Founded on the French government’s decision to create a center for research
into musical research/creation, IRCAM quickly attracted scientists and artists in all
branches of sound-based research, from psychoacoustics and musical perception to digital
signal processing, sensing, and input devices.
It was also at IRCAM that Miller Puckette, a Harvard mathematics PhD, authored
what would eventually become one of the first commercially available software environ-
ments for the control of MIDI-based synthesizers: the Max programming language.54
Challenged to write a control system for IRCAM’s large-scale 4X (originally 4C) real-time
digital signal processor so that the computer could follow a score in conjunction with a
live musician, Puckette first developed a non-GUI-based, command-line-driven language
that could directly control parameters on the machine. Eventually writing a graphics-
based editor running on a Macintosh and communicating with the 4X via MIDI, Puck-
ette’s “Patcher” program in many ways set the standard at the time for real-time software
control of larger, more powerful computers (Puckette 1998, 2002).
In line with the paradigm set by Max, composers who had been working with real-time
systems such as Joel Chadabe, George Lewis, and Morton Subotnick also pursued the
creation of interactive software environments for exploring performative interaction pos-
sibilities between computers, synthesizers, and other sound-producing modules by way
of the MIDI standard. Developed at STEIM between 1985 and 1987, Lewis’s “Voyager”

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Figure 5.7 George Lewis. Photo Ian Cummings. Courtesy George Lewis.

environment and composition was described by the composer as “a virtual improvising

orchestra” that could generate “both complex responses to the musician’s playing and
independent behavior that arises from its own internal processes” by listening to and
responding to live musicians (Lewis 2000, 33; see figure 5.7).
Also working with real-time control methods in the 1970s through tape-based signals
that controlled external electronics, composer Morton Subotnick—in collaboration
with his student and software programmer Mark Coniglio [Sensate Dances, chapter 6]—
developed the graphic software environment Interactor LPT (1985), which allowed live
performers to interact with external MIDI devices like samplers and mixers. Having shied
away from electronic produced work for years, even Boulez again jumped onto the interac-
tive bandwagon, using the research infrastructure of IRCAM to develop works such as
Repons (1986), which relied as much on live, computer-generated timbres as it did on its
acoustic instrumentalists.55 Judging from these shifts toward real time, what becomes
more than evident is that composition and performance were increasingly drawn together

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partly as a result of machines, further eclipsing the traditional separation between com-
poser and musician while forging a new relationship between composer-musicians and
programmers.

Toward Live Electronic Music-Theater II

The artistic possibilities of human-to-machine-to-machine interaction also spawned a

generation of composers and performers who, comfortable with such techniques, looked
to use them in new hybrid music, media, and theater works, once again turning composers
and musicians into theater makers. In contrast to many 1960s experiments in Europe that
employed tape-based effects and pushed the contextual envelope of what was considered
music, composers at the end of the 1980s created works attesting to the mixing between
high and low culture, fusing the concert hall and the alternative, noncommercial perfor-
mance gallery with genres such as rock, jazz, experimental opera, theater, video, and other
electronic media, simultaneously scrambling the traditional roles of composers, directors,
actors, singers, dancers, choreographers, and musicians.
The financial and production support of American organizations such as New Music
America and the American Music Theater Festival, European centers like IRCAM and
international festival networks guaranteed a steady diet of new music theater that became
a key vehicle for composers to find sympathetic audiences for their boundary-defying
works. The example of so-called “cross-over” artists like Laurie Anderson, who brought
experimental electronic music and performance art practices to a popular audience
with her MIDI-controlled violin in 1981 and signing with Warner Bros. Records in 1982,
put forth the idea that the mass public was ready for genre-breaking, music-media
fusions.
One of the most technologically driven composers working with music-theater and
live computer-based interaction was Tod Machover. Trained at Juilliard, Machover became
composer in residence and then director of musical research at IRCAM in 1980, producing
chamber works such as Light (1979) and Fusion Fugace (1981) that combined traditional
instruments with computer sounds generated from IRCAM’s 4C and 4X digital audio
processing computers. He later embarked on a series of dramatic projects that expanded
operatic genres through computer interaction.
Valis (1987), based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name and described as
“the first computer opera,” was a futuristic commission by the Pompidou Center in con-
junction with IRCAM that combined elements of sound poetry, speech, rock-tinged
electronics, and opera. Featuring six vocalists whose voices were occasionally transformed
by real-time DSP (digital signal processing) from the 4X, a massive video wall, and an
orchestra consisting solely of two musicians playing keyboards and percussion, Valis
introduced Machover’s notion of hyperinstruments: traditional instruments whose
timbral and rhythmic possibilities could be widely extended with virtuoso performers

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through sensing and computer augmentation techniques like score following and per-
former gesture analysis.
Developed within the research context of the MIT Media Lab, where he is a
professor, Machover’s next theatrical project, The Brain Opera (1996), which premiered
at Lincoln Center and was dedicated to artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky,
combined a forty-five-minute stage performance with a gigantic, playable walk through
environment (what Machover termed the “Mind Forest”) filled with sensor-based interac-
tion systems. Offering Machover’s hyperinstruments to the general public, the “Mind
Forest” featured a series of audience-interaction musical games such as “The Gesture
Wall,” which allowed visitors to sculpt with musical fragments of sound through
gestures captured by electrical field sensing and the video game–inspired “Harmonic
Driving” installation, where visitors sitting in a pod-like device could “drive through” an
existing piece of music, altering its behavior through real-time control of its musical
parameters.56
Although Machover’s access to the enormous research and infrastructure resources of
the MIT Media Lab was an exception, other technically adept or curious composers like
Morton Subotnick and Robert Ashley developed theatrical works where electronic visual
and musical elements were seamlessly woven together.57 Many of these projects were
shown in either alternative gallery environments like The Kitchen in New York, which
presented new musical experiments within the framework of the visual and media arts or
university performing contexts. Similar directions were also found in the solo perfor-
mances of vocal artists such as Diamanda Galas, Pamela Z, Shelly Hirsch, and Jerry Hunt.
Galas achieved particular notoriety through the electronic transformation of her three-
and-a-half-octave voice, which at times verged on glossolalia in multimedia works like
Plague Mass (1990) and Vena Cava (1992), both of which examined the mental and physi-
cal extremities of AIDS victims’ experience.
Even more unusual was the Texas-based occultist composer-musician-performer Jerry
Hunt. Fascinated by esoteric systems like the Kabbala, Tarot, and alchemy, Hunt’s
obscure yet atavistic performances were combinations of theater and shamanistic ritual,
integrating what the composer labeled as “interrelated electronic, mechanic, and social
sound-sight interactive transactional systems.”58 Works such as Ground: Haramand Plane
(1985), Birome (zone): Plane (fixtures) (1992), and Transform Stream: (Core) (1992) generated
by Hunt’s development of hermetic, numerological systems and codes, unfolded during
ceremonial-like solo performances that featured the composer shaking rattles and talis-
mans and shouting incantations, all the while producing timbrally and rhythmically
complex sounds through a variety of home-brewed sensing systems like infrared detectors
and crude black-and-white video camera arrays.
Other composers, particularly early minimalists like John Adams, Philip Glass, and
Steve Reich, conceived electronic and acoustic music theater on the even grander scale of
new opera. John Adams’s operatic works such as Nixon in China (1985), The Death of

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Klinghoffer (1990), I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky (1995), and Doctor
Atomic (2007) all combined the use of samplers and amplified singers with traditional
orchestral instruments and spanned several theatrical genres, ranging from large-scale
“docu-opera” to Broadway-style music theater.
After the monumental Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), and Akhtnaten
(1983), Glass turned to smaller chamber operas (Hydrogen Jukebox, written by Allen
Ginsberg [1988]) as well as projection spectacle (1,000 Airplanes on the Roof [1990]). Steve
Reich, who began using samplers in his Different Trains commission for the avant-garde
Kronos Quartet, wrote two “high-tech multimedia music theater works” (The Cave [1990]
and Three Tales [2002]) with large-scale, multiscreen video landscapes by video artist Beryl
Korot. Like Adams, Reich also was interested in the exploration of landmark historical
events, particularly in Three Tales, which examined the transformation of society through
technology such as the hydrogen bomb testing at Bikini Atoll and the creation of Dolly,
the first cloned sheep.
Another composer who sought to create new theatrical models using live electronics
was the “postminimalist” composer Paul Dresher. A former student of Terry Riley and
then Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson at UCSD, Dresher was as much drawn to the
collaborative model inherent in theater making as he was to the invention of new kinds
of live performance technologies. A guitarist and keyboardist by training, Dresher devel-
oped an elaborate, hardware-based, four-track, closed-tape loop system for live multitrack
recording, processing, and playback in 1979, which he subsequently used for live over-
dubbing in performance until 1997.59
In 1985, Dresher formed the Paul Dresher Ensemble, a composer-led band dedicated
to creating new music theater works. In collaboration with virtuoso tenor Rinde Eckert,
Dresher’s American Trilogy—featuring the theater works Slow Fire (1985), Power Failure
(1987), and Pioneer (1989)—used the techniques and sonorities of an onstage rock band
while dramaturgically exploring the sociopolitical underpinnings of disaffected contem-
porary American life.
The interest in mediated music theater was not just confined to the United States. In
Europe, dozens of younger composers working with media-saturated performance explored
unusual theatrical contexts for their music and sound work, freely mixing genres and
contexts like radio plays, sound installations, or citywide festivals. German-born composer
Heiner Goebbels achieved recognition for his compositional work with East German
playwright Heiner Müller and for his “staged concerts” like Newton’s Casino (1990), Ou
bien le débarquement désastreux (Or the Hapless Landing) (1992), Black on White (1996), Erarit-
jaritjaka (2004), and Stifters Dinge (2007), all of which combined music, text, scenography,
and performers.
Known for their sound installation projects that transformed the sonic identity of
public spaces, Austrian-born composer Sam Auinger and American Bruce Odland (known
collectively as O A) also experimented with city-scale performances in their epic

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performance Stadttraum (1991), a “sonic hologram” that “resonated” the city of Salzburg
for Mozart’s 200th anniversary.60
In a follow-up to his works in Brussels in 1958 and in Montréal in 1967, even Iannis
Xenakis pushed further in his interest in totalizing media spaces of electronic timbres,
architecture, and real-time, computer-controlled light.61 His Polytope de Cluny (1972),
installed in the Cluny baths in Paris, consisted of an “automated spectacle with lights,
lasers, and electronic flashes,” accompanied by a seven-channel tape and digitally con-
trolled by a computer punch tape. Even more spectacular was the light and sound Le
Diatope (1978), a huge, temporary, tent-like structure erected for the opening of the Centre
Pompidou in 1978 that housed a similar spectacle of computer-controlled lasers, lights,
and the playback of the terrifying seven-channel electronic composition Le Legend d’Eer
(After Plato).

The PowerBook Era and the Aesthetic of the Digital

Arguably, the introduction of the Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3 laptop computer in

1997 ushered in perhaps the most radical technocultural shift to electronically created
music and sound in performance since the availability of the microcomputer some twenty-
five years before. The ability of musicians to rebuild hardware instruments that they previ-
ously had to lug around on tour entirely in software was certainly unprecedented. Powerful
real-time synthesis and sampling software environments that a few years before were oper-
ated only in computer music research centers like Miller Puckette/David Zicarelli’s Max
(and the signal-processing objects MSP), Barry Vercoe’s Csound, and James McCartney’s
SuperCollider could now be run on laptops by musicians who carried such new digital
instruments in their backpacks from international gig to gig.62 Historically separate,
musicians operating in the myriad of club-culture genres like techno, house, drum
and bass, ambient, and jungle were utilizing the same computational processes for their
sonic ontologies that a few years before were the strict domain of engineers and DSP
researchers, creating an almost otherworldly meeting between club and computer music
electronica.63
The aesthetic shifts from what became known as laptop music were far greater than just
neoteric technical possibilities. The shift to the laptop as the instrument of electronic
sound culture signaled an even more extreme move toward an aesthetics of the digital
conditioned by software and hardware. Artists as varied as Oval, farmersmanual, Micros-
toria, Autechre, Christian Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider,
Autopoesis (Ekkehard Ehlers), Thomas Köner, Tim Hecker, Tesuo Inoue, Ryoji Ikeda,
Antje Fuchs (AGF), Pan Sonic, Peter Rehberg, Florian Hecker, Kristin Erickson (aka
Kevin Blechdom), Joshua Kit Clayton, Stefan Betke/Pole, Mouse on Mars, Stefan Mahieu,
Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Kim Cascone, Francisco Lopez, Rei Harakami, Akufen,

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Figure 5.8 Robotron—Signal—Raster-Noton (DE). Elektra May 2008—Usine C. Photo Camil Scorteanu,
Conception Lévy.

Taylor Dupree, Yasunao Tone, Scanner, Exonemo, and Richard Chartier, among hundreds
of others, excelled in creating musical evocations of precise reduction that occasionally
bordered on minimalist fetishism, using the computational formalism of software to
generate either crystalline or almost microsonic abstractions that invoked the visual image
of sparsely populated, clinical white laboratories or pulsing transformations of techno beats
into ambient acoustic fields (figure 5.8).64 Here, music and sound design inevitably
blurred, as did sound and pixel, reflected as well in the graphic design of such mostly
European-based digital music labels such as Raster-Noton, Frankfurt’s Mille Plateaux,
Amsterdam’s Staalplaat, Vienna’s Mego, Brussel’s Sub Rosa, and others.
Through what Kim Cascone labeled “the aesthetics of failure,” sound and music land-
scapes emerged from a software universe that elevated the digital to an aesthetic paradigm;
one marked by a tension between the errors and glitches inherent in the breakdown of
data versus the unadulterated aural experience of pure signals in themselves. “The post
digital aesthetic was developed as a result of the immersive experience of working in
environments suffused with digital technology . . . but more specifically, it is from the
‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application

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errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise
floor of computer sound cards” (Cascone 2004, 393).
Judging from the sound and image of laptop performance, Cascone’s postdigital prac-
tices spanned across multiple fields, from the design of objects like CD and LP covers and
almost antiseptically clean sound installations that demonstrated basic sonic principles to
audioscapes generated by the singularity of sine waves, the skipping of CDs, the buzz of
ground noise loops, and bursts of aural disquiet.
Digital electronica advanced through younger sound artists who raised fragments of
digital noise to a status like that of Carl Andre or Dan Flavin in (ironically) the visual
arts world, but another major genre that partly intersected the laptop sound universe was
populated by digital sampling, appropriation, recycled culture, and plunderphonia—music
that began and ended with what Chris Cutler called “the already played” (Cutler 2004,
141). Explored in the late 1980s by experimental rock musicians like Kate Bush, Peter
Gabriel, and the Art of Noise with the first available sampling instruments like the
Fairlight CMI,65 sampling under artists like John Oswald, Chris Cutler, Negativeland,
the “king of sampling” Carl Stone, the politically provocative Bob Ostertag, and concep-
tual turntablists like Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide became a political weapon
against copyright culture in the 1990s, critiquing concepts of ownership and property
through appropriated sounds that were mangled, recut, and spit out from the ubiquitous
laptop, sampler, or turntable.
Network-based music, another digital genre with roots in groups like the League at
Mills College in the 1970s, also exemplified a technical paradigm turned to aesthetic
practice: the communication of computers over electronic networks. Already exploited by
the League with their networked KIM-1s, the group’s all-network successor (renamed The
Hub) was founded by Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Scott Gresham-Lancaster, Mark Trayle, Chris
Brown, and Phil Stone in 1986.
The “hub” in question was in actuality a KIM-1 microcomputer that served as
a data mailbox for various communication signals emitted by each individual’s
own microcomputer and that could listen to and change the behaviors of the other
computers in the network—”the sound of individual musical intelligences connected
by networked information architectures” (Bischoff and Brown 2002). As with interactive
software, access to large-scale networks like the Internet had a similar ripple effect
with musicians who embraced the data environment of computer networks as a new
acoustic space for the aural transmission of sound from remote sites. Indeed, “perfor-
mances” of network music from artists like The Hub, Sensorband (the group’s
multi-user instrument NetOsc [1999]), Guy van Belle, CCRMA researcher Chris
Chafe’s SoundWire, and others were strange but intriguing affairs, consisting of musicians
sitting behind laptops waiting to improvise with data pings and sounds from locales
stretched across the globe, the body of the performer apparently dissolved into the network
itself.66

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 The Body Returns: New Gestures and Instrumentalities in the Twenty-First
Century

One of the greatest issues in the era of digital sound concerned what consequences the
digital episteme of numbers and instructions, algorithmic representations, and software
abstractions had for the embodied act of musical performance. Like the tape music concerts
of the early 1960s in which audiences complained of music without human bodies, the
laptop was met with the same criticism. “With the emergence of the laptop as instru-
ment,” wrote Bob Ostertag, “the physical aspect of the performance has been further
reduced to sitting on stage and moving a cursor by dragging one’s finger across a track
pad in millimeter increments” (2002, 12).
In contrast to such “knob twiddlers,” as Carl Stone labeled the genre’s practitioners,
the computer was also picked up by performers for whom the human body’s gestures and
sensorimotor capabilities were central to the sound-making act itself. Basing their prac-
tices on earlier models like the Theremin in which gesture and musical play were symbi-
otic with each other, performer-musicians such as Michel Waisvisz, Joel Chadabe, Laetitia
Sonami, Pamela Z, Atau Tanaka, Sensorband (Tanaka, Edwin van der Heide, and
Zbigniew Karkowsky), SSS, Jon Rose, Jerry Hunt, Ben Neill, Tod Machover, and Butch
Rovan turned their bodies into alternative “controllers,” translating real-time flesh-
and-blood movements into synthesis parameters through wearable sensors, carried objects,
maladjusted instruments, and augmented outfits.67
Once again, research in gesture-based synthesis, mapping strategies, and physically
augmented human-computer interaction in institutes like IRCAM, GRM (Le Groupe de
Recherches Musicales), STEIM, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies)
in Berkeley, CIRMMT (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and
Technology) at McGill and the InfoMus Lab at the University of Genova in Italy seeped
into the messy, rough world of alternative performance spaces, galleries, warehouses,
and theaters. Orienting Amsterdam’s STEIM as one of the leading developers of new
gesture/touch-based controllers specifically for performers, Michel Waisvisz was also
one of the earliest artists to develop a gesture-based controller that combined many
different sensors attached to two boards that could be gripped by both hands. Bypassing
the track pads, mice, and keyboards of computers in favor of direct musical control
through the human hand, Waisvisz’s device, appropriately named “The Hands,” became
a virtuoso instrument by which a performer could generate torrents of sampled sound
from the computer based on quick finger nimbleness, acceleration, and sudden changes
of orientation.68
With finger adroitness being the driving force for “The Hands,” artists using body-
based controllers explored other corporeal characteristics as well. In his solo as well as
group performances with the “sonic scientists” Sensorband, and later with SSS (Sensors,
Sounds, Sights), American-Japanese composer and sound artist Atau Tanaka employed

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Figure 5.9 Atau Tanaka (top). Live in Concert with Sensors_Sonics_Sights. EMF Festival. Palais de
Tokyo, Paris, 2004. Photo Marc Battier. Laetitia Sonami. “Lady’s Glove.” Photo F. Balde.

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muscle tension and relaxation for control of synthesis parameters, transmitted to the
computer by electromyogram (EMG) sensors worn on his arms (figure 5.9). Exploring the
territory where “the micro functions of the body are amplified to macro level media pro-
jection,” Tanaka’s futuristic in appearance and sonically assaultive performances played
with both performer and audience thresholds: the intensity of muscle contraction and
expansion and the comfort and pain of amplitude/frequency limits in the listener’s
body.69
The French-born composer Laetitia Sonami developed a different technique with her
conception and mastery of the so-called Lady’s Glove, an arm-length black Lycra fitting
designed and constructed by Sonami and Dutch engineer and gesture expert Bert Bongers
and covered with sensors such as contact switches on the fingers, an ultrasound receiver,
accelerometers, and Hall-effect transducers.70 As exquisite exercises in microcontrol using tiny
motions of the fingers and broader gesticulation of the hands, and combining text, light-
ing (controlled by the glove), and disconcerting—almost alien—sonorities, Sonami’s
“performance novels” appeared like a strange ceremony for the dead in which phantom
gesticulations conjured up sonic ghosts from the ether (figure 5.9, bottom).
Appropriately, as new instruments equally dependent on both digital processes and
the body, gesture-based controllers bookend the twentieth century, taking us full circle
to Cahill’s, Trautwein’s, Martenot’s, and Varèse’s earliest electric dreams of instruments
enabling an “entirely new magic of sound” (Varèse) while still anchored in corporeally
based musical expression. Moreover, the computation-augmentation of a gesture radically
problematized the almost overwhelming restlessness we now experience between the
human body and the machine. Is it not then the least bit ironic that the biggest threat
to the creative evolution of music and sound making through digital systems might even
be the looming disappearance of musical performance itself—the fading of the enactive
and live act of sensorimotor perception, replaced by the articulation of machines that
analyze gesture and re-render it in mathematical abstraction, far removed from the mate-
rialized act of generating sound in the physical world?
Hardly, for after all, sound is touch and material rolled into one, needing a force to
disturb a medium in order to move it through space and time to sound. Even with its
overarching transformation through both the analog and digital, we see that the perfor-
mances of the acoustic world and the sensations that it generates would be unthinkable
without bodily presence—as capturer, resonator, amplifier, filter, and, most important,
perceiver and listener.

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 6

Bodies

In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary posed the following question: “How is the
body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies,
apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?” (Crary 1990, 2) It is by now a
cliché to say that our traditional understanding of the body is blurred and extended
through technical apparatuses. This transformation does not solely occur with the per-
forming subject’s decentering within a scenographic machine-scape. Through changing
philosophical paradigms from Aristotle onwards, rigorous systems of conditioning and
training also have envisioned the body as a technology itself—a sophisticated musculo-
skeletal, mechanical-organic system. Technology, in other words, not only provides us
with instruments that question the assumed omnipotence of human flesh as the key
element in performance, but, as Michel Foucault articulated, also suggests new ways of
bringing it into being as a mutable object and subject (Foucault 1979, 135–141).
This tension of the organic in relation to the mechanical is one of the central debates
in contemporary performance theory and practice. “The modern problem of life,” write
Crary and Sanford Kwinter, “is unthinkable apart from . . . the organism and the machine”
(Crary and Kwinter 1992, 14). As photography and motion pictures in the fading
moments of the nineteenth century appeared, suddenly revealing the microfluctuations of
human movement, the raw body soon became the perfect machine embodiment of the
new industrial age of socialism.1 With the reigning machine paradigm for the technolo-
gized body forming the start of the twentieth century, the prostheticized, computationally
augmented or data-formed body frames the twenty-first. No longer conceived as a machine
in the traditional sense of an organized heterogeneous assembly of parts, performance
theorists and practitioners now see the contemporary body as something incorporated into
larger than human systems—as something to be transcended through implants, prosthet-
ics, sensors, actuators, and even genetic invasion.
 What then happens to our perception of the dancing body as it is lost in a flurry of
dynamic media changes and encounters the mediated double of itself, as in the work of
many choreographers utilizing live and recorded images of the body directly in perfor-
mance? How are bodies extended and made anew by technologies, for example, in the
case of Donna Haraway’s “cyborg body,” Stelarc’s network-controlled implants, Orlan’s
surgical performances, or Rebecca Horn’s worn machine hybrids? What occurs to the
“unmediated” dancing body when it is defamiliarized by exogenous systems of rules,
games, and algorithmic constructs, as in the work of diverse choreographers like Merce
Cunningham, William Forsythe, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer? How can we thus
grasp this perceptual and ontological transformation of the body before the scanning eye
of the spectator through optical devices, “systems of rigor,” models of efficiency, mathe-
matical systems of strategies, cameras, electronics, surgical instruments, and, last but not
least, computers?

Flash Traces: Bodies Captured

It is well known that the introduction of photography and moving image–capturing

apparatuses radically transformed earlier body perceptions, cutting and slicing up motion
in time. In what could be seen as the earliest examples of body-based sensing, the French
physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey already attempted to “track down the imperceptible,
the fleeting, the tumultuous, and the flashing”: that which escaped and tricked the naked
eye (Dagognet 1992, 15). Initially trained in medicine, Marey’s doctoral work focused on
human movement at the level of the internal rhythms and fluctuations in the circulation
of human blood.
During a lifelong search for the parameters of movement, its amplitudes, periods,
phases, and fluctuations, Marey rejected observation and sensory information, calling it
imprecise and elusive. Bringing the invisible to the surface could be accomplished only
through the construction of machine inscriptions disjointed from the deceit of the human
senses—the “discovery of how to make recordings without recourse to the human hand
or eye,” which followed a long post-Enlightenment trajectory of devices rendering visible
the invisible forces of the human body (Dagognet 1992, 30).
Inspired by the pistons of James Watt’s steam engines, stenographic implements, and
Herman von Helmholtz’s “writing” of acoustic phenomena, Marey’s instruments attempted
to record what he dubbed “the language of nature,” inscribing signals emitted from bodies
in motion as abstract yet legible traces to be discerned from the distant standpoint of the
machine’s eye. Marey’s earliest devices used a combination of mechanical sensors (to collect
data) attached to the test subject, transducers (to convert the data to a different form),
and finally inscription mechanisms (to notate the invisible movements of blood, breath,
and neural-muscular oscillations).

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Figure 6.1 Étienne-Jules Marey. Walk with Stiffened Knees (left) 1884. Walk with Bent Knees, 1884.
College de France.

Having extracted and rendered the internal fluctuations, Marey then turned to an
interest in recording and writing external movement, initializing another major concep-
tual shift from a mechanical to an electro-optical universe of sensing/writing devices.
Along with photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Marey’s partial invention of chronopho-
tography, or the capturing of continuous movement over a series of discrete time intervals,
made bodily locomotion a visible phenomenon, rendering a universe of continuity through
discrete time constants.2 Wielding a camera-like device, Marey captured the body’s move-
ments and transferred them into reduced visual form in order to decrease the “noisy”
information radiating off the subject (figure 6.1). In fact, what we may recognize as a nod
to the neoprene wet suits and suspended white balls of sophisticated camera-based motion
capture apparatuses today, he ingeniously obscured the human (or animal) body by
clothing (or painting) it in black, leaving only thin strips of white metallic lines or paper
dots that acted to outline appendages set into vivid motion against neutral black
backgrounds.
While Marey’s bodies were producing traces manifested through abstract images of
moving lines and ghostly points, for colleague and competitor Eadweard Muybridge, the
body would prove no less than the source of a quasi science of movement. Born and dying
in the same year, the pair of Marey and Muybridge epitomizes our epoch of the techno-
logical capture of bodies in motion. As a figure that Rebecca Solnit reminds us “grasped
time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over” (Solnit

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Figure 6.2 Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion. Circa 1884.

2003, 3), Muybridge made history for his 1872 chronophotographic record of a horse in
motion captured on the site of then–California governor and railroad tycoon Leland
Stanford’s stables—what is now Stanford University.3 Reportedly inspired by a reading
of Marey’s mammoth study Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial
Locomotion, Stanford provided Muybridge with the capital and infrastructure necessary to
take the photos that would not long after become the basis for the development of motion
pictures.
There was, however, another crucial difference in approach between these two annihila-
tors of time and space (Solnit 2003, 4). In contrast to Marey’s juxtaposition of the body
against a neutral black background, Muybridge’s horses, and later human bodies, were
mapped onto a grid-like coulisse (figure 6.2). Suggested by Muybridge admirer and
painter Thomas Eakins, the grid served the purpose of helping the viewer identify changes
in movement generated by the human subjects. The grid also brought an undeniably sci-
entific gloss to Muybridge’s less-than-scientific photographic images—a representation of
the moving and naked human body that could be “subjected, used, transformed, and
improved” (Foucault 1979, 136). With Muybridge’s gridding of the human body by way
of a visual technology, the photographer already hinted at the oncoming scientism of time
motion studies and machine dances soon to overtake the performing body.

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 Electric Bodies and the Motor

What the newly invented electro-optical-chemical technologies did for Marey and
Muybridge, the airplane and motor similarly did for modern dance. Historian Hillel
Schwartz’s often-cited 1992 article “Torque: The New Kinesthetic” suggests that the
origins of modern dance lay in the kinesthetic behavior of a technological machine: the
biplane of Wilbur Wright’s first 1904 complete circle flight. Like the Wright Brothers’
return to their point of departure in a cloudy Dayton, Ohio, field on September 20, 1904,
turn-of-the-century modern dance pioneers like American-born Isadora Duncan, Ted
Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, and Mary Wigman also sought a heavier-than-air relationship
through the human body’s confrontation with space. Breaking away from the stuffy
formalism and assumed weightlessness of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet, “dancers
of the modern dance had come to insist upon the grounded human body moving nonethe-
less fluidly, rhythmically, naturally and, in the sense that any part of the body could be
called upon, freely. Its chief pattern was the spiral; its deepest resource was torsion” or
movement emanating from the solar plexus (Schwartz 1992, 77).
Among Duncan, Shawn, and St. Denis, Isadora Duncan’s claim that dance should be
driven by “the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movement
are born,” most closely paralleled Marey’s notion of the “animated motor” as the distin-
guishing characteristic between the animal and the machine (Duncan 1995, 75). At first,
this seems like a strange statement coming from Duncan, whose grounded, lyrical move-
ment was inspired by the friezes of classical Greek vases. Still perceived today as a chief
proponent of late choreographic Romanticism, Duncan’s invocation of the “motor in my
soul” does not suggest a mechanism of cogs and wheels, but that of sheer propulsion.
The motor as the dominant modern technology at the turn of the century, according
to philosopher Manuel De Landa, contrasted with an earlier machine: the clockwork.
Whereas the clockwork was the perfect cog and spoke mechanism “animated by God from
the outside,” the motor behaved the way natural systems acted—”they run on an external
reservoir of resources and exploit the labor performed by circulating flows of matter and
energy” (De Landa 1992, 3). “Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my
soul. When that begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move inde-
pendently of my will. But if I do not get time to put that motor in my soul, I cannot
dance,” answered Duncan (1995, 123). The motor in the soul was the “central spring of
all movement;” not an assemblage of parts but a reservoir of energy whose force welled
up inside the body. “Artificial mechanical movement,” such as that generated by ballet’s
emphasis on the back of the spine, “was not worthy of the soul” (58).
Regardless of the image of a motor’s mechanically controlled centripetal might,
Duncan’s expressive, almost erotic dance seems to be the furthest thing from Marey’s
mechanistic rendering of motion through lines and points. Centered on and flowing
outwards from the lower torso, Duncan’s dancing body exhibited curvilinear flows and

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magnifications of internal energy driven by a hidden, internal power deep within. Her
motor was a metaphor for a technological object that appeared to run on its own volition,
something that Duncan sought as a catalyst for motion in her own body.
Another American who made her name in Europe, Illinois-born dancer Loïe (née Mary
Louise) Fuller also invested in the aura of modern technology to transform the body. For
Fuller, however, technology was not just a metaphor to invoke a new state of motion but
rather a process to challenge the very perception of movement. Her common answer to
the often-posed question “What is dance?” swiftly brought the replies “motion” and
“sensation” (Fuller 1978, 70).
Motion not only emanated from the human body but also manifested itself in the
environment in which the body danced. Functioning simultaneously as choreographer,
dancer, and inventor, Fuller’s stage performances were a stunning amalgam of popular
culture forms like vaudeville and burlesque coupled with sophisticated invention and
adaptation of recently introduced electrical lighting technologies, like Edison’s incandes-
cent bulb. Her signature discovery was the draping of the body in an over-proportioned
skirt of silk before a mirror, which when she moved produced fantastic morphologies of
billows and dynamic folds (figure 6.3)—what the artist/architect pair Madeline Gins and
Shusaku Arakawa have now labeled an “architectural body,” one defined and constituted
by its architectural surround.4 This absorption in material was only the first step in Fuller’s

Figure 6.3 Loïe Fuller, 1902. Photo Frederick Glasier.

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use of technology—she further conceived of dance being conjured out of light and color
itself, to be achieved by rotating a series of colored gels in front of powerful incandescent
spotlights.5
Even by today’s standards, Loïe Fuller’s command of technology’s power of affect was
breathtaking. A quick glance at her patented and unpatented inventions reads like a
laundry list of theatrical innovations in stage and lighting techniques: new lamp and
reflector technologies, invented chemical processes for the creation of slides and colored
gels, and experimentation with phosphorescent salts to create almost day-glo costumes.
Her shifting away from traditional lighting techniques, like footlights, to movable and
handheld spotlights were experiments that would be essential to the burgeoning new
developments taking place in stage lighting design. Inspired by her observations of a
Grand Hotel fountain in Paris that used up-light to illuminate a statue from beneath,
Fuller’s concept of underlighting turned part of the stage floor that she danced on into a
glass surface lit from below by incandescent and arc lights focused upwards onto her
swirling, vertiginously moving body.6
Fuller’s most famous patent concerned her “Garment for Dancers” (1894), a skirt-like
construction inspired from the silk dresses used in her famous Serpentine dances. This
worn architecture consisted of a skirt constructed out of “light and fluffy material” with
a metal ring at the top that could be placed on the head. Aluminum or bamboo poles
held in the hands helped reinforce the garment so that the wearer could control the degree
of movement and extension of the material into space while she danced, thus creating the
potential for undulating, wavelike motion to travel through the material. As we will later
explore, her idea of physically extending the moving body beyond its own established
kinesphere through simple technical contraptions like poles and cloth set the precedent
for the experiments of such choreographers and performance artists as Trisha Brown and
Rebecca Horn some eighty years later.
Fuller’s choreographies not only resonated with the rapid development of electric light-
ing for the stage but also coincided with another luminous medium at the time: early
cinema. Rather than adopt the static frame of the screen as cinematic wallpaper for her
performances, Fuller’s enveloped, moving body merged screen and scene, confronting
the materiality of fabric with immaterial fields of projected light. With her movement,
light, and color experiments, the flatness of the cinema screen transformed into a four-
dimensional rotating and morphing form, challenging the spectator’s perception of where
the dancing body would end and the screen begin.

The Machine Body

“One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for that ideal multiplied
body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of” (Marinetti 1971a, 137). Written in
1917, Marinetti’s little-known “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” transmitted the Futurist

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ideology—as we have already seen—to permeate scenography, theater, architecture, and
music into the realm of dance. Seeking the ultimate “metallicity” of body and flesh, in
which the body would “imitate the movements of machines with gestures,” Marinetti
admired Fuller’s use of technologies to transform the human body into the body electric.
In contrast, Isadora Duncan’s expressionism, her “desperate nostalgia of spasmodic sensu-
ality and cheerfulness,” paled next to Fuller’s “machine-like movements” in Marinetti’s
imaginings of a new dance in which the inspiration of automatic guns, shrapnel, and flight
could bring about the fusion of human and machine (137–138).
Futurist dances such as the Dance of the Machine Gun or The Dance of the Aviatrix
specified choreographies for a female danseuse imitating the firing of weapons, the
propellers of airplanes, and the movements of “steering wheels, ordinary wheels, and
pistons” (Marinetti 1971a, 137). Among the Futurist legions, the dancer Giannina
Censi aimed to put Marinetti’s choreographic visions into practice in her Aerodanze
from the 1930s. Consisting of a performance at the Milan gallery Lino Pisaro in October
1931, Censi’s Aerodanze was a bodily interpretation of Marinetti’s aerial poems: “Every-
thing that the plane did had to be expressed by my body. It flew and, moreover, it
gave the impression of these wings that trembled, of the apparatus that trembled” (Klöck
1999, 400).
Twentieth-century Modernism saw the machine as a liberating force for opening up
the possibilities of a dancing body restricted by traditional stage forms like ballet or natu-
ralistic acting techniques, thus confronting Lewis Mumford’s statement that “the machine
eliminates human performance, which amounts to paralysis” (Weibel 1999, 208). Of
course, Mumford’s statement referred to human performance within the industrialized
setting of the factory; such performance would soon come to be somewhat idealized by
modernist art’s machine longings.
Still, Modernism’s image of this technologized body was caught up in the general
tension between structure imposed from without and freedom of movement generated
within; the mechanically controlled and the ecstatically abandoned. Duncan’s expressive,
“motor-driven” fluidity and Censi’s body as airplane brought the image of the machine
to bear on the organic and expressive performing human body. If the machine could be
used as an image metaphor of movement, it could also be seen as system to organize,
train, and structure the body.7
Between 1900 and 1933, influences from industrial human factors research in the
United States and Europe and body movement–based training systems with obscure
names like eurythmics, biomechanics, choreutics, eukinetics, and choreology began to
make their indelible mark on the European terpsichorean landscape. Some of these
systems, like Dalcroze’s eurythmics, [Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space,
chapter 1] were devised as pedagogical tools linked to the larger movement of dance- and
body-based disciplines seeking to formulate a new kinesthetic image of humans through
principals of harmony and mind-body expression.

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 The merit of such rhythmic exercises was that they longed for a fusion between the
spiritual and the physical—the body and soul. Eurythmics was a movement training
system intimately linked to the technological revolution of modernism. “Escalator, projec-
tor, conveyor belt, phonograph, these all lay within the realm of Dalcroze eurythmy:
bodies could be made (or made to appear) whole and mobile, only if one understood the
principles of rhythm” (Schwartz 1992, 89).
Dalcroze’s eurythmic techniques became more widely known with his establishment
of Hellerau, which, along with Appia’s scenographic experiments as discussed in chapter
1, became a center for new concepts of the body, not only through Dalcroze’s work but
also that of Dalcroze’s star student, dancer Mary Wigman. One of the key founders of
what would later be termed German Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance), Wigman would
eventually leave Dalcroze and venture to Ascona, Italy, in 1913 and later to Zürich to
become a student and protégé of Hungarian-born dancer and theorist Rudolf von
Laban.
It was Laban who helped construct and codify one of the more systematic, rigorous
analyses of human movement at the time, while tirelessly promoting research into the
science of dance as a lived phenomenon. Raised in an aristocratic, military family, Laban
first came into contact with the moving body through his studies of architecture at the
Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Laban’s growing interest in research into dance led to his
creation of a complete science of movement termed choreology: a set of detailed technical
theories that generated systems of movement notation (kinetography, later called Labanota-
tion), geometries, architectures and spatial paths of bodily movement (choreutics), as well
as explorations of the qualitative intensity of such spatial movement (effort behavior or
eukinetics).
For Laban, space itself was not an empty container waiting to be occupied by a body,
but rather a dynamic form that would come into existence only through a moving human
presence; space was a “hidden feature of movement” and movement was a “visible aspect
of space” (Laban 1966, 4). Attempting a systematic explanation of how the body created
spatial pathways in which fantastic geometries would emerge, choreutics or Raumharmonie
(space harmony) described “the relationship between the architecture of the human body
and its [harmonious] pathways in space” (25).
Beginning with the concept of the kinesphere, the geometric sphere around the
body “whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping
away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot,” Laban
quickly established a system in which the human body would be surrounded by an
imaginary cube with twenty-six diagonal directions of possible extension for the
limbs: forward or backward, up or down, and left or right (Laban 1966, 10). When
moving through zones in space (what Laban labeled the dynamosphere in order to
denote the space outside of the kinesphere), the body transported the kinesphere
dynamically in time, the space of it being constructed by “trace forms”—complex

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formations of spatial pathways and directional projections generated by the moving limbs
(figure 6.4).
Deploying an array of technical terms such as circuits and rings (i.e., returning to their
starting point), lines, chains, coils, knots, and spirals to describe the complex trace forms
generated through motion, Laban depicted the body as a dynamic generator of intricate
geometries of cubic, isocahedral, and polygonal networks through the dynamosphere;
crystallographic “scaffoldings” traced out by the body, which resulted in spatial forms
akin to what Laban called a “living architecture.”8
The diagonal and transversal pathways that the body could trace through space were
not just restricted to the balletic vocabularies of rond de jambe and port de bras, but also to
the minutiae of everyday movements arising in the functioning of the body. Of particular
interest were the ways in which human movement patterns could be studied and improved
upon to become more efficient. “The tendency of our age to replace human-power by
machine-power represents one side only of the problem of the economy of human effort,”
Laban wrote in his 1947 study Effort; “the other side is the rational use of human-power
so far as it is still employed in industry” (Laban and Lawrence 1947, 1).
His study of what is termed effort movements attempted fine-grained analysis of qualita-
tive movement behaviors that the human body exhibited in everyday use; “the effort
capacities displayed in the functions of man’s bodily engine and of the rules which govern
their economic and efficient application” (2).9 Although Laban did not promote a mecha-
nistic, dehumanized image of human movement, his quantitative schematization of effort
expressed through varying taxonomies, effort graphs, and charts would have most likely
been unthinkable outside of the context of industrial modernism.
The general interest in training the body to exploit its full potential in the service of
a more efficient set of procedures percolated through the work of dozens of psychologists,
managers, and industrialists, as well as artists. One of the most influential thinkers in
the area of efficient movement was American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor,
whose 1911 work The Principles of Scientific Management set the stage for a powerful set of
theories about human movement within the context of a technologized milieu and which
Laban himself paid homage to in Effort.10 Taylor not only sought the optimization of
prosperity and happiness through a maximization of human labor output, but he also
ambitiously tried to develop a systematic corpus of training tools to increase such
efficiency.
In the past, management decisions were based on a combination of worker initiative
and employer delivered incentive, whereas scientific management was directed at develop-
ing a systematic science of managing worker output by amassing the “traditional knowl-
edge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating
and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae which are immensely helpful to
the workmen in doing their daily work” (Taylor 1913, 36). Scientific management would
create a science of controlled tasks for each element of a particular worker’s job, then

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Figure 6.4 Rudolf von Laban. “Trace Forms” diagram from Choreutics.

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develop a system that would “select, train, teach and develop the workman” in order to
ensure that all of the work would adhere to the set of principles developed.
The characteristics of Taylor’s “task management” described in The Principles of Scientific
Management proposed in-depth analysis of a given set of tasks around a particular set
of jobs within the “mechanic arts” (cutting of metal, pig iron handling, bricklaying)
in order to establish a given taxonomy or economy of gestures that management should
then teach the worker. Through the tool of a stopwatch, these time motion studies would
analyze both the amount of time that a particular set of gestures for a particular set
of tasks would take, eliminate the false, useless, and slow movements generated, and
subsequently collect the best practices; the most efficient movements could then be taught
to workers.11
Taylor’s task-driven choreography of individuals and coordination of group-based ges-
tures had perhaps its most sweeping influence in the acting training system of biomechanics
devised by Vsevolod Meyerhold [Constructivism’s Technologizing of Performance Space,
chapter 1]. A series of rigorous études, biomechanics—like eurythmics—was first and
foremost a set of physical exercises (plastiques) that organized the kinesthetic machinery
of the actor’s body in close connection with musical principles such as rhythm, dynamics,
and tempo. The exercises also simultaneously developed actors’ agility, coordination, and
expression, particularly in relationship to other performers on stage. Études, such as
walking and running, “shooting the bow,” “the dagger attack” (a complex pantomime
that would simulate an assailant’s attack on another performer), and other static and
dynamic poses all combined to build up an awareness of the component parts of a gesture,
the relationship to the center of gravity and stage space and a general level of physical
stamina to bring the actor up to the position of dancer. More important, as a “method of
physical actions,” biomechanics brought the body into the role of expresser; “the body as
the producer of external word” (Rudnitsky 1981, 296).
The goal of biomechanics, according to Erast Garin, one of Meyerhold’s central actors,
was one of a “comprehensive training of the actor” through “techniques opposed to the
photographic naturalism of ‘slice of life’ theater on the one hand, and to balletic estheti-
cism on the other” (Braun 1979, 37–38). As a system for “training the actor’s material—
his body,” biomechanics and its Taylorist-inspired processes viewed the body as a machine,
seeking to train not only performers but a new human of the future—what the Construc-
tivists labeled life-construction.12
Meyerhold’s mise-en-scène such as The Magnanimous Cuckold, D.E., and Earth Rampant
were the obvious context for his biomechanical techniques to find their home. At the same
time, however, small experimental studios created by Soviet theater and dance artists of
the Constructivist period also harbored visions of mechanical choreographies danced and
performed by human machines. Inna Chernetskaya, a former Isadora Duncan pupil,
founded the experimental Studio of Synthetic Dance at the Choreological Laboratory in
Moscow in 1923, which abstracted movement into machine-like poses.

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 In her “Machine Dances” (1922–1923), the Russian choreographer Bronislava Nijinska
also explored the choreographic construction of machines, with performers simulating
their individual parts. In 1919, Nijinska established a choreographic studio in Kiev to
train a “new type of ballet artist” in which physical movement and mechanized motions
would be effortlessly combined with “dynamic rhythm” and, like an airplane or train,
would have the capacity for speed, acceleration, and “unexpected nervous breaking.”13
Another use of Taylor’s work appeared in the oeuvre of choreographer Ippolit Sokolov,
who from 1922–1923 produced dances embodying the principles of “industrial gesticula-
tion” (Zalëtova et al. 1989, 22).
The greatest realization of human-based machine choreography, however, was undoubt-
edly Nikolai Foregger’s 1924 Dance of the Machines. In addition to the experimental
scenocinematic techniques in his theatrical work [Constructivist Performance: Beyond
Meyerhold, chapter 1], Dance of the Machines was, as Russian theater historian Mel Gordon
has written, “a revue of various machines [performed by actors] portraying the industrial
process, each group enacting the movements of gears, levers, fly wheels, motors, etc.”
Foregger combined popular forms like circus and music hall performances within a highly
controlled spectacle in which, as one critic described at the time, “bodies became correctly
constructed appliances. They no longer moved, they functioned. . . . Dancing is intended
to be nothing but a vivid demonstration of the adequate organization of the human
machine” (Gordon 1975, 72).14
Paying homage to the industrialized utopias of Taylor’s time-motion training systems,
choreographic artists in post-revolution Russia and other parts of Europe (e.g., Fernand
Léger’s 1924 film Ballet méchanique, of mechanical objects based on Léger’s Cubist paint-
ings) remained mostly stuck in representing the body as a machine by visually imitating
the processes of industrial production with it, rather than enlarging or fashioning it
anew.
The ultimate epiphany of this form of the machine aesthetic would come not from
Russia but Weimar Germany, however, in the work of Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus
between 1923 and 1929. In contrast to Foregger and Meyerhold, Schlemmer’s imagina-
tion of the human-machine interface was less the conversion of the body into a machine
but rather one in which, through a harnessing of the techniques of architecture, costume
and space itself could “enlarge it [the body] beyond its dimensional and temporal limita-
tions” (Gropius 1961, 21). Like Laban (with whom he briefly collaborated), Schlemmer
also saw the human body as an integral mechanism for the creation of space. But the
human body was no mere system of simply geometric trace productions but instead
pictured as a dynamic event that could invoke both “psychic expression” and an abstract
“mathematics in motion” before the spectator (95).
For Schlemmer, who had trained in and continued to teach painting at the Bauhaus
in addition to running the stage department, live performance was the vehicle to trans-
figure the human form. Despite the possibilities of the mechanized stage, “man” still stood

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as the centerpiece of performance with the dancing body and its technical augmentation
the ultimate mechanism used to transform space. Within the geometries of Schlemmer’s
abstract stage, the human body was situated in an abstract, geometric, mathematical space,
yet, as Schlemmer repeatedly stated, “man as dancer . . . obeys the laws of the body as
well as space” (Gropius 1961, 25).
Schlemmer was and is chiefly known for his pioneering Bauhaus Dances, demonstrations
of visualizing space and its geometries that took place at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. By
simple augmentation of the body by wooden sticks, wire lines, metal, and paper, studies
such as Pole Dance (1921) and Raumtanz (Space Dance, 1924) succeeded where the Russians
in their quest for the ideal machine body failed: physically extending the human body
through simple technologies into space itself.
As an external device, technology could be imagined to extend and thus, transform the
human body’s limitations by way of gravity, but Schlemmer went further, working with
inventive costumes that would help alter basic bodily characteristics. Whereas Kleist or
Craig’s theater imagined the human body to be superseded by the Kunstfigur or marionette,
Schlemmer saw the possibility of entanglement between what he termed a “technical
organism,” an artificial figure and “naked, natural Man.” Clad in “precision machinery,
scientific apparatus of glass and metal, the artificial limbs developed by surgery, the fan-
tastic costumes of deep-sea diver and the modern soldier,” Schlemmer’s dancers still
remained uniquely human to the artist (Gropius 1961, 28–29).
Schlemmer’s most heralded experiment, however, was the Triadic Ballet. Commencing
work on the piece in Stuttgart as early as 1912, Schlemmer described a dance of “abstract
types”: a work consisting of three parts exploring color, form, and movement. Hoping
that the dance would be free from the stigma of tradition (opera and theater) and instead
act as a departure point for innovations, the Triadic Ballet owed much to similar machine
experiments happening in the visual arts at the same time, namely Léger’s Ballet mécha-
nique and most certainly Duchamp’s Cubist-inspired revisiting of Marey and Muybridge’s
chronophotographic orderings of reality.
Schlemmer himself declared more than once that the goal of the Triadic Ballet itself
was far from transforming the human being into a lifeless automaton through technology,
but rather searching for materials that would amplify the body’s “biomechanical exact-
ness.”15 Like other Bauhaus teachers, Schlemmer held an enthusiastic but simultaneously
critical attitude to technology in relationship to its ability to change the perception of
the human form. “Amazed at the flood of technological advance, we accept these wonders
of utility as being already perfected art form, while actually they are only prerequisites
for its creation” (Gropius 1961, 31). Technology was a precise and aesthetically powerful
means of augmentation and alteration of the human form, but, as Schlemmer repeatedly
emphasized, could achieve its impact only with a purpose that was larger than techne
itself.

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 The Body in the System

Like changes in other artistic forms, the post–World War II world resulted in a dramatic
shift in the relationship of the performing body to its sociopolitical technological sur-
round. With the demise of experimental culture in Europe due to fascism, artistic explora-
tion into the nature of the performing body within a technological context largely swung
to the North American sphere. The largely American-centered, post-1945 period would
increasingly be preoccupied with the phenomenal nature of dance itself, with the perform-
ing body seen less as a vessel of expression and more as a material for the production and
generation of movement.
Much of what would eventually come to be labeled as postmodern dance in the early
1970s directly involved this demystification and stripping away of the overblown theat-
ricality and false emotions that had come to be identified with the modern dance practices
of Isadora Duncan or, later, Martha Graham. Instead, the exploration of objective, task-
driven, and quotidian movement anchored within a rigorously formal temporal and spatial
context brought a conception of the body as a highly sophisticated instrument whose
ordinary movements like walking, sitting, and running could be utilized as material for
performance.
The other trend that marked the postwar transition period was the increased impor-
tance of the body outside of the traditional dominion of the stage (theater and dance),
and instead as the subject and object of performance in the burgeoning, genre-blurring
array of movements that shook up the visual arts during the 1950s and 1960s. Happen-
ings, Japanese Gutai, and international Fluxus-styled events, installations, site-specific
environments, land art, and other hybrid forms all challenged the traditional fixity of the
art object as such and brought into play process over result, activity over work, and spon-
taneity over planning.

Cunningham’s Techne

One of the key artists appearing during this tumultuous period was American-born dancer
and choreographer Merce Cunningham. As numerous critics have discussed, Cunningham
acted as a central transition figure between European and later American dance modernism
(as typified by choreographer Martha Graham) and a dance that marked new frontiers in
North America.16 Originally trained at the Cornish School of Performing and Visual Arts
in Seattle, where he met John Cage, who was a faculty accompanist and composer, Cun-
ningham later danced with Martha Graham from 1939–1945. Cunningham’s break with
Graham’s aesthetic was due in part to his growing dissatisfaction with her overt emotional
and psychological pretexts, overemphasis on linear narratives built upon classical theme
and variation models (e.g., A-B-A), and the tendency to subordinate movement to

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illustrative music. It was Cunningham’s collaboration with Cage and their mutual influ-
ences on each other that set the stage not only for Cunningham’s development of techno-
logically enveloped choreographic stagecraft but also both artists’ influence on an entire
generation of dance and movement artists.
Urged by Cage to leave Graham, the two artists’ first experiment, a recital that took
place in the Humphrey-Weidman studio in New York in 1944, already explored tech-
niques that would come to define Cunningham’s aesthetic direction. As Cage performed
one of his famous prepared piano works in which the composer altered the sound of a piano
with the insertion of objects between the strings or on the hammers or dampers, Cun-
ningham danced in rhythmic phrases that he later described as discrete “time units,”
sometimes linked directly to Cage’s music and other times wholly independent of it, as
if movement and sound existed on separate tracks of a mixer. Cunningham’s movement
itself also reflected his departure from Graham’s psychological aesthetic. Angular, geo-
metric, and fragmented, Cunningham’s choreography amplified the feeling of discretiza-
tion reflected in the music.
Cunningham’s fracturing of a predetermined synthesis between movement and music
was the beginning of an aesthetic and political practice in which different art forms could
be dissociated from each other such that they maintained their own autonomy. This
technique resonated strongly with Brecht’s call in the 1920s for a Trennung (separa-
tion) of artistic elements, which would keep the totalizing effect of media from over-
whelming the spectator’s own processes of making meaning. Deeply influenced by Cage,
Cunningham went further in his attempts to dissociate music from movement and to
introduce systems of indeterminacy by way of chance procedures.
As early as 1950, Cage was already experimenting with musical compositional struc-
tures arrived at from using the ancient Chinese I Ching. Suite by Chance, Cunningham’s
1953 choreography, was a dance in which all spatial and temporal elements were subjected
to chance procedures derived from coin tosses.17 Searching to open up the possibilities of
new forms of movement, the use of mathematically derived chance techniques helped
remove the human being as the sole instigator of movement—what Cunningham described
as “not the product of my will but which is an energy and a law which I obey” (Copeland
2004, 111).
Given Cunningham’s propensity for the separation of artistic elements and his interest
in decentering the spectator’s perception through processes of simultaneity and chance,
it is not surprising that he was soon drawn to the possibilities that electronic and, later,
computational systems could provide. Although not incorporating electronic technology,
Cunningham and Cage’s early multimedia explorations between 1947 and 1953 at ex–
Bauhaus member Josef Albers’s experimental Black Mountain College in the hills of
North Carolina, were prime examples of process-based performance happenings that
served as the foundation for their first real foray into live use of real-time electronic
technologies: the 1965 collaboration Variations V (Copeland 2004, 149–152).

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 It would not be an exaggeration to say that Variations V and subsequent experiments
from Cunningham, Cage, and their tight-knit collaborators set up the foundations for
much contemporary work in dance and technology that so many today feel is unprece-
dented. Described by collaborator Gordon Mumma as “a superbly poly: -chromatic,
-genic, -phonic, -meric, -morphic, -pagic, -technic, -valent, multi-ringed circus” (Nyman
1999, 98), Variations V was developed and premiered at the Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln
Center, on July 23, 1965, for a festival celebrating French and American relations.
Involving a stellar list of collaborators including Cunningham, Stan VanDerBeek (film),
Nam June Paik (live distortion of VanDerBeek’s films), Robert Moog, Billy Klüver and
Max Matthews (electronics), and the musicians Cage, Malcolm Goldstein, Frederick
Lieberman, James Tenney, and David Tudor, the work acts as one of the earliest choreo-
graphic events to exploit the possibility of real-time interaction between performers (both
dancers and musicians) and a semi-autonomous electronic system (figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5 John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma (foreground), Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham,
Barbara Dilley (background), Variations V, 1965. Photo Herve Gloaguen. Courtesy of the John Cage
Trust.

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 Specifically, the event involved the incorporation of two systems of sensors. Designed
by Robert Moog, the first consisted of a series of twelve 5-foot-tall capacitance sensors—pole-
shaped antennas that responded to the distance between dancers, the number of dancers
on stage, and the distance between dancers and the sensors. The second system, designed
by a Bell Laboratories team led by Billy Klüver, consisted of photoelectric cells that were
mounted at the base of the poles, sharply focused at the stage lights such that when the
dancers intersected the path between sensor and light, the light intensity measured by
the photocells would suddenly change. A specially created array of electronic switching
equipment and a fifty-two-channel mixer designed by Max Matthews that would route
all of the audio data to a multichannel speaker setup enabled the musicians to control a
battery of reel-to-reel tape recorders, radios, oscillators, and other electronics and trigger
the overall sonic landscape.18
Even as the musicians—above all, Cage—reveled in the overall indeterminate interac-
tion among dancers, musicians, and the technical systems, the dancers, and—early on—
audiences and critics were less than enthusiastic about the mix between the human and
technical, with dancer Barbara Dilley stating that the very nature of the interaction
between the performers and the technology lent a “ ‘dissociative’ quality that people
had trouble with” (Miller 2001, 557).19 Nevertheless, Variations V served to entangle the
body within a myriad of complex, nondeterministic electronic systems and furthered
Cunningham’s choreographies in which, as critic and scholar Roger Copeland described,
the “fundamental differences between human beings and inanimate objects were ignored”
(Copeland 2004, 42).
Both directly and indirectly, Cunningham would go on to exploit other technological
possibilities, due in part to his continued collaboration with adventuresome musicians
and visual artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Cage, Tudor, Mumma, David Behrman,
Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman. Ambulant set and light-
ing elements, wireless sensing technologies (as early as 1972), and, increasingly, electroni-
cally generated sound scores were a few of the featured technologies that were explored
for their theatrical effect.
Choreographies such as Winterbranch (1964) and Canfield (1970) shocked audiences and
critics alike by their use of extreme lighting effects and extremely discordant, noise-
saturated electronic sound environments.20 In response to Cunningham’s cacophony of
technical systems, critic Marcia Siegel wrote in the New York Times: “More than ever the
machine is in control. The chance activities that were produced by human beings doing
unpredictable things have been submerged under the more powerful unpredictability of
electronic equipment. The human input is simpler and less noticeable—all that’s needed
now is one long and two short blasts on a trumpet from the top of the balcony or a voice
over test or simply throwing the mike open. The tubes do the rest” (Klosty 1975).
The musicians with whom Cunningham worked, both inside the company (like Cage,
Tudor, and Mumma) and outside, were one of the main forces for his continual seeking

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out and adoption of radical technological possibilities. In addition to Cage, David Tudor
would also go on to create increasingly electronic scores for Cunningham. His Rainforest
(1968) score for the similarly named choreography featured a series of hanging objects
that were set into resonance through acoustic actuators attached to the sculptures. Gordon
Mumma would prefigure current experiments with wireless technologies in dance contexts
by two decades with his score Telepos I for Cunningham’s choreography TV Rerun (1972),
in which the dancers wore “telemetry” belts containing wireless tilt sensors and radio
transmitters that would broadcast the physics of the dancer’s movements to Mumma and
his mixer. “The dancers were collaboratively responsible for the nature and continuity of
the sound, through the implications of this technological extension of human activity”
(Klosty 1975, 68).
Even when he was not using technology directly, computers and electronics still figured
into Cunningham’s overall conceptual planning. His early choreography Walkaround
Time (1968), with set design by Jasper Johns (based on Duchamp’s Large Glass),
was named after a joke among University of Illinois computer scientists indicating the
time spent waiting for calculations on early large mainframe computers. Described as
a “machine game,” Walkaround Time in a strange way mimicked earlier twentieth-century
machine choreographies with the body imitating the movement of parts, gears, and
motors.
The fascination with mathematically determined systems and their unpredictable out-
comes might explain why choreographers and dancers like Cunningham as well as his
disciples and offshoots harbored an ever-increasing interest in the objective, rigorous
techniques that they believed scientific and technological models could offer. Given these
broader socioscientific and technological interests, it is unsurprising that Cunningham
helped jump-start a move away from the dance modernism that he himself partially
represented.

Rules, Games, and Dance Machines: Judson and Its Postmodern Successors

In 1962, with the encouragement of Cunningham, Robert Dunn, a composition student

of Cage’s and husband of one of Cunningham’s star dancers Judith Dunn, taught a radical
dance composition course involving several dancers from Cunningham’s own company as
well as other New York–based choreographers. Dunn encouraged his younger students to
experiment with dance in sweeping aesthetic breaks with the past, bringing not only
Cage’s interest in chance operations to bear on movement ideas but also Erik Satie’s time
systems, manipulations of objects as part of a performance, and the integration of non-
dance-like movement into the choreographic composition process.
The concert that Dunn’s students staged on July 6, 1962, at the Judson Memorial
Church off Washington Square in New York City marked the beginning of what many
critics refer to as the start of the postmodern dance era. During the next several years, the

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list of choreographers in Dunn’s workshop who began creating their own concerts at the
Judson Church reads like a who’s who of contemporary dance: Alex and Deborah Hay,
Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Robert Dunn, Lucinda Childs, David
Gordon, Simone Forti, Judith Dunn, Meredith Monk, Elaine Summers, Kenneth King,
and others.
Between 1962 and 1964, the twenty choreographic concerts at Judson radically split
with the past, bringing a new generation of female choreographers to prominence
and incorporating techniques for making dances that squarely fell outside of traditional
compositional strategies: games, casual and quotidian movements, tasks, the manipula-
tion of objects, the reciting of texts, the showing of films, and extensive exploration of
improvisation.
It is impossible to identify a singular Judson aesthetic. Nonetheless one of the group’s
hallmarks was a mutual interest in exposing the structural foundations of movement and
how meaning was attributed to its generation. Dance was that which could be labeled
and thus, contextualized as dance and performance, focusing less on the virtuosity of
expression and more on the “neutral doing” of simple tasks and behaviors. According to
Judson expert and dance theorist Sally Banes, Judson and its later postmodern (“post” in
the chronological sense, as that which came after modernism) successors, sought out the
cultural-social underpinnings of dance as a lived phenomena. “Whether the prevailing
structure is a mathematical system for using space, time, or the body; or arbitrary
assemblage; or fragmentation, juxtaposition, the deliberate avoidance of structure by
improvisation; or the constant shifting of structures by chance methods, there is always
the possibility, in post-modern dance, that the underlying form will be bared” (Banes
1987, 16).
Judson dance events were tied to the larger experimental cultural atmosphere of the
mid 1960s, integrating visual artists, musicians and experimental composers, poets, and
choreographers who all shared in sometimes equal and sometimes different duties. Any-
thing could be the subject and event of dance where the body was treated as object to be
performed and explored. Moreover, Judson’s concerts freely integrated elements from the
visual and sonic arts as well as Fluxus and happening-like strategies into what its members
clearly labeled as dance.
In such choreographies as Room Service (1964), for example, choreographer and later
filmmaker Yvonne Rainer utilized game structures in which teams followed the leader
through a dense sculptural environment built by visual artist Charles Ross or tested out
strategies of tasks and repetition in her most famous work, a four-and-a-half-minute
phrase entitled Trio A (1966) organized from a series of event modules that were chained
together into an endless series of transitions. Dancer Simone Forti’s (Whitman) early dance
constructions such as See-Saw, Rollers, Slant Board and Huddle, were gamelike dances in which
movement was organized by the play between performers and various equipment: a seesaw,
wooden ramps, and sculptural jungle gyms.

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 In her early pieces Lightfall (1963) and Rulegame 5 (1964), choreographer Trisha Brown
developed choreographies with severe rule-bound constraints in an effort to “find the
schemes and structures that organize movement, rather than the invention of movement
per se,” while Lucinda Childs played with the line between performer and audience per-
ception through site-specific events (Street Dance in 1964) and the conscious manipulation
of objects and movement coupled to those objects (Banes 1987, 86).
Dancer Elaine Summers, one of the few original Judson members who sought to
integrate more complex media into her work, developed the elaborate 1964 performance
Fantastic Gardens, one of a handful of early choreographic works to incorporate projections
of 8mm film and, according to filmmaker Jonas Mekas, “the most successful and most
ambitious attempt to use the many possible combinations of film and live action to create
an aesthetic experience” (Banes 1983, 190).
In the eyes of contemporary dance historians, the Judson Dance Theater, as it would
come to be known, is not normally seen as interested in exploiting technological develop-
ments as part of its modus operandi. This may be partly due to the early Judson dancers’
critique of Gesamtkunstwerk-type choreographic events and, instead, for the most part,
their pursuit of a kind of bare-bones aesthetic in which the body would become paramount
to the act of performance without the clutter of external theatrical devices. Yet, like
Cunningham, these young dancers and choreographers were keenly interested in the
manipulation, intervention, and extension of the dancing body through all manner
of choreographic systems: simple tasks, rule-based or chance techniques, mathematical
procedures, game models, or any other kind of “movement not pre-selected for its
characteristics but resulting from certain decisions, goals, plans, schemes, rules, concepts,
or problems” (Kirby 1975, 3). Rigorous techniques derived from mathematics or inspired
by science could thus yield unexpected possibilities that would not necessarily be under
the direct control of a single individual but rather subjected to systemic evolution and
control.
Offering “an objective rigor that was a welcome antidote to the subjectivity of dramatic
dance, and a logical extension of a concern with methodology,” some of the key Judson
Church dancers like Childs, Alex Hay, Rainer, and Paxton also became fascinated in how
new electronic technologies might also enlarge the choreographic process (Banes 1987,
14). This curiosity in technology came to the forefront with the landmark event: 9
Evenings: Theater and Engineering, held at the colossal New York Armory from October
13–23, 1966.
Created by Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, who had been working
on the side as an assistant to sculptor Jean Tinguely and additionally collaborated with
Cunningham and Cage on Variations V, the event was a yearlong collaboration between
ten performing and visual artists and over thirty Bell Laboratories engineers to realize a
series of performances that fused cutting-edge performance concepts with the latest tech-
nological developments. Apart from Judson members Alex and Deborah Hay, Lucinda

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Childs, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert
Whitman, Oyvind Fahlström, and David Tudor participated as well. Played in front of
an audience of more than ten thousand, the artists devised performance events that in
many cases pushed the engineers and technologies to their limits.
Lucinda Childs’s Vehicle, for example, incorporated radio technologies and Doppler
radar, merging “dance involving three performers and a groups of objects one of which
was air supported. The materials and performers came into contact with light and sound
sources intermittently throughout the dance so that the qualities of the materials in
motion as well as the motion of the performers could be exposed to different situations”
(Childs 1973, 56). Deborah Hay’s Solo also explored the relationship between animate
performers and objects; in this case, remote-controlled platforms.
Steve Paxton’s Physical Things, described as a “dance with a set” took a different
approach, resulting in a series of massive polyethylene inflated, walkthrough environments
filled with projected images and sound [E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey, chapter 8].
According to Judson member, observer, and event administrator Simone Forti, many of
these technically innovative performances transformed into real-time “disasters” through
the malfunction of untested, research lab–based technologies shortly before or even during
the performances. Nevertheless, 9 Evenings produced a series of joint artistic and technical
events that were not only unprecedented for their time but also helped strengthen and
complicate the collaboration between human and nonhuman systems in performance.
Although the actual Judson movement was short lived (from 1962–1964), star dancers
in the movement would successfully continue their formal explorations into the 1970s
and 1980s. One wing, which Sally Banes termed analytic postmodern, expanded on the
research into procedural systems that had marked earlier experiments. In pieces like Accu-
mulation (1971)21 and Locus (1975), Trisha Brown began to develop almost algorithmic
models to what she would later call “dance machines that take care of certain aspects of
dance-making” (Goldberg, 1986, 166).22 In the 1980s, Brown would begin incorporating
more elaborate environments and musical scores, collaborating with visual artists includ-
ing Rauschenberg (a hanging architectural set mainly constructed through projections in
Set and Reset, 1980), the Japanese fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya (Opal Loop/Cloud Installation
#72503), and minimalist Donald Judd, as well as Laurie Anderson (Set and Reset).
Preoccupied with Cartesian-driven geometries that would be used to generate extremely
reduced sets of movements, Lucinda Childs also went in a direction similar to that of
Brown. In her choreographies Untitled Trio (1973), Calico Mingling (1973), Congeries on
Edges for 20 Obliques (1975), Radial Courses (1976), and Interior Drama (1977), Childs’s
dancers would traverse grids, diagonals, or parallel lines in extremely complex series of
repetitive movements that although simple in appearance, demanded extraordinary con-
centration and virtuosity.
Some of the hallmarks of this analytic dance movement would be summarized in the
short-lived Grand Union collective (1970–1976), which involved nine of the original

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Judson members, including Brown, Paxton, and Rainer, among others, and sought to
more radically explore processes of improvisation through open systems in which little
preplanned structure existed and in which social interaction rituals and political frames
became the basis for compositional material.
In its exploration of the distinctions between control and autonomy, Judson and its
offshoots brought a fundamental questioning of received assumptions of what the perform-
ing body was and how it could be technosocially constituted. How could one view the
body when movement itself was no longer the result of a sole human creator but the result
of mathematically generated procedures? If procedural machines were the generating
catalyst, then where did the locus of human creation lie and what was the role of chore-
ographer and dancer in relationship to a dance-making machine? Could a machine cho-
reograph, and what kinds of corelationships would be possible?

Body Art/Technomanipulation

The Judson choreographers emerged in the broader 1960s climate of artists working with
the body as both subject and object outside of traditional performing arts contexts. Driven
by a host of international influences, from the experimental Gutai movement in Japan
and a resurgence of interest in the writings of Artaud to the violent, politically motivated
performances of the Vienna Actionists, the body, according to Rose Lee Goldberg, became
simultaneously a material for ritual, a testing ground for psychophysical limits, and a
political weapon of protest (1998, 96–97). If a shift toward what Australian-Greek artist
Stelios Arcadiou (also known as Stelarc) would call “electronically connected and coupled
bodies” (Stelarc n.d.) would not take place until the late 1980s, the roots of technological
transformation of the flesh were firmly anchored in the body-based actions and practices
of artists in the 1960s.
The work of the Judson dancers already resonated with that of numerous visual artists
in Europe and the United States, including Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Vito Acconci,
Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, William Wegman, Dennis Oppenheim, Klaus Rinke,
Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Stuart Brisley, Marina Abramovic, Ulay, Linda Montano,
Hsein Hsuo-Hsei, Gina Pane, Valie Export, Arnulf Rainer, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl,
Hermann Nitsch, and Peter Weibel, as well as Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose interests lay
in the use of the body as a material to be subject to transformative processes in order to
be reformulated anew.
First and foremost, artists saw the body as an extension of painting; a material to be
manipulated, like paint or clay in the fashioning of a canvas or sculpture. Much of this
activity arose within the visual arts, where new methods were sought in order to expand
traditional notions of pictorial representation that had ossified in the fixed form of the
object. French visual artist Yves Klein, for example, already used live actors as living
paintbrushes in his Anthropometrien performances between 1958 and 1962, and the work

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of the Japanese Gutai group between 1954 and 1972 sought a fusion between Jackson
Pollock–inspired Action Painting techniques and happenings.23

Invasion/Mutilation/Reformulation

In other cases, artists looked to more invasive techniques to resculpt and transform the
body. In the performances of Chris Burden, the French/Swiss artist Gina Pane, the German
artist Valie Export, the Vienna Actionists, the Serbian artist Marina Abramović, and later
the modern primitives body artist Fakir Musafar, early Stelarc, or the French surgical
artist Orlan, technology helped break the flesh in actions involving direct pain, injury,
amputation, and self-mutilation. Using the crude and the sophisticated, from simple
instruments like guns (Burden, who was mock-crucified onto the roof of a Volkswagen
in one performance and shot in another) and razors (Pane) to advanced plastic surgery
(Orlan), artists saw their own bodies as extended sculptures to be deformed/reformed by
direct manipulation at the level of the skin.
The most extreme refiguring most certainly came in the performative actions of the
Vienna Actionists, a group of Austrian artists composed mainly of Hermann Nitsch,
Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose transgressive public and
private events involved actions of public self-mutilation (Brus’s Selbstverstummelung and
Schwarzkogler’s photographic works) and theatrically ritualized ceremonies of animal
sacrifice (Nitsch’s Dionysian/Artaudian-inspired Orgien Mysterien Theater). Criticizing a
postwar Austria that was seen by many artists as still harboring the complicit, authoritar-
ian attitudes that made possible the fascist ideologies of National Socialism, the actionists
brutally shattered staid bourgeois political and social mores.
Slightly younger but also part of the Actionist circle was artist and curator
Peter Weibel. Having studied mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and logic, Weibel
was interested in the political power of language through a post-Wittgensteinian
exploration of the materiality of words. In early actions such as Polizei Lügt (1971) and
expanded cinema works such as Lichtseil (1971), Weibel focused on the visualization
of language and its transformation through visual and cinematic juxtaposition, but in
later works such as Raum der Sprache (1973), he increasingly explored the connection
between text and the body, using his own as a marking system and literal surface of
inscription.
The direct reformulation of the body with technologies as a form of social protest
against established norms also surfaced in a completely different sociopolitical context:
the culturally conservative climate of Reagan-era America. In the performances of Ron
Athey and Bob Flanagan, for example, bodily pain was also explored as a means of
self-liberation against the oppressive atmosphere of Christian fundamentalism or stifling
cultural conservatism. The HIV-positive son of a Pentecostal minister, Athey’s “theater
of pain” performances such as Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1990) sought a transcendence

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of the body through processes of piercing, scarification, and masochism akin to the ecstatic
behavior that marked Pentecostal religious services.24
Another example of body transformation came in the work of the cystic fibrosis-stricken
performance artist Bob Flanagan. Initially known for his role in the banned Nine Inch
Nails video “Happiness in Slavery,” in which a naked Flanagan was strapped into a fic-
tional pleasure/pain machine that eventually ripped him apart, the artist’s sadomasochistic
solo works also focused on the transcendence of a diseased body through the infliction of
pain.
In his epic 1994 performance-installation Visiting Hours, first shown at the Santa
Monica Museum and then at the New Museum in New York, Flanagan and partner/
dominatrix Sherrie Rose constructed an identical brick-and-mortar replica of the artists’
hospital room. A comment on the nexus between machineries of medicine and pain,
Visiting Hours spectators encountered a hospital room with the bedridden Flanagan
himself, medical and torture instruments, an S&M dungeon, and a video scaffold
featuring images of a healed Flanagan’s body intensely experiencing the pain/pleasure of
self-mutilation.25

Noninvasive Extension: Wearables, Prosthetics, and Images

Performing artists also explored less invasive techniques to technologically extend the
body. Concurrent with her choreographic experiments, Trisha Brown’s so-called equip-
ment dances between 1968 and 1972 also researched ways to transform the body’s rela-
tionship to weight, effort, and gravity. Working with mountain climbing equipment such
as ropes and harnesses, pieces like Planes (1968), Man Walking Down the Side of a Building
(1969, 2006), and Walking on the Wall (1971) literally suspended normal relationships
with gravity by having dancers perform on surfaces perpendicular to the ground (figure
6.6). Brown posed such questions as “What does it mean to walk on a wall?” and “How
can you move parallel to the ground?” in her most well-known equipment exploration,
Walking on the Wall, which was performed at the Whitney Museum of Art and in which
harnessed dancers perpendicularly hung and could walk, run, or remain still at varying
heights on two right-angled walls with the aid of climbing ropes and extended tracks
that curved around the room.26
Extensions to the body could also take more fanciful, wearable forms such as the strange
prosthetic devices created for the early performance experiments of the German visual
artist Rebecca Horn and the participatory propositions of the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark
and Hélio Oiticia. Interested in how soft materials could extend the body into space
during a one-year period of convalescence and isolation, Horn began to sew strange
anthropomorphic, pupus-like forms that could protect and, at the same time, project the
body beyond its physical constraints into the world around it.

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Figure 6.6 Trisha Brown. Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. Performance restaged at Tate
Modern, May 2006. Photo by John Rowe at Tate Museum.

Similar to Loïe Fuller’s extension of the moving body through poles and flowing tex-
tiles, Horn’s idiosyncratic performances transformed the female body by means of strange
sculptural extensions built by the artist herself: a long protruding horn (Unicorn, 1970),
a leather face mask with pencils sticking out from it to be used for drawing (Pencil Mask,
1972), and long, spindly balsa wood–constructed gloves that would enable Horn to
“scratch both walls at once” (Finger Gloves, 1974). Almost meditative in their execution,
Horn’s performances and films made the body into a hybrid: a quasi animal, human,
object, and machine.
Horn further augmented this hybrid body with more elaborate costumes during the
mid 1970s. White Body Fan (1974) extended Horn’s arms beyond her bodily kinesphere
through a fan-shaped construction while Feathered Prison Fan (1974) did the opposite,
almost imprisoning the body in a mechanically controlled, feather-coated cocoon. Dis-

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pensing with her human-based performance work in the mid 1970s, Horn would subse-
quently turn her interests in performance from the human body to a mechanical one with
the construction of strange and autonomically behaving machines [Machines for Them-
selves, chapter 7].
Bodily extension practices enabled through wearable objects and prostheses also
appeared in the work of Brazilian visual artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Starting
with nonrepresentational paintings, Clark’s Nostalgia of the Body work between 1964 and
1968 involved the construction and use by “performing” spectators of what Clark called
“living organisms”: hoods, gloves, specially constructed eyeglasses, suits, and other strange
objects sought to generate specific sensorial experiences among nontrained performers.
For example, Mascara Sensorial (Sensorial Mask, 1967) involved costumes composed of
hoods and helmets with mirrored eyepieces that allowed the wearer to shift her focus onto
herself while Mascara Abismo (Abyss Mask, 1967) focused on the haptic experiences brought
on by blindness through weighted masks applied to the eyes.27
Analogously, Clark’s collaborator Hélio Oiticica focused on spectator-generated, body-
based performances involving wearable elements. Oiticica’s Parangoles (1964), a series of
participatory happenings emerging from the Maguiera Samba school in a well-known
Brazilian favela (slum), used simple materials such as painted plastic bags and jute fabrics
worn and danced in by the public participants in order to explore the fusion between
fabric and organic bodies. Dancing with the colorful fabrics of the Parangoles, Oiticica
literally catalyzed fabric and colored bodies in motion out of the physical behaviors of his
spectator-performers, focusing on the kinesthetic intensity that arose within the dance
context of samba and the sensorial experience of navigating the various pieces of worn
material.28

Video Documentation: Endurance/Transformation

As extensively detailed in chapter 4, more “immaterial” technologies such as the video

camera, monitor, and projection screen also played a major role in remaking the perform-
ing body, particularly in the documentation of actions designed to dismantle live presence.
Before turning to filmmaking with the epic Cremaster cycle, the early works of American
artist Matthew Barney used video to document his athletically rooted, endurance-style
performances that took place off-camera. Having initially studied medicine at Yale before
turning to a formal art degree, Barney’s seemingly homoerotic and visually baroque works
culled techniques from body-based art of the 1960s through a systematic fusion of sculp-
ture, video, installation, and live actions.
His infamous 1991 New York debut exhibition, held at the Barbara Gladstone gallery,
featured video monitors displaying a naked Barney in rock climbing harness, wielding
crampons and scaling the ceiling and stairwell of the gallery space. Positioned next to
sculptural objects that included a bench press thickly coated in Vaseline, the previously

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recorded performance broadcast on the four monitors appeared like a psychosexual revision
of Trisha Brown’s equipment pieces. Soaked in a hermetically sealed yet texturally rich
world of metabolically inspired sculptures, clinical medical instruments, and ubiquitous
television monitors, Barney’s work exploited video’s ability to display different bodies in
the process of transformation—a three-hour physical trial to the body that metaphorically
and symbolically converted the gallery space into what critic Roberta Smith called “a kind
of body that the artist moves through, like an enzyme in the digestive tract or an infant
being born” (Smith 1991).
By far the most controversial connection between the skin-based experiments of the
1960s and real-time tele-technologies was the “carnal art” of the French artist Orlan (née
Linda Moreno). Constructing what the artist described as a technological form of self-
portraiture spanning between “defiguration and refiguration,” Orlan came to fame in the
early 1990s with The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a series of nine performances in which,
working simultaneously as both director and patient, the artist underwent surgical pro-
cedures before a live camera. Rather than focus on the ecstatic potential of the body in
pain like other body modification artists, Orlan’s “blasphemous” performances generated
a new, mutant body remade by contemporary technologies of plastic surgery and artificial
implants in which the artist’s identity was continually morphed at a direct physiological
level.29
Ranging from plastic surgery, liposuction, and implantation of new materials, each of
Orlan’s surgeries redefined her body, basing its form on computer-generated composites
of selected features from prototypical female figures represented in classical Western
painting traditions such as the Venus of Botticelli, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Diana.
Accompanied by the artist’s conscious (during the surgical processes) recitation of
philosophical texts while a bastion of real medical performers clad in clothing designed
by Issey Miyake and Paco Rabanne scurried about, the documentation of the procedures
was normally broadcast live to cultural institutions such as galleries and performance
venues. The privacy of the operating room was thus transformed into an electronically
transmitted theater of observation and spectating on the body, reminiscent of French
psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot’s late-nineteenth-century public theatricalization of
hysterical women.30
Orlan’s public exposure of the processes of bodily representation, writing, and marking,
took place at the intersection between contemporary technologies of inscription (the
surgeon’s scalpel) and documenting/recording (the video camera), with the once-private
operating room becoming both artist’s studio and television set for the surgical reconstruc-
tion of bodies at the direct, corporeal level. If the obsession with inscription and marking
the skin explored by many body-based artists in the past served as a frame for her surgical
birthing of a new hybrid “body-machine,” Orlan’s carnal art sought to convert her own
body into a sign—a form of language itself that reversed the traditional formula of “word

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made flesh” to a new formulation of “flesh made word” where “only the voice remains
unchanged” (Orlan n.d.).

Electronically Coupled Bodies: Cyborgs and Hybrids

The body hybridization work of performance artists was also overwhelmingly influenced
by new electronic and computer-assisted technologies and informed by questions con-
cerning new constructions of subjectivity and identity through the writings of feminist
cultural theorists such as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, Allucquére
Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone), Avital Ronell, and Sadie Plant. Undeniably, UC Santa Cruz
professor Haraway’s 1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” helped set the conceptual stage for a new gen-
eration of artistic performative practices involving the construction of “chimeras, new
fabricated hybrids between machine and organism” that according to Haraway, would
blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, biological, and computational,
the “imagination and material reality” (Haraway 1991, 150).
Adopting the tendency toward what quickly became known as the posthuman body,
international performance artists searched for new techniques, ranging from high digital
imaging, sensors, muscle-controlling actuators, and machine implants in order to trans-
form their bodies into the alloplastic hybrids envisioned by Haraway and others. Directly
situating herself in a Haraway-inspired nexus of body representation through technologi-
cally determined constructs of gender, the female Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s other-
worldly photographic performance projects cast the artist in the center of the image, both
seducing and criticizing the mainly male-driven gaze directed toward female cyber iden-
tity constructed by fashion and image industries.
Dressed up as a cyber-pop Japanese fashion model, “high-tech geisha,” or a mythical
being from the future, Mori was photographed within the completely artificial settings
of Japanese culture (airports, indoor oceans) and then digitally altered. A similar produc-
tion strategy was evident in her large-scale photo-performance event, Beginning of the End
(1996), in which the artist—encased within a translucent plastic body capsule—placed
herself in international public locations, such as the Giza pyramids, Times Square, Brasilia,
and the glitzy, commercial Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Ambiguously straddling the desire
and fear of hybrid technocultural bodily transformation, the content of Mori’s work
derived precisely from her own hybrid East-West, spiritual-materialist fusions of Asian
philosophy and Western-styled pop culture.
Curiously, although much theorizing of cyborg identity came from women, with the
high-profile exceptions of Mori and Orlan, male performers constituted a large percentage
of artists willing to physically alter or transform their bodies with mechanical-electronic
or even biochemical systems. The Catalan artist Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca developed

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interactive mechatronic performances whose central element involved spectator-initiated
computer control of a metal and plastic body-mounted “exoskeleton” that Roca wore.
Beginning with Epizoo in 1994 and continuing with Aphasia (1988), Transpermia (2003),
and Protomembrana (2006), Roca’s mechatronic performances resurrected body art in the
age of computer control.
In the widely toured Epizoo (1994), pneumatic and robotic devices mounted in the
worn exoskeleton and attached to the artist’s mouth, chest, buttocks, and face as well
as lighting and sound elements could be directly steered by individual audience
members from a remotely controlled panel interface. With the click of a mouse,
spectator “tele-torture” would activate lighting, sound, and compressor relays connected
to the pneumatic-electronic hardware mounted on his body, resulting in real-time
transformations of Roca’s muscles and nerves: a repeated twisting of the mouth, a vigorous
quivering of the buttocks and pectoral muscles, or a spasmodic shaking of the entire
face.
Claimed by the artist as “probably the first performance to feature a remote control
device enabling the spectator to control onstage elements including the artist’s body,”
Epizoo’s interactive ritual of computer-assisted body transformation through both active
(the controllers) as well as passive (the observer/voyeurs) means raised critical questions
about the direct manipulation of a human subject for pleasure/entertainment and the
ethical issue of man-machine hybridization.31
In a comparable yet less spectacular vein was the work of Dutch engineer/performer
Arthur Elsenaar. In Elsenaar’s ArtiFacial research, the artist constructed a MIDI-controlled
system of small facial actuators that when attached to the face could activate up to sixteen
different facial muscle groups, the strength of contractions by the actuators controlled and
scaled through the seven-bit MIDI number range (0–128). Involving local and network-
based algorithmic control over Elsenaar’s facial muscles in real time, Elsenaar and collabo-
rator Remko Scha’s performances such as rEmote, a.k.a. Compose Your Emotions (1995),
Arthur and the Solenoids (1997), and Morphology Face Shift (2005) created a new form of
algorithmic facial choreography in which the human body and face could be seen as
potential new computer-controlled display devices.
Another artist who experimented with body-implanted control interfaces was
Brazilian-born Eduardo Kac. Known for his controversial transgenic artworks, Kac’s 1997
performance projects Time Capsule and A-Positive also sought to mix up the distinction
between biological and mechanical bodies, with A-Positive involving a live blood
transfusion between Kac and a robot, while Time Capsule saw the artist implanting a
microchip into his arm in order to electronically scan his body into an online database for
animals.
Roca, Elsenaar, and Kac’s body manipulations depended on mechanical technologies;
Swiss dancer and body-based artist Yann Marussich experimented with internal biochemi-
cal transformations. Marussich’s 2007 solo work Bleu Remix (a sequel to an earlier work

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Figure 6.7 Yann Marussich. Bleu Remix, 2007. Photo Marc Gremillon.

entitled Bleu Provisoire in 2001) was described by the artist as the “first motionless dance
piece.” Sitting almost frozen in a glass box before spectators for the duration of one hour,
Marussich’s performance consisted of a “biochemical choreography” in which the artist
gradually began to sweat blue secretions from the openings in his body, the result of a
methylene blue injection before the event (figure 6.7). The result of several years of
research with Swiss doctors, Marussich’s “bloodless flaying of the body” occurred at the
interior of the body—a performance in which internal bodily processes like thermal
regulation and stillness were amplified and exhibited at the interface of the skin (Hauser
2008, 12–13).
Arguably, the most high-profile example of such “cyborg performance” was that of
Australian (Cyprus-born) artist Stelarc. Ironically declaring that the body is obsolete,
Stelarc’s artistic and theoretical research investigated how to “extrude agency with a
body’s awareness being neither ‘all there’ nor ‘all here.’ ” Infusing body manipulation
practices with a hefty dose of mechanical and electronic invention and a litany of pro-
vocative theoretical salvos (“the body is obsolete,” “the body is no longer an object
of desire but an object for designing,” “As an object, the body can be amplified and
accelerated, attaining planetary escape velocity”), Stelarc radically reconceptualized and
enhanced the body beyond its normal human physical limits. For Stelarc, the body

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was seen as an objective, evolutionary structure that could reach a new evolutionary state
only through technological fusions among skin, metal, electronics, and computation
(Stelarc).
In his body suspension pieces, dating from the late 1970s and 1980s, the artist
suspended himself from ceilings and various other structures with hooks impaled
through the skin. Influenced by both the invasive techniques of the Vienna Actionists
as well as the modern primitive movement in the United States, led by piercing
and suspension artist Fakir Musafar, the skin and body were both perceived as
objects ripe for technical redesign whereby even the simplest technologies of wire
and hooks could aid in erasing the skin “as a boundary between the self and the
world.”32
Almost simultaneously to these suspension works, Stelarc embarked on the construc-
tion of a mechanically enhanced prosthetic device that would technologically extend the
body beyond its organic limits. Pursuing his interest in the function of the body within
a landscape of machines, projects such as Third Hand (1976–1984), Virtual Arm (1992),
Stomach Sculpture (1993), and Muscle Stimulator System (1994) all developed a series of
mechanical exoskeletal structures that functioned less as prosthetic substitutions for
organic body parts than as extensions of existing musculoskeletal systems.
Third Hand, for example, was a mechanical, handlike manipulator attached to the
artist’s right arm that could be controlled from electromyogram signals originating
from the legs and stomach. Both imitating as well as counterpointing the behavior
of human hands, Third Hand served to heighten peripheral and proprioceptive
awareness, much like the phenomenon of a phantom limb in providing increased con-
sciousness of an absent appendage. Stelarc’s most infamous experiment with extension
(or in this case, intension), his 1999 Stomach Sculpture, turned an endoscopic-like proce-
dure into a real-time sculptural performance event in which the artist swallowed
a capsule-sized camera apparatus that was guided down the esophagus to explore the
hollow body as a “host” for “aesthetic adornment” (Stelarc n.d.). Toward the end of
the 1990s, Stelarc shifted his focus to distributed control via the fledgling Internet.
Seeking remote connections between bodies that were both present and absent,
simultaneously local and distant, performances such as Fractal Flesh (1995), Ping Body
(1995), and Parasite (1997) involved a multiplicity of bodies through the fragmentation
and distribution of control facilitated by computer networks. The artist’s body, whose
individual muscles could be actuated by network activity (e.g., in Ping Body) was made
both object and subject controlled remotely from exogenous code, as a hub, host, and
“nexus for Internet activity.” Electronic space, fractured between the physical and
the data world, would act itself as the medium for action and performance, turning
information away from disembodied bits to what Brian Massumi described as “elec-
tronic forces impinging on the body” and highlighting before a public an unfinished
body in becoming.33

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 Cyborg Identity and Hybrid Bodies

With artists caught up in a kind of technological ecstasy fomented by the very possibility
of birthing new mutant bodies through fleshy excavations, other practitioners were quick
to focus on the political repercussions of such cyborg bodies’ envelopment within more
predatory systems of biopolitically centered control. Working within frameworks of
cultural and political identity and hybridity made more complex by the introduction of
cyber identity, ethno-techno culture, and biopolitics, artists such as Guillermo Gómez-
Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, Coco Fusco, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Critical Art
Ensemble, and Tissue Culture and Art all examined issues of the capitalist transformation
of bodies through biopolitical structures.
Mexican-American/Chicano interdisciplinary artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose
prolific solo and group performances, critical writings, and media activism gained him a
strong following in the 1980s, became increasingly interested in the politics of cyborg
identity and the digital divide between Caucasians and Latinos in the 1990s. A postmod-
ern collage of radio studio, lecture hall, museum exhibition, and political soapbox, Gómez-
Peña’s solo performances involved the adoption of fake Chicano-American characters (the
most famous being the Warrior for Gringostroika and Cyber-Vato) dressed in ethno-
kitsch, who would hold long, radio play–like monologues on the future of ethnic relations,
border politics, and Chicano identity.
Later, in his chicano cyberpunk performance performances and ethno-techno art with
collaborator Roberto Sifuentes, such as El Naftazteca: CyberAztec TV for 2000 AD (1994),
Borderstasis (1997), and Ethno-Techno (2006), Gómez-Peña and collaborating artists of his
Pocha Nostra collective worked on the creation of living museums, which took the form of
audience walkthrough, museum diorama–like total media environments populated by
what he termed ethno-cyborgs: performers composed of “one quarter stereotype; one quarter
audience projection; one quarter aesthetic artifact; and one quarter unpredictable personal/
social monster.”34
Originally having studied performance art at CalArts in the 1970s, Gómez-Peña’s stab
at postgendered, ethno-techno cyborg, “depoliticized, extreme bodies,” was anchored in
the direct experience of his body in both performance situations and activist political
actions internationally. Not only ironic but politically incisive commentary on the
commercialization of the performing body transformed by technology and “populating
the corporate mediascape and cyberspace,” Gómez-Peña, as a self-proclaimed “information
superhighway bandido,” admitted that he was simultaneously fascinated by and extremely
critical of the hybrid convergence of technocapitalism with ethnicity and gender.
Collaborating with Gómez-Peña on a notorious performance event in the 1990s in
which the two artists displayed themselves as exotic “Amerindian” specimens in a cage
in international public locations, Cuban-born, American-based performance artist Coco
Fusco also investigated issues of ethnic identity within the moral and ethical paradoxes

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of advanced capitalistic driven technoculture. In collaboration with Electronic Distur-
bance Theater founder Ricardo Dominguez, Fusco’s Dolores 10h to 22h (2001) and The
Incredible Disappearing Woman (2003) used surveillance technology, real-time Internet
input and live performance to examine the fate of minority women’s bodies entwined
within corporate constructed techno systems of worker discipline and surveillance in
the maquiladora factories dotting the shady border zone of Mexico and the United
States.
A network-based “docu-drama” performance, Dolores 10h to 22h dealt with the fate of
a young Mexican woman imprisoned without food or water inside a corporate holding
cell for attempting to form a worker’s union inside a maquiladora and involved Fusco and
Dominguez in a live room which was broadcast online via hidden surveillance cameras.
Their Incredible Disappearing Woman performance used a similar thematic and technological
apparatus to follow the story of a young American artist who traveled to Mexico in the
1970s to engage in necrophilia acts with dead women. Using the forum of a live chat
room, live performers on stage enacted rituals of “tele-perversion” actuated by online visi-
tors who could give commands to live performers in a theater setting before audience
members.
Formed in 1998 by Ricardo Dominguez, Stefan Wray, Brett Stalbaum, and Carmen
Karasic, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) married Internet-activated perfor-
mance and hacktivist aesthetic-political practice. Emerging specifically out of the 1998
Zapatista rebellion in Mexico as a forum for the performative execution of mass decentered
online protest techniques, EDT used the Internet as both a conceptual and situational
medium for publicly organized performed disturbances, which targeted the liquid movement
of power relations between multinational governments and corporations represented in
online, virtual space. Collaborating with artists such as Fusco as well as Gómez-Peña,
Dominguez and EDT catalyzed political agency and organized resistance among a seem-
ingly disembodied mass collective of anonymous network bodies.
EDT’s brand of electronic civil disobedience was also hatched in the work of the
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a similar politically driven collective formed originally in
1986 by Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes and involving other activist artists, including
Dominguez, Beatriz de Costa and Bev Schlee. Producing work ranging from installations,
books, performances, and public political actions, CAE’s tactical media methods of
resistance employed a sophisticated apparatus of critical theory and philosophy, political
discourse, theater tactics, and medical technologies to target predatory corporate power
structures, particularly those of the biotechnological industries.
Some of CAE’s works took the form of performance events that appeared to be a cross
between lecture-demos and product information sessions taking place in pseudoscientific
settings. In Flesh Machines and GenTerra, the group created fake biotechnical corporations
(BioCom and GenTerra), where audience members became donors in simulated rituals of
reproductive, DNA-based screening tests or transgenic culture manipulation, while Free

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Range Grain (2005) involved audience participation in fake information sessions about the
hazards of GMOs (genetically modified organisms).
CAE’s interest in performances about the socioethical problematics of biotechnology
was taken much further in the experiments of the Australian collective Tissue Culture
and Art. Founded by artists Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, and Guy Ben-Ary in 1996,
Tissue Culture’s research into “wet biology,” the use of visualization techniques for cell
functioning versus the “dry” biological and informatic study of genetic code, sought
to create a new kind of natural/cultural hybrid; a “Semi-Living” organism sustained
outside of an organic body that could still be classified as an “alive” presence (Catts and
Zurr 2002).
Investigating the “use of tissue technologies as a mode of artistic expression,” Catt’s
and Zurr’s work ranged from collaborations with other artists (Stelarc) interested in bio-
technological manipulation to the creation of experimental “subject/object sculptures”
(Disembodied Cuisine, 2000–2003; Victimless Leather, 2007) raised in vitro and “grown
inside a technoscientific ‘body’ ” (Tissue Culture and Art n.d.). Distributing performance
away from humans and toward biological actants, Tissue Culture’s projects brought body-
based art full circle, where the spectators’ passive role of watching the transformation of
a performer’s body at a distance was transferred to the biochemical reactions and perfor-
mances of complex semilive organisms inside the Petri dish.35

The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater

As a technology that could overcome its own physiological limits or was embedded into
an external, technoscenographic surround of sound, image, and architectonic space, the
body also became an important subject within the work of dance and theater companies
like La Fura Dels Baus, Jan Fabre’s Troubelyn, Wim Vandekybus’s Ultima Vez, Saburo
Teshigawara’s Karas, Reza Abdoh’s Dar e Luz, La La La Human Steps, DV8 Physical
Theater, the Brazilian-based Cena 11, Dumb Type, Carbone 14, Marie Chouinard, Sankai
Juku, Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik, Frédéric Flamand, Alain Platel and Compagnie C
de la B, William Forsythe, Hubert Lepka, and others. Supported by the apparatuses of
(mostly) European-subsidized state theaters and festivals during the economically flush
1980s and 1990s, these artists created technically intricate, extreme sonic, visual, and
tectonic scenographic environments that placed both performers’ and sometimes specta-
tors’ bodies into precarious states of physical disorientation and risk.
A staple of the European avant-garde visual theater of the 1990s, the Belgian chore-
ographer and director Jan Fabre subjected his performers to real physical trials, whether
through the execution of unbearably slow and repetitive movements (The Sound of One
Hand Clapping [1992]; The Other Side of Time [1994]) or direct conditioning and marking
of the body. In the 1996 solo monologue Who Shall Speak My Thought . . . , a Ku Klux
Klan–hooded Fabre, standing behind a pulpit of switches like a maleficent Wizard of Oz,

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wired the body of performer Mark van Overmeier with electrodes and subjected it to
electrical shocks.
Other theater makers and choreographers, like former Fabre dancer Wim Vandekeybus,
Iranian-born and United States–based Reza Abdoh, or French-Canadian choreographer
Édouard Lock also created performances that tested the limits of performer-audience
endurance. Beginning with What the Body Does Not Remember (1987), Vandekeybus’s
company Ultima Vez created violent, urban-inspired choreographies in which performers
threw themselves in the air and at each other in relentlessly aggressive yet precise exami-
nations of the brutality of male/female relationships.
The emotionally and physically demanding works of director Reza Abdoh, who had a
meteoric European career before he died of AIDS in 1995, incorporated fragments of video,
virtuoso movement sequences, and high-decibel sound of a sheer intensity that more
than once resulted in the fainting of both performers and audience members. Perhaps no
choreographer extended the limits of the performing body as much as Édouard Lock’s
celebrated Montréal-based La La La Human Steps. Internationally recognized for his
kinetic dances that fused balletic and modern techniques, Lock’s Human Sex (1985), New
Demons (1987), Salt/Exauce (1998), Amelia (2000), and Amjad (2007) pushed already
extraordinarily trained dancers to their kinesthetic thresholds through ferocious and ver-
tiginous movements executed at almost superhuman speed. The projects of these artists
and others produced an atavistic, almost Artaudian cruelty within the confines of a seated,
passive audience, but other companies, such as the Catalan pluridisciplinary, all-male
collective La Fura dels Baus brought such cruelty into a much closer relationship with its
public.
Emerging in the post-Franco atmosphere of late 1970s Spain, La Fura dels Baus (liter-
ally, “the rats from the Baus,” in reference to a river near Barcelona) originally performed
its physically exhausting, street-influenced theater in found spaces like dilapidated, aban-
doned buildings; plazas; and the street. Moving into indoor nontheatrical venues with a
series of internationally touring performance spectacles, starting with Accions (1983–
1987) and followed by Suz/o/Suz (1985–1991), Tier Mon (1988–1990), Noun (1990–1992),
M.T.M. (1994–1996), and Manes (1996–1998), the collective developed what they
dubbed lenguaje furero, a multidisciplinary theatrical language probing elemental themes
such as war, aggression, and the tension between humans and the natural/technological
world.
Hung from the ceiling, submerged into water tanks, connected to machines, and
blasted by the intense pressure of water from fire hoses, La Fura’s jock strap–clad bodies
engaged in initiation rituals of human conflict through searing theatrical actions that
abolished the borders between spectator and performer corporeality (figure 6.8). The col-
lective’s strategy of maneuvering directly among, on, and around the moving spectators
served to shift focus from the trained performer’s bodies to the bodies of the audience.

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Figure 6.8 La Fura dels Baus. Suz/o/Suz, 1985–1991. Photo © Theodore Shank.

Continuously displaced and put at risk, La Fura’s spectators became both subject and
object of a performance whose borders were transgressed.36
After 1990, La Fura achieved worldwide attention with their staging of the opening
ceremony for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and subsequently moved into what they
termed digital theater: “a theater language connecting the organic with the inorganic, the
material with the virtual, the actor in the flesh with the avatar, the present audience with
the internet users, the physical stage with the cyberspace.”37 In contrast to the earlier
works, which focused on the immediate relationship between the performer and spectators’
bodies, La Fura’s later, digitally inspired events such as F@ust version 3.0 (1996–), Ombra
(1998–2000), and ØBS (2000) as well as theater and opera stagings in more traditional
theaters focused more on the mediation of the body through the apparatus of camera and
screen.
Still another set of techniques placed the performing body into stage-specific,
artificially constructed environments that both conditioned and estranged the normal
possibilities of dance or physical movement. In the distinctly German Tanztheater of
the celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch in the industrial town of Wuppertal, dancers
navigated scenic spaces filled with water, tables and chairs, wet leaves, fallen bricks, carna-
tions, AstroTurf, and other unusual materials and objects, while engaging in intense

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movement theater that exploited techniques such as repetition to their almost unbearable
extreme.
The Japanese choreographer Ushio Amagatsu, founder of the international butoh
company Sankai Juku, also created scenographic environments of water, sand, train tracks,
and gigantic plastic flowers, among other things, that his bald, rice powder–dusted
dancers moved through. As leaders in the international dance scene in their own right,
neither Bausch nor Sankai Juku were particularly concerned with technological devices,
but their work did suggest that the total scenic environment that conditioned the body’s
movement was as essential as the movement that took place within such environments,
paving the way for other, more media-centric dance and theater makers to explore the
possibilities of the body colliding with and performing within installations and architec-
tural surrounds.
An important example in this direction and frequent participant in European festivals
during the 1990s was Japanese dancer, choreographer, and visual artist Saburo Teshiga-
wara and his ensemble Karas, who created scenic and aural installations that researched
the fleshiness of the body (literally) colliding against the materiality of technologically
constructed space. Noiject (1992; titled by merging “noise” and “object”), for example,
featured dancers who threw themselves against an environment of amplified iron walls
generating both an industrial sonic landscape and a space in which the body was subjected
to severe environmental constraints. Scattered onto the floor, anchored into walls and
furniture, or directly embedded into the backs of the dancer’s costumes, broken glass also
played a prominent scenographic role in other Teshigawara works, including the solo
Bones in Pages (1992), White Clouds Under the Heels (1994), and Glass Tooth (2005). Poised
between beauty and imminent destruction, Teshigawara’s choreographies created direct
physical merges between the organic and inorganic: the human body and technological
materials.
Another staple in European dance-theater of the 1990s, Belgian choreographer Frédéric
Flamand, also explored the body’s encountering of technoarchitectonic stage environ-
ments. In particular, Flamand’s interest in bringing dancers face to face (and body to
body) with unusual surfaces and technological materials, directly materialized in a series
of collaborative productions with star architects such as Diller Scofidio, (Moving Target
and Muybridge: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed, 1996 and 1998), Zaha Hadid (Metapolis-
Project 972, 2000), Jean Nouvel (Body/Work/Leisure, 2001), and Thom Mayne/Morphosis
(Silent Collisions, 2003).
Arguably, the most high-profile contemporary dance/theater maker to research the
body’s entanglement with techno-social-perceptual systems was American-born, German-
based choreographer William Forsythe. Dancing in the Stuttgart Ballet under John
Cranko in the late 1970s, Forsythe became artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet in
1984. Assembling concepts from architecture, dance theory, physiology, philosophy,
literary criticism, film, linguistics, mathematics, and the natural sciences as generative

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material for his choreographies, Forsythe’s vision of the body was not unlike that of
Laban’s: a richly complex physiological system capable of producing sophisticated spatial
and temporal trace forms.
Departing from the ordinary, pedestrian movement so embraced by modern dance,
Forsythe’s extraordinarily complex and rigorous choreographies were celebrations of
theatrical and perceptual artifice; visceral stage events that functioned simultaneously as
theoretical models and as entertainment (Libeskind 1988). By exploiting the platform of
a lavishly subsidized, city-supported institution like the Frankfurt Ballet, Forsythe ques-
tioned political and perceptual descriptive models within the apparatus of dance and
theater itself; particularly, how dance and performance emerged within politically and
culturally inscribed practices.
Early works in Frankfurt such as Gänge (1983), Artifact (1984), LDC (1985), Die
Befragung des Robert Scott (1986), Isabelle’s Dance (1986), and Impressing the Czar (1988) used
the conventions of dance and music-theater to demonstrate how power mechanisms of
perception/observation operated directly within the act of performing and perceiving
dance. Beginning with The Loss of Small Detail (1987 and 1991–1996) and continuing
with Limbs Theorem (1991), Alie/n a(c)tion (1992), As a Garden in This Setting (1993), Eidos:
Telos (1995), Endless House (1997), and Kammer/Kammer (2001), however, Forsythe
turned to a more systematic inquiry into choreographic production, incorporating formal
mathematical, architectural and linguistic systems, computer technologies, and media
elements into his mise-en-scène to examine the effect of external systems on the dancing
body.38
Specifically, the choreographer sought to develop new generative operations that could
be applied to movement sequences in order to birth choreographies co-produced through
the outcome of the system and the dancers’ own bodies. Labeled improvisation technologies,
this assemblage of techniques not only assisted Forsythe in calling into question Laban’s
ideology of centeredness but also served as a kind of choreographic machine, not unlike
Trisha Brown’s work a decade earlier.
Described as “tools for the playful mind” by longtime Frankfurt dancer Dana Caspersen,
Forsythe’s procedures consisted of spatial, temporal, architectural, and corporeal opera-
tions applied to shorter movement phrases or longer sequences in order to create unpre-
dictable outcomes at both micro (the dancer’s body) and macro (the larger choreographic
organization of scenes, events, or entire dances) levels.39 Such technologies served as a
generative basis for Forsythe’s large-scale theatrical works of the 1990s, as well as for the
development of a unique CD-ROM-based dance archiving tool co-created with the ZKM
(Center for Art and Media Technology) and digital artists Volker Kuchelmeister and
Christian Ziegler between 1994 and 1997.
Forsythe’s improvisation technologies were only a subset of techniques to spark
new forms of spatial and temporal movement organization. Populating the stage
with information systems ranging from hidden displays showing videos that acted as

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triggers for movement associations to computer-generated timers, such clandestine
information streams out of view of the spectators provided the performers with simul-
taneous options for improvisation to take place within mostly highly inscribed choreo-
graphic structures. In the 1992 choreography Alie/n a(c)tion, a work that partially explored
issues of xenophobia, a computer-driven timing system helped initiate individual and
group sequences that estranged the dancers from their normal, habitual ways of moving
(figure 6.9).
Acting as research into choreography as a system of self-organization based on the
“sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” the third act of the epic theatrical work Eidos:
Telos (1995) used computationally based instruction sets devised without the aid of a
computer that created a huge “connection machine” among multiple groups of dancers.40
The use of so many simultaneously functioning, partially autonomous systems that might
or might not have influence on the overall outcome of a stage event assisted Forsythe in
his quest to thwart deeply held beliefs by both dancers and spectators about the perceptual
determination of order and chaos.
Another area of exploration was how architecture produced by the body and construed
through an environment surrounding it could shift our understanding of dance. In Limbs

Figure 6.9 William Forsythe. Alie/n a(c)tion, 1992. Pictured: Jacopo Godani, Thierry Guiderdoni, Jennifer
Grisette and Francesca Harper. Photo © Dominik Mentzos (www.mentzos.de).

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Theorem (1991), Forsythe and scenographer Michael Simon took architectural blueprints
from Daniel Libeskind in order to build vast, Constructivist-inspired objects that
inhabited the stage with a parallel kind of choreographic expression as the human
performers. Forsythe also developed new lighting techniques involving reflective
illumination, moving lighting instruments, and, in perhaps the boldest move, plunging
the stage into total darkness in the midst of full dance sequences to generate what
dramaturge Heidi Gilpin called architectures of disappearance. “Such performance environ-
ments highlight the nonvisibility of the dancers, forcing the audience to strain to see
or imagine the body that is producing the movement whose traces are all that can
be discerned. Movement itself does not disappear, but the body that performs it does”
(Gilpin 1994, 51).
Collaborating with Dutch composer Thom Willems, Forsythe’s approach to sound and
music also broke with common ways of working with such materials in dance. Inspired
by contemporary architectural forms, Willems’s stirring, sometimes baroque, and some-
times minimal electronic scores paralleled Forsythe’s stage language in their timbral,
rhythmic, and spatial transformations. Starting with Eidos: Telos and continuing with
Sleepers Guts (1996) and the installation-performance works You Made Me a Monster (2004)
and Three Atmospheric Studies (2003), however, Forsythe and Willems also engaged sound
experts such as Joel Ryan and composers-programmers Andreas Breitscheid and Manuel
Poletti to develop real-time software-based instruments for the live production and
manipulation of sound.
Extending the possibilities of live acoustic instruments (Eidos: Telos and Sleepers
Guts, 1997) or inventing new ones, the use of technologies like DSP functioned as a new
compositional strategy as well as directly structured a work’s dramaturgical evolution.
Moreover, the embodied interaction or co-production taking place among the human
players, acoustic instruments, and computational systems in such choreographies resulted
in music and sound environments that were more like dynamic, evolving processes (much
like Forsythe’s movement) than the construction of traditional objet-fixé scores used in
dance.41

Dance and Technology: Extending the Body in the Twenty-First Century

Forsythe’s technologies were more about the processes made possible by complex systems
rather than a strict emphasis on the integration of new devices directly into the perfor-
mance. In stark contrast, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of an entire genre of
performance dubbed dance and technology (or dance tech), which sought to use recently
developed tools to reinvent the perceptual and ontological role of dance in the context of
a digital zeitgeist. The growing interest from choreographic artists in worn and stationary
sensing devices, 3D modeling software, and software control environments coupled with
computer vision and motion data analysis techniques trickling down from scientific

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research helped facilitate the possibility of new dance experiences, distributing control
among human choreographers, performers, and machine ensembles.
Although we can trace dance tech’s origins back to 1960s experiments, the somewhat
vague moniker “dance technology” arose around practices combining dance and, specifi-
cally, new computation technologies, “including responsive systems that allow performers
to manipulate digital media in real time, interactive digital scenography and motion
capture as well as the development of new software and hardware for choreographers and
dancers.”42 These hybrid dance tech practices piqued artists’ curiosity and also garnered
interest from the scientific community looking for artistic, real-world applications of
previously lab-driven engineering and computing research. Many in the areas of computer
science, electrical engineering, physiology, computer music, kinesiology, artificial intel-
ligence, cognitive science, and neurobiology from institutions such as IRCAM, MIT’s
Media Lab, University of Genoa, ATR Labs in Japan, KTH Stockholm, DIEM in Aarhus
(Denmark), GMD in Germany, and elsewhere, convened numerous symposia and obtained
high-level government funding for such exotic studies as emotional interfaces, multimodal
and interactive systems, and the application of signal processing operations to movement
data.43
Led by University of Genoa researcher Antonio Camurri, a team of researchers within
the context of the European Union–sponsored MEGA project developed EyesWeb, a
sophisticated software environment incorporating kansei principles of analysis of expres-
siveness in movement and gesture augmented with custom-written libraries of computer
vision techniques to analyze the emotional-expressive features of danced movement. The
results of long-term interdisciplinary research, the EyesWeb system was made public as
a tool to incorporate both the analysis of gesture in professional performance and exhibi-
tion contexts as well as in the confines of the scientific laboratory.
During the same period, other scientific laboratories—namely, MIT’s Media Lab—also
used dance practice as a viable research object. Computer scientist Flavia Sparacino, a
researcher with MIT’s Spatial Imaging Group, worked with computer vision techniques
for the real-time control of media elements within a performance environment in her
Dance Space project (1996). Receiving attention in computer science conferences like
SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI and numerous artistic publications dealing with dance and new
technology, Sparacino’s work was one of the early attempts within human-computer
interaction circles to create direct, one-to-one mappings between human movement and
triggered music.
Likewise, MIT physicist and electrical engineer Joseph Paradiso, who originally
designed precision alignment sensors for the GEM (gammas, electrons, muons) super-
conducting supercollider in CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), also
developed numerous sensor-based interfaces for dancers during the 1990s. Unlike the
camera-based, computer vision technologies used in projects like EyesWeb and Dance
Space, Paradiso’s electrical engineering expertise led to his research and development of

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numerous hardware-based sensing systems for dance technology performance, ranging
from sensor-augmented sneakers for dance and wearable wireless accelerometers that could
form a local body-based network to a piezoelectric-based carpet that could monitor a
performer’s foot position.
Another key ingredient for dance technology’s increased establishment as a distinct
genre was the creation of networks between the cultural and academic world. Taking
advantage of the traditional academic platforms of symposia, conferences, and publica-
tions, independent arts researchers like Scott deLahunta, the Paris collective Anomos
and its offshoot Mediadanse (Armando Menicacci, Emanuel Quinz), and university-based
scholar-artists like Johannes Birringer worked to establish knowledge sharing among
artists, university researchers, writers, and critics. Ranging from the Laban Center in
London and Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) to the Dance
Technology program located within the prestigious Ohio State University dance depart-
ment, institutions increasingly moved toward the education of a next generation of dancers
who would be as equally equipped with knowledge of sensing, motion capture, 3D ani-
mation, and video as with compositional techniques.44

Transparency/Effect: Tools, Systems, and Processes

One of the overarching issues in the dance technology community was how such new
technologies could or should enlarge dance as a historical and cultural practice. Even
among its stalwarts, the debate raged on email lists and publications around which way
the internal, research-oriented practices taking place in the lab/rehearsal studio with
sensing, motion capture, and other exotic digital systems could effectively translate to
audiences in the result-driven context that marked live stage performance. What aesthetic
impact could such abstract, more or less transparent hardware and software systems have
on spectators who were not privy to the intricate mappings, the forging of relationships
between data input and output between movement on a stage and the resulting transla-
tion of such movement into computer-driven media processes?
In his essay “Invisibility and Corporeality,” deLahunta articulated this tension, stating
that processes of computation—particularly the mapping of input to output—were largely
invisible to those from without (i.e., the spectator). Mostly derived from gesture-driven
computer music, mapping in dance technology invoked a similar use in its deploying of
performer actions to trigger sonic, visual, or mechanical events “in the space around or in
proximity to the performer” (deLahunta 2001).
The misnomer linking dance creativity with technology as simply a matter of input/
output was further propagated by both dance critics and theorists, who sometimes had
minimal understanding of the technologies being used, but also by some artists, whose
lack of technical knowledge prevented bolder conceptual ideas that might have employed
digital systems to a more potent aesthetic effect rather than covering up conventional

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dance performance with layers of superficial digital icing. The fact that many artists who
were eager to work with newly arising digital tools had little understanding of the inner
workings of electronics or computer code led to an even greater furor within the commu-
nity, one acutely articulated in a post from multimedia artist Andy Clarke on the Dance
and Technology Zone mailing list in August 1999 entitled “dance technology: undemand-
ing, unambitious, uninformed, and uninspired” (Clarke 1999).
According to Clarke, through their ignorance of the conventions, genres, aesthetics,
and technical-critical languages of digital art, the practitioners of dance tech produced
work that was uninformed by past precedent and utilized technology in an “emperor’s
new clothes” fashion. Yet, if such new technologies functioned as mere window dressing,
often producing lackluster, safe, and uninspired aesthetic work, what kind of innovation
did result from the fusion between soft and hard digital technologies and choreographic
practices with those who did seek to advance the fundamental aesthetic and perceptual
frameworks of dance?

Software for Dancers

Not surprisingly, Merce Cunningham was one of the earliest dance artists, in the early
1990s, to engage the potential of computational technologies for dance performance,
chiefly through his widely reported use of Life Forms, a 3D character-animation software
package. Created in 1991 by a team of researchers and artists at Simon Frasier University’s
Computer Graphics and Multimedia Laboratory in Vancouver, Life Forms was the brain-
child of Zella Wolofsky, a Simon Frasier graduate student in Kinesology, computer
scientist and engineer Tom Calvert, and later, dancer and computer media artist Thecla
Schiphorst [Responsive Environments: Second Generation, chapter 8]. It emerged from
an earlier software environment called COMPOSE, which enabled the composition of
screen-based dance scores through the use of 3D animated body models.
Described by Calvert as an interface and visualization tool for choreographers, Life
Forms’s structure combined the four-window perspective inherent in 3D modeling soft-
ware with that of a timeline-based system for constructing choreographic sequences. As
Life Forms moved through the academic research conference context and generated com-
mercial hype and press, the Italian city of Orvieto commissioned Cunningham to create
a project using the software for the city’s seven-hundred-year anniversary. No stranger to
the potential of computational technologies in a choreographic process, Cunningham’s
use of a visual-based software environment that could simulate space and set it into
geometric and temporal movement noticeably differed, however, from his and Cage’s
earlier envisioning of computers as elaborate generators of indeterminate structures for
composition.
Working with animated wireframe figures that—as Roger Copeland pointed out
in an 1999 article “Cunningham, Collage, and the Computer”—looked very similar to

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Schlemmer’s out-of-proportion machinic figures from the Triadic Ballet, Life Forms’s
incorporation of the spatial perspectives of 3D modeling and the timeline perspective of
animation software suggested to Cunningham new approaches to visualizing motion in
spatial terms that were made possible only through such a software design paradigm.45
Through its innate ability to characterize and visualize space, the underlying software
design of Life Forms influenced the kinds and dynamics of shapes that Cunningham’s
dancers would execute.
Similarly, Cunningham’s use of space became increasingly fragmented and shifting
based on dancer position—another side effect of working in a software environment that
provided the choreographer with the visualization of multiple perspectives, rather than
imagining such perspectives in the head. Yet another paradigm of approach that was
already part of Cunningham’s technique but may have indirectly (or directly) been height-
ened from the use of software as a choreographic sketch pad was the computer’s inherent
cut and paste model, in which logical sequences of events could be cut and pasted and
rearranged at will.
As with Cunningham’s later expansion of the spatial, temporal, and kinesthetic possi-
bilities of dance practice through software, research was already underway in the 1960s
by engineers who imagined computers as mainly useful for creating combinatoric systems
that could impact the sequencing of actual choreographic phrasing and timing. The cho-
reography Stationary Dance developed at the University of Pittsburgh in 1967 by the
choreographer Jeanne Hays Beaman and software designer Paul Le Vasseur employed such
combinatoric techniques, as did experiments that took place at the University of Sydney
in the mid 1970s. It was, however, a relatively obscure article in Dance Magazine in 1967
by Bell Labs researcher A. Michael Noll entitled “Choreography and Computers” that
suggested that a program could be devised with animated stick figures that might suggest
new directions for movement from a spatial rather than a combinatoric perspective, a
direction that software like Life Forms eventually took.46
With the increased sophistication of computer graphics techniques in the 1970s, Noll’s
proposal was realizable as choreographers began folding computer-generated possibilities
into their work. In 1982, choreographer Twyla Tharp incorporated an early animated,
computer graphic dancer into her PBS video film The Catherine Wheel. Developed at the
New York Institute of Technology (one of the key centers of computer graphics research
at the time) in collaboration with graphics expert and artist Rebecca Allen, Tharp’s ani-
mated St. Catherine was constructed by videotaping the performer and using a mathemati-
cally derived wireframe, tree-like figure, intricately studying key positions in individual
movements to painstakingly produce keyframes for each movement in order to create the
illusion of continuous motion.47
The question of what role software environments could play for expanding choreo-
graphic brainstorming was also vigorously taken up in a 2001 workshop/think tank and
theoretical article entitled “Software for Dancers” organized by deLahunta in London and

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involving a multidisciplinary group of choreographers (Wayne McGregor, Siobhan Davies,
Shobana Jeyasingh, and Ashley Page), digital media artists (Bruno Martelli, Joseph Hyde,
and Guy Hilton), and software programmers who also worked as and/or with artists
(Christian Ziegler, Adrian Ward).
In what deLahunta referred to as software’s “toolness,” its use, one commonly desired
application that arose from the team’s in depth discussions was the design of a kind of
multimedia “notebook” that could be used in rehearsal for recording, notating, and
playing back information (e.g., video), rather than an interface to trigger media on stage.
Based on its binary underpinnings, software could thus give choreographers the ability
to record and manipulate visual and audio data for sketching, indexing, commenting, and
preserving, presenting to its users the sense of an infinite mutability of such data.

Motion Captured

If software could enable animated, cross-media sketching and archiving, it could also be
used to record more invisible data derived from the force, pressure, acceleration, velocity,
rhythm, and spatial trajectories generated by movement. As the obsession with the invis-
ible traces generated by bodies grew, one of the central technologies immediately adopted
was the complex system of motion capture (MoCap). Originally developed for the U.S.
military to track targets and the head position of pilots, motion capture was the digital
age’s version of Marey’s and Muybridge’s quest to reveal the hidden traces of human and
animal locomotion. Increasingly utilized in biomedical, film animation, gaming, and
sports movement analysis applications during the 1990s, motion capture involved “mea-
suring an object’s position and orientation in physical space, then recording that informa-
tion in a computer-usable form. Objects of interest include human and nonhuman bodies,
facial expressions, camera or light positions, and other elements in a scene” (Dyer, Martin,
and Zulauf 1995).
Employing mechanical, electromagnetic, or optical technologies through single and/or
multiple camera setups, motion capture demanded the wearing of sensor-augmented suits
or the placement of tiny, sphere like reflective markers on the joints and body of the moving
subject in highly coordinated sessions where cameras, infrared light, and central comput-
ers would record the emissive traces given off by the attached markers. Taking thousands
of sample images per second (in the case of optical systems), highly detailed and precise
locomotion data could then be stored, analyzed, and reassembled in real-time playback to
create a ghostly, 3D-animated body drained of muscles, nerves, and organs, replaced by
an outline of phosphor dots that retraced an already vanished live movement.
In what researcher Lisa Naugle noted as the ability to explore movement and its depth
in three dimensions, motion capture was viewed by the dance technology community
as a valuable tool for artists that would go beyond the limited visual detail of video.48
The technical complexity and prohibitive cost of systems by companies like Polhemus

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(magnetic) or Vicon (optical, camera-based), however, kept motion capture systems only
within the domain of institutionally funded infrastructures like Arizona State, IRCAM,
UC Irvine, or other research centers. Furthermore, although motion capture could deliver
extraordinarily high-resolution kinesthetic detail beyond the human eye, the question of
what to do with such masses of data within an aesthetic framework posed both a formi-
dable artistic and technological challenge.
One of the most pivotal collectives to engage with this question was the OpenEnded
Group, consisting of artists Paul Kaiser, Shelly Eshkar, and computer scientist-artist Marc
Downie. Working first in experimental filmmaking, Kaiser had already begun using
computers to capture creative processes in his work with learning-disabled children and
then in CD-ROM documentation projects for Robert Wilson. In 1998, Kaiser and Eshkar
began several long-term collaborations with Cunningham utilizing motion capture
technology. Hand Drawn Spaces (1998) and Biped (1999) took motion captured movement
from Cunningham dancers and used it to drive hand-drawn, digitally animated sketchlike
figures in a 3D landscape. Whereas Hand Drawn Spaces was exhibited as a screen-based
installation, a kind of virtual choreography, the digitally created figures that inhabited
Cunningham’s stage choreography Biped shared the stage with live dancers, being pro-
jected onto a huge, transparent scrim that covered the entire width and length of the
proscenium.
As discontinuous segments lasting from fifteen seconds to four minutes, Kaiser’s and
Eshkar’s motion-captured bodies materialized in a multiplicity of visual forms such as
dots, sticks, lines, and Duchamp-inspired Cubist forms suggesting early chronophoto-
graphic forms. Kaiser and Eshkar applied similar techniques in their work with choreog-
rapher Bill T. Jones on the 1999 installation Ghostcatching, in which movement data
captured in sessions with Jones was “restaged” in character modeling software, forming
an astonishing digital dance of multiple Joneses performing as 3D, hand-drawn forms
whose underlying bases were mathematically derived spline curves.49
With the collaboration of Cambridge and MIT computer scientist Downie, the artists
extended their techniques, introducing elements of computer-based artificially intelligent
agents into the mix. Critiquing the mimetic, keyframe animation model of software such
as Life Forms as well as one-to-one mapping models, Downie’s work with Kaiser and
Eshkar aimed at adding more “computational support to the choreographer” (Downie
2005, 10). With the model of software agents, code-based control structures equipped
with percepts, actions, and motor skills that could operate on graphical material, Downie’s
AI-underlying programming substrate could thus structure a richer, more nuanced com-
putational universe than the brittle, mapping-based I/O (input/output) systems of dance
technology that could “deflate the awesome potential of the algorithmic before it can
appear” (19).
Another collaboration with Cunningham, Loops (2001) used motion captured data from
Cunningham’s 1971 “solo for hands” to create a digital portrait of the choreographer—a

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real-time animation that materialized a perpetually redrawn and nonrepeating cats’
cradle–like image derived from constructing an artificially intelligent network of visual
relationships among the vigorously moving points on the choreographer’s hands. Gener-
ated by the forty-two motion-captured positions, the autonomous digital creatures of
Downie, Kaiser, and Eshkar continually drew and traced lines between the other creatures
in the network and signaled interactions that generated a nonphotorealistic, endlessly
shifting gestural world.
In the group’s 2005 collaboration with Trisha Brown, how long does the subject linger on
the edge of the volume . . . , the three artists worked with real-time motion-captured data
from Brown’s dancers to generate a projected stage environment with morphologically
behaving diagrams of transforming surfaces, paths of motion, points, lines, and shapes
computed through probabilistically augmented agents (figure 6.10). Sharing the stage
with the performers as in Biped, the Downie, Kaiser, and Eshkar trace-like shapes both
examined and sensed the environment of the physical dancers, “notating the traces of the
movement” as they took place and producing a choreography of bodies without human
figures—a dance in simulated yet somehow tangible physical worlds that—while faintly
suggesting ours—was ultimately only known to the machine.

Sensate Dances

The OpenEnded Group’s work demonstrated that compelling dance could be constructed
from human dancers’ residual traces: machine-captured, -analyzed, and -choreographed
data that would intensify the debate around human-machine autonomy and authorship.
But their work also leveled a larger critique at another central dance tech paradigm: that
of sensor-based hardware and software systems that mapped dancer-generated movement
input to media output. Inspired by the gestural instrument control model (Wanderley
and Battier 2000), companies such as Troika Ranch (New York), Palindrome (Nürnberg),
and kondition pluriel (Montréal), among others, became leaders in transforming real-time
human movement data captured from body- and camera-based sensing to create what
kondition pluriel cofounder Martin Kusch called the “interactive manipulation of a media-
based environment through dance/performance” (kondition pluriel n.d.).
In addition to their media-saturated choreographies, equally important was each
group’s custom development of the technical systems necessary to carry out their desired
performance explorations. Founded by musician and programmer Mark Coniglio and
choreographer Dawn Stoppiello, Troika Ranch emerged in 1994 as one of the earliest
companies to develop their own hardware and software systems specifically for the trans-
mission of real-time movement data derived from dancers to control musical and visual
scores.
Coniglio’s MIDIDancer, a worn hardware-sensing system consisting of a central encod-
ing and transmission unit and a series of wired bend sensors applied to the joints of a

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Figure 6.10 OpenEnded Group and Trisha Brown, how long does the subject linger on the edge of the
volume . . . Photo © Stephanie Berger.

dancer, was used to wirelessly send MIDI-encoded data to directly control the note values
of synthesizers, the color parameters of projected images, or the movement of motors.
With Coniglio’s custom-written Isadora software employed in works like The Future of
Memory (2003), Surfacing (2004), 16 [R]evolutions (2006), and Loop Diver (2009), Troika
Ranch shifted away from physical sensors to camera-based motion tracking, imposing a
simple 3D virtual skeleton model onto the dancing body caught in video capture to
control real-time 3D imagery and audio. Troika Ranch’s work sought to establish jazz
music–like connections between the organic body and electronic media, creating an

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improvisatory environment that would give performers playful and precise control over
media, making them equal authors alongside the stage director or choreographer.
The German intermedia performance group Palindrome founded by dancer Robert
Wechsler similarly developed both worn and camera-based sensor systems in order to
find a “correlation between science and dance” (Palindrome Inter.Media Performance
Group n.d.). Collaborating with engineer and codirector Frieder Weiss, works like
Menehune (1999) “seine hohle form” (2001), and Maibaum (2003) utilized computer vision
techniques like frame differencing in Weiss’s custom-written EyeCon software to track
dancers in real time and render the results in an intermedia mix of computer-generated
sounds and projected video images. In other works, such as Elektroden, Touching, and
Heartbeats (1997–2002), Palindrome experimented with wireless electrodes to render a
dancer’s heart rate (electrocardiography, or ECG), skeletal muscle activity (electromyog-
raphy, or EMG), and brainwaves (electroencephalography, or EEG) into sonic and visual
amplifications; a real-time body symphony generated by the flexing of muscles or accelera-
tion of pulse.
Palindrome’s artistic interest and technological strategy in creating perceivable yet
surprising interactive relationships between dancers and their stage environment bore a
similar relationship to the modus operandi of Troika Ranch, even to the extent of market-
ing Weiss’s software to the dance technology and digital art making world as Coniglio
did with Isadora. Likewise Weiss used the techniques developed with Palindrome in other
dance and artistic contexts, as in the case of Glow, a 2006 collaboration with Australian
choreographer Gideon Obarzanek’s company Chunky Move that tracked a single solo
dancer under a transforming beam of video light.
Created by choreographer-dancer Marie-Claude Poulin and media artist Martin Kusch,
the Montréal-based partnership kondition pluriel also focused on sensor-augmented cho-
reographic practice, designing, developing, and implementing their own wireless and
worn sensor systems. Distinct from the almost exhilarating celebration of technological
utopia in Troika Ranch or Palindrome, however, kondition pluriel’s choreographic instal-
lations took a far darker reimagining of the body integrated within a sensor-occupied
universe, while blurring the line between performer and participant.
Projects like scheme I/II (2001), recombinant (2004), and Passage (2008) took place in
aesthetically reduced stage environments that stripped image and sound of filigree and
were co-inhabited by dancers whose movement was deliberately crippled and constrained
by the sensor systems they wore. Navigating landscapes of rotating video projectors that
cast strange image blurs between actual and simulated spaces onto moving surfaces,
kondition pluriel’s performers mixed with audience members in a conscious attempt to
estrange the physical and spatial perspective of performers, spectators, and environment.
Moreover, kondition pluriel’s work called into question the static relationships between
observer and participant through their direct emplacement of performers and spectators
into nonproscenium, electronically augmented spaces.

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 These same strategies were also evident in the oeuvre of choreographers whose work
with real-time sensing systems was motivated by their interest in blurring the boundaries
experienced among dancer, observer, and environment. Catalyzed by her studies in phi-
losophy, and particularly phenomenology, for example, choreographer and writer Susan
Kozel’s Mesh Performance Partnerships devised choreographic environments based on the
question of how a performer/observer could be embodied within the constraints of a
sensor-based system.
Contours, a 1997 performance co-created with Kirk Woolford, endeavored to create an
“ecosystem within which a journey of physical transformation mediated by software was
shared by a small number of audience members.”50 In an elaborate circular architectural
arena in which fifty spectators were housed, audience members stared down onto dancers
whose movements were tracked with infrared cameras and converted into luminous com-
puter graphics suggesting ripples across water or skin, projected onto the floor and on a
360-degree screen.
From harness-suspended dancers in the center of the performance space to an audience
forced to view a performance from a bird’s-eye view, Contours’ investigation of embodiment
within an aware computational environment became manifest by placing shared bodies
(both physical and computational) into situations of direct physical confrontation. Mesh’s
Figments took on a far more intimate appearance, creating via motion capture a duet
between a lone performer and an animated, abstract representation of human form, both
of which were viewed by a small group of onlookers. Employing an ultrasound-based
motion capture system that could monitor the position of the single performer in space
through attached microphones, movement was converted into curves, lines, particles, and
other computer graphic structures and projected onto various visual displays: LCD screens
for the spectator and an HMD (head-mounted display) for the performer.
Kozel described the research and creation process of Figments as one of “birthing a sen-
tient system in six weeks,” in which not only the physically present performer would be
captured and transferred into a virtual body but also the history of previous performers’
traces through the system. The choreographer pushed this triadic relationship of per-
former/digital trace/spectator even further in her 2004 choreography Immanence, a work
in which spectators moved throughout an intimate space of three spatially demarcated
zones, each occupied by a different performer. Tethered to harnesses or captured by
cameras, the results of human movement were then transferred into color blurs, ghosts,
medical images, and flying particles and projected onto the floor or screens surrounding
the performance. Engineered through choreography between performer and spectator
intimately confronting each other, Immanence, like Contours and Figments, tried to generate
a felt permeability between bodies, both as physical material and digital abstraction.
With a background in computer science, photography, art, and design, Kozel’s col-
laborator Kirk Woolford became one of a handful of experts in the development of sensor-
and motion capture–based performance and installation projects in the 1990s. Besides

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cofounding Mesh with Kozel, Woolford also collaborated with the UK intermedia part-
nership Igloo, a group composed of choreographer Ruth Gibson (who also collaborated
on Mesh’s Figments) and digital artist Bruno Martelli (who worked in the domains of
choreographed performance and user intervention–based installation around themes of
natural phenomena and its entangling with human perceptions).
Igloo’s Viking Shoppers (1997), a duet between a live performer and a projected “scratch
dancer” employed Woolford’s custom ASCII CAM software which generated an animated
body filled with flickering ASCII code, while WinterSpace (2001–2005), a projection-based
installation by day and a dance performance by night, used similar tracking techniques
to transform particle-system-driven falling snowflakes into a screen of static, star-like points
behind which live performers garbed in pointillist costumes continually appeared and
disappeared, based on their own extremes of movement and stillness.

Simulated Bodies

Woolford’s computer-generated alchemy transforming the dancing self was part of a much
larger trend within the dance technology world toward projected visual environments that
featured lifelike movement of geometrically birthed morphs and forms that mimicked the
behavior of the physical world. As already seen, the tradition of performances between
human dancers-actors and their videated doppelgängers traced its arc back to the larger
historical movements in projected scenery and imagery, but the continual improvement
in processing speeds, graphics cards, high-resolution projection, procedural animation, and
software-based physics simulations enabled choreographic imaginings with bodies that
were truly virtual—in a constant state of becoming.
After D.A.V.E. (Digital Adaptive Video Engine; 2002) and Vivisector (2003), earlier
video-based dance-theater experiments with the choreographer and dancer Chris Haring,
Austrian composer and visual artist Klaus Obermaier turned to high-end computer vision
tracking techniques and physics-based graphic simulations for his 2004 dance work
Apparition. A choreography consisting of two dancers set adrift in a massive projection
of moving dots, waves, strings, lines, and particles, Obermaier’s highly tuned image
landscape formed “a virtual architecture that can be simultaneously fluid and rigid, that
can expand and contract, ripple, bend and distort in response to or an influence upon the
movement of the performers.”51
Analogous strategies were also seen in the work of dozens of other choreographers
interested in dancing with computer-generated bodies, including London-based choreog-
raphers Carol Brown and Wayne McGregor, media artist/programmer Simon Biggs, the
Irish collective half/angel, Israeli-born dancer Yacov Sharir in collaboration with designer
Diane Gromala, and “liquid architect” Marcos Novak and former Ballett Frankfurt dancers
Nik Haffner and Thomas McManus, collaborating with ZKM programmer and artist
Bernd Lintermann. Conducted at the ZKM in 2003, the Haffner and McManus project

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Timelapses was particularly interesting as a longer-term research exploration into the
perceptual links between a physical body in three-dimensional space and its mediated,
computer-generated representation on a flat, two-dimensional screen.
Christian Ziegler, another ZKM-based artist, designer, and media artist—and one of
the main developers for William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies CD—also created
several key dance works involving the computer manipulation of live graphic material.
Ziegler’s Scanned V (2001), in collaboration with the Indian dancer and choreographer
Jayachandran Palazhy, used camera-based tracking to grab images of a moving Palazhy,
sample them, and project the slowly evolving scan lines back into the stage environment
in real time, temporally reorganizing and reshuffling the dance and gradually assembling
an image of the body as a sampled entity.
Working with Japanese dancer Kazuo Ikeda and German turntablist Florian Meyer,
Turned (2005) and its predecessor DDR! (2003) both relied on real-time camera tracking
in order to generate a panoply of computer-generated transformations of the dancing
performer. Sampling visual motifs from DJ/VJ and audio motifs from video game culture,
Turned as a dance event proceeded from concert to dance to installation and finally to a
purely computer-generated world in order to produce an evolving set of moving bodies
(spectator, dancer, graphic, sound) that would continually spatially reorganize themselves
through an interconnected, interactive network of devices and systems.
Ziegler’s appropriation of video gaming culture at the sonic level was taken much
further into a full-blown dance/video game image aesthetic with two notorious works
from the Dutch choreographer Krisztina de Châtel, Lara (1998) and Lara and Friends
(1999). Based on the Lara Croft video games, de Châtel used the primitive movement
vocabulary of the animated Tomb Raider star to stage a choreography in which dancers
and dance were controlled by a real fourteen-year-old boy playing the video game on stage.
Her follow-up entitled Lara and Friends (1999) made use of the high-end, real-time com-
puter graphics capabilities of Houdini (a high-end film industry modeling/animation
software) to sculpt a projected video game backdrop augmented and driven by the dancers:
a live video game choreographed by physical bodies.
At the same time, the projects of several prominent Montréal artists working with
notions of computer-effected bodies also gained considerable attention in what Andrée
Martin in a 1997 Ballett Tanz article called the Canadian “interactive choreography boom”
(Martin 1997). Beginning with Le Partage des Peux (1990) and then Communion (1995),
artist Isabelle Choinere developed works that sought to test the boundaries between physi-
cal presence and projected simulation, at times equipping her body with worn microphone
and bend sensors used to produce animate, pulsing, electric-like fields that would eroti-
cally dance alongside human performers.
More technologically refined attempts to link physical and projected bodies appeared
in the collaborations of Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon with the Montréal-based PPS
Danse (Pierre-Paul Savoie and Jeff Hall). Making use of projection technologies similar

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to those that marked Pilon’s and Lemieux’s 4D Art and Cirque du Soleil’s Delirium spec-
tacles, PPS’s Grand hotel des etrangers (1994) and Pôles—dance virtuel (1996) made live
meetings between different orders of flesh: projected and human bodies that encountered
each other across cosmic stage landscapes where animated images emerged, cocooned,
entranced, and enraptured the human dancers.

Dance at a Distance

If one strain of choreographic practice with digital technologies exemplified by artists like
Pilon and Lemieux, Ziegler, and de Châtel resulted in duets between projected light and
flesh on stage, another explored telematic partnering over digital networks between
dancers physically divorced from each other in time and space. Contrasting attempts to
transfer video dance onto the Internet or other Internet dance models incorporating early
(and quickly obsolete) technologies like VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language),
telematic, or network-based dance had one foot in the physical world, while the other (or
a partner’s other) was broken down into packets and transmitted across so many Internet
hops only to end up as grainy images on a screen thousands of miles away.
To many of the practitioners of networked dance or distributed choreography such as
Company in Space, Lisa Naugle, Kelli Dipple, media artist Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dream-
ing work with Susan Kozel, and the research university members involved in the 2002
ADaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics), networks as conceptual
paradigms and distribution means provided a context to critique received ideas about the
performance and reception of dance within a singular physical space as well as dance’s
fixation on the purity of physical presence.
Described by ADaPT researcher Ellen Bromberg as “polymorphous movement in a
shared stream,” networked dance shared a similar utopian excitement about the possibility
of folding the collaborative mechanisms that appeared to be enabled by networked systems
into the actual performance process, staging the techniques of collaboration as an aesthetic
event in and of itself (Bromberg and Birringer 2002). Emblematic of the trends in tele-
matic dance, projects like Escape Velocity (2000), named after the Mark Dery book of the
same title, and c03 (2001), both from the Melbourne, Australia–based Company in Space
(founded by choreographers Helen Sky and John McCormick), were works in which the
camera frame and the video editor in collaboration with the network helped construct the
viewer’s perspective of the dancing body—a presence where partnering only took place
over ISDN lines.
Transducing choreographic space into the flatness of a pixel array, the work of Company
in Space and others was part of a larger debate around the aesthetic merits and effects of
a dance form reduced to camera viewpoints, transmitted over fiber optics and received by
one audience group only as projection. The technological seduction among choreographers
to capitalize on increasingly ubiquitous digital networks, however, sidestepped more

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critical questions generated by the very practices inherent in distributed dance itself. The
first major question concerned what aesthetic innovation could emerge from artists on the
telematic bandwagon? The precise organization of spatiotemporal relationships achieved
through encounters with bodies in physical proximity to each other (one of the central
tenets of choreographic practice) was more than complicated by the very use of computer
network technologies.
If dance before the Internet age (and the even more high-powered Internet 2) was seen
to be, above all, about real bodies interacting in real time and space, then hidden engi-
neering factors mostly unbeknownst or unimportant to artists such as latency, bandwidth,
and temporal/image resolution suddenly had to be taken into account on equal par with
kinesthetic-aesthetic issues. In other words, the stuttering of the network from bandwidth
blockages and the crude resolution of a dance jumping around on servers across the globe
became at times more important than the actual dance itself.
Although Lisa Naugle, one of the key proponents of distributed choreography, claimed
that the temporal hiccups and burps in the network were part of a new artistic medium
that “plays with its protocols and technical peculiarities, it exploits the bugs and pushes
the potentials of software and hardware” (Naugle 2002, 61) and other practitioners per-
ceived that the “delay created by the network liberates the ‘events’ of motion from the
bodies executing them” (Bromberg and Birringer 2002), many of these justifications
appeared thin at best, covering up what was more likely to be substandard choreography
dressed with technological sheen.
Perhaps an even more fundamental issue with networked dance, however, was based
on the confusion perpetrated by its practitioners between the network as a model of com-
munication and the network as a means of distribution. In their claim to dispense with
“older notions of the book and theatrical dialogue” (person-to-person communication) by
focusing on the possibility of broadcasting distributed artists at different geographic loca-
tions to both physical as well as online locations, in reality telematic dance practitioners
still relied on the theatrical sender-receiver model, albeit with two different senders in
remote locations. For media theorists like Vilém Flusser interested in exploring different
strategies of communication, the theatrical or amphitheater model involved a single sender
sending out to multiple receivers.
For network discourse, however, the point of origin of sending and receiving disap-
peared, replaced by a complex latticework of connections. A network model assumed an
open circuit (Flusser) with no single point of origin of a message (be it text, image, sound,
etc.) and a heterarchy of potential senders and receivers, the majority of telematic dance
work used the traditional dyadic, sender-receiver model in which a live dancer from one
location was broadcast to another location.
Even as network dance’s practitioners claimed that anyone could enter the network at
any point by logging on to the performance online, in fact, the complexity of a network
was simply replaced by the communication means of a video camera that carried the signal

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from one remote location to another. Networked dance more often than not resembled
the distribution model of television than the multiple, independent, potentially rhizom-
atic nodes depicted by network culture. “Telematic dance exists as transmitted images for
remote seeing, and thus, it resembles online television/cinema” (Bromberg and Birringer
2002). That television was a medium that resembled a more antiquated form of com-
munication due to its unilateral rather than network structure appeared to be lost on the
practitioners of telematic dance, who were caught up in the techno-euphoria of movement
carried across the ether.

Augmentation/Prosthesis/Replacement

We began with Marey’s chronophotographic tracings of locomotive bodies across time

and space that occupied optical curiosity at the end of the nineteenth century and end
with our own digitally conditioned apparatuses of capture that transfigure the body in
the twenty-first. After more than a century of machinic and informatic interventions in
which the human body was thoroughly altered in concept, practice, and perception, the
question still remains as to what borders still exist between the organic and the mechani-
cal. Where is the body left if we so thoroughly trained and conditioned it, pushing it
beyond its limits and reconfiguring it in aesthetic moments of dueling monstrousness and
beauty? Have we succeeded in erasing the age-old distinctions between the human and
the machine, between the body in here and systems “out there?”
Perhaps the clue (if not the answer) to this fiendish conundrum lies in the nondigital
age, in the perception of the body that the machine age transformed. Through Marey’s
grabbing of the “imperceptible, the fleeting, the tumultuous and the flashing,” the tech-
nologizing of the body already reached its epiphany with the technologies of his time,
long before the digital imaging, sensor augmentation, networked choreographies, surgical
metamorphosis, or algorithmic systems of ours.
But this feigned, supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the
dehumanized machine that has so occupied us may be, in reality, a fiction—a fabulous
construction drawing a false line between poles that are always in the process of being
blurred. If machines remaining outside of human flesh also exhibit expression, agency,
efficiency, and virtuosity, just like human bodies, then what are the repercussions of
machines performing? Why and how do they perform, and—last but not least—for
whom?

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 7

Machines/Mechanicals

The world today belongs to machines. We live among machines, they help us do everything, to
work and to enjoy ourselves. But what do we know about their moods, their nature?
bruno munari, “manifesto of machinism,” 19521

In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely devised a
performance event in which a machine, fastidiously assembled from bicycle tires, wire,
and electric motors from New Jersey junkyards, would commit an act of suicide, self-
destructing in the enclosed garden of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
before the crème de la crème of New York cultural witnesses. Tinguely’s ironically titled
Homage to New York was one of the earliest and concrete materializations of European
modernism’s dreams of a machine-only mise-en-scène—a performance enacted solely by
the material offspring of industrial society’s dreams and nightmares (figure 7.1). But if
machine performances such as Tinguely’s mixed human embodiment with metallic appa-
ratuses, then where are we to be found in the early and late dreams of modernity, in which
electromechanically enhanced automata displace us to be orchestrators, operators, and
witnesses to their shifting feelings?
The incessant preoccupation with a total machinic mise-en-scène, performances by and
for machines (if not for human spectators) is rooted in a conglomeration of influences
criss-crossing the histories of automata, the imagined machine fantasies of industrial
modernism, post–World War II military-industrial schemes, the advent of kinetic art,
industrial subculture, and finally, our long-standing interest in robots.
The histories of performing machines and robotic art, however, have involved a
continual mingling between the mimetic (imitative of human behavior in appearance) and
the machinic (electromechanical behavior that, though animate, is not anthropomorphic)
rather than a disambiguation. Curator and art historian Jasia Reichardt, organizer of the
Figure 7.1 Jean Tinguely. Homage to New York, 1960. Photo. David Gahr. Courtesy Tinguely Museum,
Basel.

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1968 ICA-London exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, one of the first machine art–based
surveys, wrote that an entity’s behavior rather than its appearance plays a crucial role in
whether we ascribe sentience and performativity to something that, for all intents and
purposes, is dead to us (Reichardt 1978, 56).
Here, automata not only refer to something that appears on the surface to be mechani-
cal (i.e., kinetic) but also to processes: how a machine might internally behave to
understand the environment it is situated in and react accordingly, based on a set of
instructions. For Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a key figure in the
postwar cybernetic wave to focus science away from its physics-based emphasis on energy
and power and toward information, communication, and computation, an automaton was
“any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism” (Asprey
1990, 189).
Interested in the relationship between natural and artificial systems, von Neumann
drew upon the models of the nervous system developed by electrical engineers Warren
McCulloch and Walter Pitts in which nerves were essentially seen as switching organs—
input/output devices for neural stimulus and response.2 For von Neumann, automata were
not machines in the sense that we understand the term, but rather mathematical axioms
defining logical processes for such self-regulation and self-replication: the deciding factors
for whether something natural or artificial could be considered “living.”3
How then can we begin to understand the myriad of ways in which machines perform
for each other and for us, conveying a sense of animism that appears to be lifelike? How
can machines enunciate before spectators and why have they so often been exhibited in
an aesthetically artificial performance context based on their ability to perform as “actors”
or, as artist Louis-Philippe Demers stated, “agents of expression” (Demers 2004). With
few exceptions, from wind-up motors, remote-controlled radios, or computer terminals
spitting out ASCII or MIDI information, machinic performances encompass a delicate
dance of control between machines and their human counterparts.
“Why do we want our machines to seem alive?” wrote the artist Simon Penny (1995,
216). This is, of course, a salient question when surveying our Eastern and Western pre-
modern fantasies of simulating nature through mechanical automata, from the clypsedra
(water clocks) of Sung-dynasty China and the sophisticated pneumatics of Heron of
Alexandria to the mechanical birds of Philon of Byzantium and the “simulacra” of
Islamic scientist and engineer Al-Jazari, whose twelfth-century treatise The Book of
Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices contained more than a hundred sketches and
models for perpetual machines, wine dispensers, clocks, and similar animated matter.4
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the process of constructing autom-
ata accelerated, encompassing everything from French inventor Vaucanson’s fabled
mechanical duck, musical performing androids, sounding boxes, and chess-playing
machines to the Japanese karakuri dolls—mechanical puppets that also had a strong
influence on the development of the Japanese puppet theater Bunraku.

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 Moreover, the histories of animate objects such as self-propelling mechanical figures,
statues, and robots seem curiously tied up with theatrical performance’s similar history
of obsession with puppets and performing objects. Already some 120 years after the
development of Bunraku, the German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist’s famous
manifesto “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Puppet Theater”) described a theater
where a dance of marionettes could easily achieve the grace normally accorded to human
dancers, because they were not affected by the “inertia of matter” or the affectation of the
soul to weigh them down (Kleist 1982, 214). About one hundred years later, director
Gordon Craig’s essay “The Actor and the Über-marionette” reinforced the idea that
machines could have the same force as human beings in performative spectacles, a sug-
gestion that, as John Bell writes, could condemn the human performer to a lifeless world
of objects—to death itself.5
Not surprisingly, the word and concept of “robot” made its first appearance also in the
context of artistic performance. Derived from the Czech word robota, meaning “slave
worker” or “drudgery,” “robot” was brought into widespread usage by the Czech writer
Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It is not a bit ironic that
the play’s premiere in Berlin had the famous electromechanical machine scenography
designed by Frederick Kiesler described in chapter 1, a scenography that presupposed that
a mechanical contraption could have equal status with a human performer.

Mechanization Takes Command

The machine-obsessed Futurists were not the only cultural players caught up in the
moment of nonhuman dynamism that the rapidly unfolding machine age provoked in the
human imagination. In his 1948 treatise Mechanization Takes Command, the great Swiss
architectural historian Sigfried Giedion described the hailing characteristic of the machine
above all else, as the phenomena of movement itself; an extension of the human body and
an articulated, performative substitute (Giedion 1969, 46–50) . The human hand, which
acted as a grasping instrument, was the central assemblage of the body, but the machine
was also a kind of articulate aggregation, extending human action and elasticizing it.
In a further animistic move, the kinetic sculptor Bruno Munari’s 1936 “Manifesto of
Machine Art” suggested that artists were the only ones capable of grasping the machine’s
personality, intimately understanding its complexities and possibilities. “Artists are the
only people who can . . . take an interest in machines. . . . They must get to know the
anatomy and the language of machines, they must learn to understand machines and dis-
tract them by making them function irregularly, thereby creating works of art with those
same machines and with the means they offer” (Hultén 1987, 17). Munari’s manifesto
demonstrated the general aesthetic interest in the simultaneous uselessness of machines
and their aura of superhuman abilities that emerged around the industrial cultures
surrounding modernism.

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 In his encyclopedic 1968 work Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, art historian Frank
Popper provided yet another crucial piece in the machine performance puzzle, portraying
the superhuman ability ascribed to the machine as something akin to the force of magic.
“The introduction, suggestion and employment of machine movements in art,” wrote
Popper, “can be equated with the idea of the identification with the industrial and
mechanical universe that is as much within the field of magic as that of aesthetics” (1968,
235). For Popper, machines were only a small subsection of the larger field of kinetic art
that began in the early part of the twentieth century—an aesthetic field, like Giedion’s
claim, based on the dynamics of kinesthetic behavior.
The earliest—and consequently, most well-known—kinetic forms that incorporated
what painter Fernand Léger called “machine aesthetics” into a direct translation of move-
ment at the material level such as Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction or László Moholy-
Nagy’s Lichtrequisit (Light-Space Modulator) from 1929, were chiefly driven by a formal
exploration into the kinetic behavior of materials. The fact that Moholy-Nagy’s Licht-
requisit had initially been imagined by the artist to present a new kind of stage environ-
ment points out the growing interest that the Constructivist-influenced avant-garde had
in the intricate choreography of animated, nonhuman assemblages.
In describing the wide range of kinetic possibilities for artistic practice, Popper created
a useful taxonomy of movement that corrected the common assumption that kinetic art
was the sole basis for machine art and performance. Among categories such as figurations
of movement, representation of movement, and photographic and cinematic procedures,
he included the notion of movement expressed by movement itself: simple mechanical as
well as electromechanical, electronic, thermal, hydraulic, and magnetic kinesis. “The
automata of the 18th century have a direct relationship to . . . simple mechanical move-
ment. But there seems little doubt that the modern manifestation of this technique actu-
ally derives a reaction to the machine age, which may take the form of fascination or irony.
Picabia and Duchamp, in the first place, followed by such members of the younger
generation as Tinguely and Gustav Kramer, have adapted this procedure in order to
bring out the simultaneous beauty and monstrosity of the machine in motion” (Popper
1968, 221).
It is the fusion of beauty and monstrosity that helps articulate the strange, late-
twentieth-century phenomena of machine performance or what the San Francisco–based
machine art collective Survival Research Labs (SRL) described as “a unique set of ritualized
interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices with humans present
only as operators or audience” (SRL Machines 2008). Taking place in abandoned urban
wastelands and reconstituted former industrial halls, the new man-machine Gesamtkunst-
werk is that of machines fighting and dying in front of a gathered crowd, their human
operators banished behind tables holding the controls that breathe life into these mechani-
cal phantoms. The realization of automata that transcend sculpture, machine performance
is a spectacle that is curiously live yet, not living: incessantly counteracting the imagined

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utopias of the earlier machine age with the apocalyptic overtones of the postindustrial
epoch.

Machine Performance/Mechanical Mise-en-scène

The Futurist vision of machine destruction was most patently actualized in the works of
Jean Tinguely. Driven by an interest in the “mechanics of chance” (Hultén 1975, 8),
Tinguely’s kinetic forms reflected a postwar world in which the utopian perfection of
Futurism was replaced by fragmented and absurd, Duchamp-influenced, ready-made junk.
Tinguely’s machines were marked by the same war-scarred characteristics that the artist
saw in human agents: ironic fallibility subject to error, disorganization, and breakdown—
simultaneously self-driven and self-destructive.
As early as 1953, together with Romanian dancer and object artist Daniel Spoerri, he
began conceptual planning for an Autotheater, a performance for colored shapes and moving
objects without human performers. With the scheme unrealized due to the collapse of his
mechanical set, Tinguely soon thereafter began experimenting with what he labeled meta-
mechanical (“beyond machine”) devices, including a series of automatic drawing machines
that consisted of mechanical structures that held pens or markers and could draw on
positioned pieces of paper.
Tinguely’s desire to create a spectacle that would “pass like a falling star” and most
crucially “be impossible for museums to reabsorb” finally resulted in a landmark series of
self-destructing machine performances in the 1960s and 1970s that laid waste to the
restrictive white walls of the gallery (Hultén 1987, 350). As described at the beginning
of this chapter, the first and most notorious event, Self-Destroying Construction No.1—
Homage to New York, was planned for the MoMA sculpture garden. Constructed from
electrically welded bicycle wheels, an old upright piano, Addressograph machines, drum
parts, a meteorological balloon, mechanically driven paper rolls, go-kart parts, and a
plethora of other detritus from suburban salvage dumps, Tinguely’s machine was designed
to create acts of seduction and unease in the spectators (Hultén 1987, 2).
Assisted in his scavenging and engineering work by Bell Labs scientist and E.A.T.
founder Billy Klüver, Tinguely’s “doomsday machine” undertook its sole thirty-minute
performance in the sculpture garden on the cold, wet evening of March 17, 1961; a per-
formance that, for the artist, was nothing less than a playful, almost mischievous act of
machine suicide. As the junk apparatus ran, various joints melted and collapsed, while a
can of gasoline hidden inside one of the components quickly sped up the mechanical self-
immolation process.
“The work had to pass by, make people dream and talk and that would be all,” Tinguely
later articulated to curator Karl Pontus Hultén. “It had a certain complex seduction that
made it destroy itself—it was a machine that committed suicide. A very beautiful idea!”
(Hultén 1987, 350). The Homage to New York performance embodied Tinguely’s profound

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interest in the anarchic effect of aleatoric, uncontrollable processes. For the gathered crowd
who had expected a colossal act of machinic annihilation, however, the machine itself
betrayed the expected and instead malfunctioned—much to Tinguely’s excitement.
Engulfed in a smoky cloud of titanium tetrachloride that Klüver had brought to increase
the visual pandemonium quotient, the burning machine reached a premature death not
only by its own processes of dissolution but through the New York City fire department
attacking it to put out the fire as well.
As the first in his series of machine performances, Homage to New York was critical to
Tinguely’s grasping the importance of the spectator’s role in the mechanical mise-en-
scène. Study for an End to the World or monster-sculpture-autodestructive dynamique et aggressive
(1961), a second performance given at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, incorporated
dynamite to amplify the violent intensity of the spectacle. Before a gathered audience
overlooking the Baltic Sea, a figural machine constructed of scrap metal, plaster, and
dynamite performed a long theatrical scenario, eventually exploding in a blaze of fire-
works, noise, and smoke.
Exploiting his increasing interest in the destructive powers of dynamite, Tinguely’s
penultimate machine performance, entitled Study for the End of the World II (1962), was
to be staged before a NBC camera crew in the barren desert south of Las Vegas, a site not
far from the proving grounds where atomic bombs were originally tested. The ultimate
tribute to Tinguely’s work, however, must have been the obscure The Tinguely Mystery
Machine or The Love Suicides at Kaluka, a 1965 play written by Tinguely’s friend Kenneth
Koch and performed at the Jewish Museum in New York by a cast of human actors and
Tinguely’s machines interacting with each other.
In the last two decades of his life, Tinguely shifted his emphasis to large mechanical
sculptures installed in public spaces and museums; works that, though sculptural, also
displayed the same performative attitudes. Dissecting Machine (1965) involved female dress
mannequins that functioned by sawing themselves apart in an atavistic act of violence.
Tinguely’s epic Mengele Totentanz (1986), a large-scale assembly of machines, made increas-
ing use of natural and organic elements such as burned wood, animal skeletons, charred
metal appliances, and traditional mechanical parts, and revealed the artist’s growing
apocalyptic world view.
For Tinguely, as a poetic instrument of liberation the machine’s essence was its ability
to move. “Life is movement . . . everything transforms itself, everything modifies
itself ceaselessly” (Tomkins 1962, 150). Subject to their own mechanisms of behavior,
Tinguely’s machines evolved in a “total atmosphere of anarchy and freedom” (150), their
playful, and simultaneously irrational and destructive behavior, expressing the imper-
manence and entropic dissolution normally attributed solely to human experience. His
belief in life’s ephemerality captured through the process of movement applied as well to
the life of his machines, which at times ended up on the junk piles and in the trash cans
of cultural institutions.

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 This Janus-faced tendency toward playfulness and destruction, and free will and control
that was materialized in Tinguely’s machines was later resurrected and amplified in what
could be called his shadow successors: the California-based machine art group SRL.
Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by artist and machinist Mark Pauline as an organization
“dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools and tenets of industry, science and the
military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare” (SRL
Machines 2008), SRL, as it was known, arose in the postpunk, industrial subculture scene
of the late 1970s, quickly acquiring an international cult following. As unstable events
combining live theater, politics, technology, and engineering, SRL’s mechanical perfor-
mances fused the organic and mechanical, gravitating to the fine line between control and
anarchy, the born and the made.
If, for Tinguely, the machine was the ultimate expression of freedom, for Pauline’s
dramaturgies it embodied a Nietzschean will to power through the violent triumph over
both humans as well as its own fellow machine species. Described by critic Mark Dery in
his ode to cyberculture Escape Velocity as “a combination of killing field and carnival
midway” (Dery 1996, 119), SRL’s fiery spectacles created a machine-age theater of cruelty
in which “the non-rational and the absurd act as the baseline of all activity” (Pauline
1996, 420).
Initially, SRL’s spectacles were staged as word-of-mouth happenings in abandoned
parking lots, freeway underpasses, and empty bus terminals, but as their reputation grew,
so did the profile of performance venues: stadiums, art museums, and even the Sony cor-
porate park in San Jose, California. The group’s partially scripted performances consisted
of custom-constructed, tele-operated creatures running amok in Wagnerian-scale pageants
of mayhem before a live audience. Unlike German artist Gustav Metzger’s 1959 call for
an auto destructive art, where art made specifically for industrial societies would self-destruct
by way of its own formal, natural, and technological mechanisms, SRL’s form of performa-
tive annihilation was chiefly planned and orchestrated by its human scenographers.6
Machine Sex, SRL’s first public performance in 1979 was staged at a Chevron gas station
and featured the carcasses of dead pigeons sliced to bits by a giant shredding machine.7
Other earlier works, such as Food for Machines, Noise, and Assured Destructive Capability (all
1979) were smaller affairs, conducted by Pauline and a small pick-up crew of associates.
With the addition of Matt Heckert and Eric Werner in 1980, SRL progressed to more
elaborate contraptions that would destroy each other in choreographed rituals of industrial
violence accompanied by ear-splitting, machine-generated soundtracks.
With extensive titles such as An Epidemic of Fear: The Relief of Mass Hysteria Through
Expressions of Senseless Jungle Hate and Extremely Cruel Practices: A Series of Events Designed to
Instruct Those Interested in Policies that Correct or Punish, Pauline and company constructed
robotic nightmares welded from the plundered remains of Bay Area surplus military and
high-tech salvagers in addition to “reanimated” animal carcasses and junked engines
(figure 7.2). Radio remote-controlled, SRL performances involved combinations of

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Figure 7.2 Mark Pauline/Survival Research Labs. Illusions of Shameless Abundance, San Francisco, 1989.
Photo Steve Heck.

stationary and mobile machines with names as Spike Roller, Chain Thing, and later, V1
(a replica of a World War II Buzz Bomb jet engine), which were pitted against each
other in savage battles, spitting flame and shrapnel and eventually consuming themselves
in heaps of wreckage.8
By the mid 1990s, the group’s performances began to incorporate more technically
sophisticated tele-robotic systems, including Internet-based remote control systems
designed by legions of SRL associates and volunteers whose day jobs involved toiling
away in the high-tech research laboratories of the San Francisco Bay Area’s military
and commercial complexes. In 1997’s Increasing the Latent Period in a System of Remote
Destructibility, a performance/exhibition sponsored by Tokyo’s NTT/ICC digital media
arts center, SRL associate and UC Berkeley computer scientist Eric Paulos programmed
an online Java Applet that gave remote audiences indirect control over a machine in San
Francisco.
1999’s Tokyo follow-up to the 1997 Remote Destructibility show was the first recorded
event to remotely control a machine during a live performance. In further efforts toward
what Pauline described as “converting machines, improving them really, from things
which once did ‘useful’ destruction into things that can now do useless destruction”

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(Kelly 1994, 32), more recent performances after 2000 relied on the implementation of
even more state-of-the-art sensing, embedded systems, and wireless technologies.
In more than one context, Pauline expressed the desire for his performances to be
strictly for the machines rather than the human spectator. “These machines are totally
at ease in the world we have built for them . . . they act completely natural” (Kelly
1994, 33). In the face of increasingly sophisticated war machines driven by telematic
technologies and distributed intelligence, the question remained, however, whether
SRL’s “pyrotechnic insanitarium” (Dery 1999a, 3) of machine war simulacra critiqued or
celebrated the performative and cataclysmic potential of such postindustrial systems.
The impact of SRL on the international machine performance scene cannot be under-
estimated. Driven by the liberal political-cultural climate of northern California as well
as the widespread impact of SRL itself, satellite artists and collectives who had either
worked with, been influenced by, or were in opposition to the group made the San
Francisco Bay Area a haven for industrial culture, with SRL alumni artists such as
Chip Flynn (the Peoplehater Group), and Christian Ristow and Kal Spelletich/SEEMEN
creating their own machines and spin-off groups.9
Much of this off-shoot machine performance scene in San Francisco not only took place
in the same down-market sites as SRL’s but also at the legendary Burning Man festival,
an annual late-summer gathering of more than 50,000 people who set up a temporary
alternative city (Black Rock City) in the Nevada desert. In a weeklong festival fusing free
expression with nonconsumer culture, technopaganism, and drug-induced hallucinogenia,
Burning Man became the single largest “in the wild” performance space in the United
States. As an ongoing postapocalyptic spectacle attracting legions of artists who built
temporary testaments to cyber-machine culture, Burning Man featured such exotic
phenomena as self-incinerating robots, roving Tesla coils on flatbed trucks, computer-
controlled flamethrowers, dinosaur-like kinetic animals, and other sorts of pyromaniacal,
industrial-techno-culture inspired madness in a barren desert.
Another indirect thread from the SRL legacy was the original San Francisco pheno-
menon of Robot Wars. Initially dreamed up by a former Lucas Arts animatronics designer
named Marc Thorpe who was trying to develop a radio-based, remote-controlled vacuum
cleaner and saw the commercial potential of similar devices engaged in battle, Robot Wars
arose as a popular competition in which remote-controlled robots built by weekend
hobbyists would fight it out in a public spectacle. Reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial
matches or naumachias, the large-scale mock sea battles that took place in flooded audito-
riums and featured condemned criminals fighting to the death on miniature-sized replicas
of naval vessels, Robot Wars was also partially inspired by Pauline’s work and a Denver-
based machine spectacle called Critter Crunch.10
Partially based on SRL’s European tours, the machine aesthetic also found appeal
among European avant-garde art circles in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly in former
Eastern European countries, which found themselves in upheaval after the collapse of

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Communism. Both directly and indirectly, the sheer impact of these events set the stage
for numerous cultural festivals and organizations to thematize the breakdown of totalizing
systems and the implosion of postwar Warsaw Bloc industrial culture.
“Out of Control,” the theme of the 1991 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria—the
largest international event for electronic arts—for example, explored what French theorist
Jean Baudrillard in his catalogue entry called the “seismic order”—the new energy
brought about by natural and technological systems on the edge of collapse (Baudrillard
1991). In continuing the edge-of-chaos theme in artistic projects, curators Gottfried
Hattinger and Peter Weibel presented a veritable potpourri of machine makers, including
English robotics builder Jim Whiting, Dutch machine artist Eric Hobijn, German
roboticist Nicolas Baginsky, and Austrian artist Just Merrit.
Other European media arts organizations, such as the Rotterdam institute V2, EMAF
in Osnabrück, Germany, and C3 in Budapest, as well as the squatted derelict East
Berlin cultural center Tacheles were also early adopters and presenters of such extreme
machine performances. Groups such as the British-founded Mutoid Waste Company,
which built roving sculptures from scrap metal, and the infamous Dead Chickens, a
collective founded in 1986 that put on machine performances consisting of huge, gro-
tesque mechanical monsters in abandoned buildings, Berlin, in general, and Tacheles,
in particular, became attractors for what the Germans called Schrottkunst (scrap metal
art): art made from the junked remains of industrial cultures that were disappearing
overnight.
The most intriguing European machine performance cum happening, however, took
place in the most suitable but unlikely of places: the Voest-Alpine steel factory, one of
the world’s largest steel mills and former tank factory for Hermann Göring, outside of
Linz, Austria. Organized by machine artist Just Merrit, the project Contained was a kind
of “nomadic encampment”/arts colony/workshop located directly on the grounds of the
behemoth steel mill, whose square area rivaled that of a small town. As a loose “conglo-
meration of adventurous ideas, carved out with passionate obsession in the heart of a steel
works,” the local and international members of Contained sought a connection to a dying
industrial culture that the Voest embodied, one born from an interest in industrial culture,
“a compassion for the steel workers and identification with their access to hardware, as
well as a fascination for the immediacy and directness of production machinery” (Merit
1996).
Operating in stealth mode for two years, Contained’s multifarious program of activities,
including working television and radio stations, industrial installations, machine perfor-
mances, sound sculptures, and a bar, was exposed to the public only during the 1996 Ars
Electronica festival in a program called “The Rearview Mirror on Reality,” which featured
more than twenty prominent machine performance artists like Merit, Chico MacMurtrie’s
Amorphic Robotic Works, Matt Heckert, Chip Flynn, Nicolas Baginsky, John Duncan,
Eric Hobijn, and others.

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 Machine Orchestras

Taking a cue from the Futurists as well as an interest in the sound production surround-
ing industrial subculture, a number of artists built machines exclusively for their sound-
making potential. One of the most intelligent manifestations of this phenomenon was the
Mechanical Sound Orchestra (MSO) of former SRL collaborator/soundtrack designer and
artist Matt Heckert. Intrigued by the complex timbral and rhythmic range of sounds that
machines could produce, Heckert left SRL in 1990 to create an ensemble of sound-making
machines that could be played and conducted by the artist through software-based servo
motor and machine control.
Longing to give “sonic voice” to machines, Heckert specifically designed and fabricated
a musical ensemble based less on its visual appearance than on its aural abilities. Similar to
a conventional orchestra only in terms of the diverse sonic range produced by different
groups of instruments, Heckert’s machine-instrument hybrids produced wide ranges of
sounds enabled by fine degree changes in motor speeds achieved by computer controlled
algorithms that executed a combination of predetermined patterns and random behavior.11
Instruments such as the Disc-Cable machine, a rotating, slapping cable threaded with
huge metal washers; Resonators, large metal cylinders skinned at one end with tympanic
membranes that resembled a machine-controlled drum tuned at different frequencies; and
Oscillating Rings, consisting of four rotating gyroscopic wheels set atop a piezo-amplified
metal table created a roaring, pulsing, shaking acoustic environment that brought a more
intense experience of immediacy to the spectator (figure 7.3). By removing the stage and
spatially placing the audience directly among the machines, Heckert’s MSO shifted the
scale of spectator perspective, creating the sensation of being inside a set of industrial
procedures or the feeling of “having been shrunk down and fallen inside a watch”
(Heckert 2005).
Heckert’s Futurist-inspired sonic universe was echoed by the machine-music perfor-
mances of Canadian-born, Berlin-based composer Gordon Monahan, also part of the
European machine art network. Interested in the relationships between natural phenom-
ena like weather systems and manmade phenomena like industrial devices, Monahan’s
most elaborate performance, Multiple Machine Matrix (1994–1998), subtitled “Sounds
and the Machines that Make Them,” was an installation-like environment filled with
computer-controlled and -conducted kinetic devices.
Constructed from industrial and electronic surplus parts and other scrap metal,
Monahan’s matrix was played by the composer using similar techniques of MIDI-
controlled motors and actuators that, when physically interacting with such material,
produced complex percussive and melodic sonorities. Similarly, like Heckert’s work,
Monahan’s 2003 performance New and Used Furniture Music shifted spectator attention
away from the human performer (Monahan sitting behind the computer) to the movement
of industrial materials and kinetic elements like motors and metallic strings.

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Figure 7.3 Matt Heckert, Mechanical Sound Orchestra. Installation at Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music
Festival, 1998. Photo Matt Heckert.

The strategy of sounding machines as the performers of a new type of industrially

generated music was taken in a different direction by another set of Canadian artists
who were not part of the machine art scene, the architect Thomas McIntosh and the
composer Emmanuel Madan, collectively known as [The User]. As part of their research
of noise by machines, “the by product of our existence” (McIntosh and Madan), the group’s
1998 performance Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers consisted of an onstage array of
dot matrix printers controlled and conducted through a computer network whose
resulting sounds were wholly determined by ASCII text files that shaped their melodic,
harmonic, and rhythmic behavior (figure 7.4). Artificially amplifying and processing
each printer’s sonic output to create a complex mix of different voices, [The User] also
sought to microscopically reveal the mechanical innards of each machine, capturing the
movement of its platens, rollers, printer ink cartridges, and disks with miniature video
cameras installed inside the printers and projecting these images above the onstage
“performers.”
An industrial music of used office machinery was also prevalent in the work of yet
another Canadian artist, Hungarian-born Istvan Kantor (also known as Monty Cantsin).
Founder of the notorious Neoist antiart movement, known for the splashing of his blood
onto famous artwork in international museums, Kantor developed mechanical perfor-
mances whose featured actants included junked file cabinets, office chairs, desks, and the
like. After a series of low-tech machine works including File Cabinet Slammers I–III

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Figure 7.4 [The User], Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, 2001. Avanto Festival, Kiasma Theater,
Helsinki, Finland. Courtesy of [The User], © Thomas McIntosh.

(1993–1996), Universal Folk Cymbal, Schlager Kloppen (1994), and Telepathic Transmission
Mobile (1995), Kantor created his signature Executive Machinery: Intercourse: The File Cabinet
Project—a performance constructed from the sounds of pneumatically controlled file
cabinet drawers, which Kantor called “a socio-sonic noise machine and interactive sub
monument” (Kantor 1997).
The machines in the performances of Heckert, Monahan, Kantor, or [The User] some-
what approximated human scale, but other European-based artists like Eric Hobijn,
Bastiaan Maris, and Nicolas Baginsky created much larger mechanical sound apparatuses
that easily dwarfed the human spectator in their size and the intensity of acoustic output.
Curating The Absolute Threshold, one of the earliest European machine art festivals in

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Amsterdam in 1993, Dutch artist Hobijn built his colossal Dante Orgel (Dante Organ), a
musical instrument assembled from computer-controlled flamethrowers, which paid
tribute to another critical element in industrial mythology: the Promethean power of
fire.
Conceived for an SRL European tour opening in Amsterdam, Hobijn’s organ was a
pyrotechnic machine spectacle extraordinaire: a sculpture consisting of from five to twelve
computer-actuated and synchronized MIDI-orchestrated flamethrowers whose inner
chambers were amplified by microphones and distributed over a multichannel sound
environment. Creating tornado-like columns of flame spiraling upwards in excess of
40 meters high and producing the howling frequencies of the various fires together
with the internal sounds of the opening and closing movement of pneumatic valves
and escaping air, Hobijn’s spectacular fire drama united both industrial fossil fuel and
information-age technologies in what he called “an audio visual environment, based on
military knowledge, dealing with the sounds and aesthetics of domesticated violence”
(Hobijn 1988).12
Machine sound instruments consisting of steel, fire, chemical substances, electricity,
and water subject to computer control also surfaced in the work of the German artist
Nicolas Anatol Baginsky. In I-Beam Music (1995), a collaborative performance with
American industrial artist Barry Schwartz, Baginsky created a colossal computer-actuated
string instrument consisting of a 4-meter-long I-beam, strung with stretched piano wire
and plucked by solenoid actuators. Traveling the length of the vast, former industrial hall
of the Kampnagel theater in Hamburg and “played” by an environment of dry ice “fingers”
(chemicals such as liquid nitrogen, water, electric current, and machine parts) as well as
by acoustic information gathered and analyzed from the environment and transduced back
to the instrument, Baginsky’s I-Beam suggested a giant industrial car wash concert—a
performance for an autonomous instrument that both played and was played by the
environment.13
Baginsky’s interest in the potential autonomy of the machine, in its ability to “learn”
and adapt to its environment was already articulated in his Humunculus (1987) project, a
self-performing machine controlled by audio signals, with joint movement based on a
double pendulum that could exhibit chaotic, nonlinear behavior. A far more involved set
of procedures marked the artist’s long-term The Three Sirens, an ensemble of “self-learning”
music-performing robots composed of three machines: Aglaopheme (slide guitar), Peisinoe
(bass), und Thelxiepeia (drum). Baginsky’s high-tech band, which used sonic spectral
analysis as input for computer-modeled artificial neural networks (ANN), learned what
sounds were being made based on the strength of the various input signals and then used
such learned data to control actuators on the individual machines to produce new sound—
what amounted to a rough and strange blend of rock music without any human presence
or control.

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 Performing Machines: Mimetic or Machinic

Baginsky’s work pointed to the shift from human-based operation and control toward
machine autonomy: self-organizing, unpredictable, and “lifelike” physical behavior based
on environmental input. Thus, although machines—and particularly robots—were associ-
ated with mechanical behavior, the powerful influence of information, feedback, and control
theory strongly suggested that technological advances in sensing, microelectronics, and
computationally enabled “intelligent” systems could further problematize the fragile lines
between natural and artificial behavior.
In the mid 1960s, prominent art historian Jack Burnham was already analyzing
the shift from the fixed, material art object to the unobject arising from experimentation
into areas such as kinetic environments, intermedia events, and happenings. Although
Burnham’s discourse focused chiefly on sculpture and not performance in its traditional
connotation, his articulation of the emergence of cybernetically influenced systems
aesthetics paved the way for machinic performances in which the human would attempt
“to concede a soul or indwelling vitality to inanimate objects” (Burnham 1968a, 16).
His pioneering 1968 book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology
on the Sculpture of this Century, now widely acknowledged as one of the key texts in the
diffuse history of the “cybernetic arts,” set out to describe the influence of both electro-
mechanical systems in order to make objects seem “alive” as well as the application of
biological models of feedback and control to artificial, manmade systems.14
As a particular case in point of Burnham’s paradigm, sculptor and architect Nicolas
Schöffer [Screen/Scene, chapter 3] had already begun work on the development of autono-
mous, cybernetic sculpture-machines and accompanying dramatic spectacles in which
such hybrids could publicly perform. Generally acknowledged as providing one of the
earliest links between kinetic sculpture, architecture, and the more technologically
complex arena of robotics, Schöffer was trained in the abstract formalism of the Bauhaus
style but then became deeply influenced by mathematician Norbert Wiener’s theories of
cybernetics. Schöffer proposed a new approach to sculptural practice, which he termed
spatio-lumino-chronodynamism, in which space, light, and time would be combined to gener-
ate an unprecedented machinic-sculptural form.
Working with the concepts of spatiodynamism, in which the proportions of a sculp-
tural form would, in effect, shape and modify the space that surrounded it, as well as the
luminosity of surfaces (luminodynamism), Schöffer’s early machines of sharp geometric
forms and vertical structures somehow conveyed a rhythmic, multidimensional, and
almost immaterial quality, one of “energy and not material” upon being set into move-
ment (Schöffer 1996, 398).
With technical and financial support from the French branch of the Philips corporation,
Schöffer began incorporating ideas from cybernetics such as feedback control and the use
of environmental data gathered from sensors in his first kinetic machine, which was named

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CYSP 1 (cybernetic spatiodynamism): a two-and-a-half-meter-high construction made
from aluminum and electronics that had its debut stage performance in Paris at the famous
“Nuit de la Poesie” (Sarah Bernhard Theater) in 1956. Ambulatory in all directions at
two different speeds, with both axial and eccentric rotation, CYSP 1 was described as
constituting “a living counterpoint, a new and harmonious contrast with the articulated
movements of the undulating bodies of humans by its evolutions and its transparent,
orthogonal and metallic structure” (Schöffer n.d.).
Further outfitted with photoelectric sensors and a microphone that enabled it to be set
into unpredictable motion by external events, CYSP 1 also performed shortly after its
Paris debut on the rooftop terrace of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse apartment complex in
Marseille for the great Belgian ballet choreographer Maurice Béjart. Béjart incorporated
the sculptor’s “artificial being” (Schöffer n.d.) into a dance performance for the Festival
d’Art d’Avant-Garde because the choreographer was intrigued not only by the sculpture’s
unique movement but also by its interaction with dancers around it.15
Aspiring to further exploit his idea of luminodynamism, Schöffer also constructed
two-dimensional machines that could accept, transform, and reflect light sources.16 His
Spectacle Spatiodynamique Expérimental, a “luminodynamic” performance involving music
and light projections, took place at Grand Central Station in New York in 1957. Even
after 1960, as the sculptor’s interest in urban space quickly led him to conceive of cyber-
netic machines at architectural scale (Tour Lumière Cybernétique), Schöffer continued
to integrate machines into stage-based spectacles. In 1968, in collaboration with the
American experimental choreographer Alwin Nikolais in Hamburg, he deployed his
cybernetic creatures as a key scenographic element in composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s
opera-ballet Les Globolinks. Schöffer and Nikolais—along with the French acousmatic
composer Pierre Henry—followed up Les Globolinks with their 1973 production of Kyldex
I, a “cybernetic experiment” for the Hamburg Staatsoper in which the main performers
were five of Schöffer’s autonomous mechanae interacting with Nikolais’s dancers in a
pageant of shifting light and color on the opera stage.17
Schöffer’s interest in the feedback loops of man-machine control was offset by Nam
June Paik’s more anthropomorphic experiments with his and engineer Shuya Abe’s robot,
K-456 (named after a Mozart piano concerto), which aspired to demonstrate technology’s
fallibility and stupidity in its supposedly animate relationship to human observers. K-456,
a twenty-radio-channel, remote-controlled machine built in Japan with wire, foam, and
other scrap parts, bore quick resemblances to its human counterparts through the execu-
tion of simple actions such as moving its arms and legs, making noises, and excreting
beans. First appearing in private, the robot had its first public performance in Paik’s own
Robot Opera with Paik and Charlotte Moorman at the Judson Church in the New York
Avant-Garde Festival organized by Moorman in 1964. After performing indoors, Paik led
the robot out into the streets, where it expelled beans and played speeches of John F.
Kennedy from speakers built into its mouth.

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 Subsequently, in what Paik described as the “first nonhuman performance artist,”
K-456 performed in the Robot Opera in Berlin in 1965, where it walked up and down the
Strasse des 17. Juni, toward the Berlin Wall–surrounded Brandenburg Gate. With two
tiny propellers for eyes and a clattering baking sheet for a hat, the robot became a cult
object in Germany, perhaps suggesting in its downtrodden appearance an all-too-human
pathos—a machine stranded in the midst of an isolated Berlin stricken by the military-
technological tension of the Cold War. Described by Paik as a street performer, the robot
could meet people on the street and “give them a split-second surprise. Like a sudden
shower” (Paik 1965). Performing for the last time during Paik’s 1982 retrospective at the
Whitney Museum in New York, the robot rambled down Madison Avenue, where it met
its not-unplanned end in the path of a moving car.18
Far more electronically sophisticated anthropomorphic-technological entities were
created by Polish sculptor/engineer Edward Ihnatowicz. A Polish refugee who fled to
England during World War II, Ihnatowicz was an autodidact in matters of science and
engineering but quickly became fascinated by the potential of electronics to create unpre-
dictable behavior in kinetic systems. Shown at Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition
in 1968, Ihnatowicz’s first cybernetic influenced work, SAM (Sound Activated Mobile) was
an electronically controlled, hydraulic, biomorphic-like sculpture in the shape of over-
grown vertebrae with a petal-shaped head containing a miniature microphone array. Based
on the direction of sound picked up by the microphones, the sculpture could be set into
lateral or sideways motion.19
Between 1968 and 1971, Ihnatowicz developed his most revered creation: a large,
claw-like mobile machine with six hinged joints enabling multiple degrees of freedom.
Named The Senster, the machine was specifically commissioned for the Philips Electronics
hands-on science museum Evolon at their corporate headquarters in the Dutch city of
Eindhoven. As one of the first mainframe computer–controlled sculptures, the 5-meter-
long Senster incorporated electrohydraulics, sophisticated microphone arrays, and Doppler
radar tracking technologies in order to generate spectator-perceivable, physical-
mechanical interaction. Through relatively simple, low-level environmental input such as
spectator motion and sound location and intensity, the Senster, as Ihnatowicz described,
could exhibit a sophisticated set of physical behaviors, moving toward quiet and sustained
sound sources or rebounding from sudden bursts of movement, noise or violent gestures.20
Unlike the vertebrae-outfitted appearance of Ihnatowicz’s earlier SAM, the Senster eschewed
biomorphic tendencies in its visual manifestation and looked like an industrial metal
framework with exposed electronics, motors, and wires.
Ihnatowicz’s desire to correlate sensorimotor functions in a machine was a strategy
that would be echoed some thirty years later in the performance projects of several
machine-robotic artists who also sought through more refined hardware/software systems
to create what Reichardt (in describing the Senster) had announced as “reactions that one
might expect when someone is trying to communicate with another human being or an

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animal . . . the sort of robot which we could imagine must have feelings because it behaves
like creatures that have them” (Reichardt 1978, 56).
The performances of machine artist Chico MacMurtrie’s Amorphic Robot Works, for
example, relied on machines with more direct anthropomorphic behavior, yet also amor-
phic geometries. Also a staple on the European machine art scene, MacMurtrie’s spindly,
rust-eroded human-, animal-, and plant-like forms were a combination of garage aesthetics
and higher-end technology, driven by computer-controlled servo motors and actuators
that gave complex kinetic possibilities to the individual parts of the machines. In direct
opposition to SRL’s threatening assemblages, Amorphic’s machines such as “Super Dog
Monkey,” “Sub Human,” “Tabla,” and “Skele” were constructed from plastic, bronze,
aluminum, and steel in order to achieve more realistic and graceful movement that could
mimic human or animal behaviors.
MacMurtrie’s “amorphic epistemology” cast his machines into dreamlike, almost
organic landscapes, where they would perform with one another, spinning out multiple
dramatic scenarios as well as interacting with observers via body-based sensing tech-
nologies. In Trigram: A Robotic Opera (1992), thirty-five of MacMurtrie’s scrap metal,
pneumatic-controlled creatures engaged with human performers in a macabre battle in
which movement and sound echoed, as MacMurtrie described, “the anguish we feel in a
world where we are deprived of the pure by our dependence upon machines that we once
controlled” (MacMurtrie 1992).
The Cave of the Subconscious (1997) was a performative environment that sought to fulfill
the artist’s ongoing obsessions with “the primacy of movement and sound” and consisted
of twenty-four machines embedded into the walls of a subterranean, cave-like structure
that exhibited different nuances of movement based on visitor proximity. The epic The
Amorphic Landscape (2000) was even more daedal, creating a moving, breathing landscape
for the members of the artists’ “society” to interact within, where movement could be
exchanged between the machines and the hydraulic-sculptural contours of the kinetic
landscape.21
The complex behavior of a society of machines based on autonomous computer-
augmented control also surfaced in the performance work of Québec robotic artists Bill
Vorn and Louis-Phillipe Demers. In earlier collaborative works such as Espace Vectorial
(1993), At the Edge of Chaos (1994), The Frenchman Lake (1995), and La Cour des Miracles
(1997), Vorn and Demers developed autonomous and complex machine societies:
pneumatic-driven, reactive mechanical systems that diffused sound and light within
sensor-augmented installations.
One of their most complex works, La Cour des Miracles populated a space with six dif-
ferent computer-controlled mechanical apparatuses that were assigned human-like behav-
ioral qualities of crawling, limping, begging, convulsing, harassing, and acting heretically.
“Neither animals nor humans, the aim of the work is to induce empathy of the viewer
towards these ‘characters’ which are solely articulated metal structures . . . an attempt to

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express the profound human nature of the machinic realm and the profound machinic
nature of humankind” (Vorn and Demers 1998).22
Applying concepts from the computing discipline of Artificial Life (or A-Life) where
the execution of simple rules yields unpredictable, systemwide behavior, Vorn’s and
Demers’s machine ecologies were simultaneously zoo and theater, placing the spectator
into the dual position of interloper and activator of the machines’ behaviors, which ranged
from pathetic to manic. For Le Procès—The Trial (1999), a robotic performance staged for
Robert Lepage’s techno cabaret Zulu Time, an array of machines with realistic movement
were suspended, caged, hung, and anchored around the environment of a motorized
catwalk. Accompanied by polyrhythmic, pulsing metallic beats as well as a live soundtrack
created by their banging into the metallic scaffolding of the scenery, the machines in
Le Procès engaged in a mock tribunal reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, accusing,
menacing, and judging each other.
In what artificial intelligence researcher Herbert Simon famously termed “the sciences
of the artificial” (Simon 1996), Vorn’s and Demers’ solo and collectively created machines
were driven by locally “implanted” simple and low-level rules that, when combined,
yielded unpredictable, global “emergent” behaviors: group reactions “engendered by the
sum of all the individual reactions” (Vorn and Demers 1995, 6). Moving from the purely
digital, computational models of Artificial Life into directly constructed “robotic organ-
isms,” the artists’ “primitive mechanical animats” sought to embody the four character-
istics of Simon’s notion of artificiality: (1) artifacts synthesized by human beings,
(2) imitating the appearance (or behavior) of natural things, (3) characterized in
terms of functions, goals, and adaptation, and (4) articulated in terms of imperatives
and descriptives.
These themes of artificiality were taken further in Vorn’s and Demers’s solo work.
In Demers’s robotic theater cycle entitled The Mechanized Eccentric Series, an updating of
Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy’s electromechanical peep show, machines were elevated to the
role of “actors of expression” who could perform in their own mechanical theater and
consequently, subsume the human body into a “mechanical rendering and abstract play
of stage action and movement” (Demers 2004). Armaggedon (2004), an operetta with robots
done in collaboration with the French rock-pop orchestra Art Zoyd and featuring twenty-
one musical instrument–playing robots with loudspeaker mouths alongside human musi-
cians, was an enactment of the mythic event of Armageddon, leaving a society populated
only by machines.
Demers’s L’Assemblée/The Assembly (2001) took this theme to an extreme, in the creation
of a fictitious future where human spectators crowded into a vast, scaffolding-erected arena
became the last witnesses to a machine takeover. Surrounded on all sides by forty-eight
computer-controlled and -choreographed robots hanging from an architectural scaffolding
membrane with speakers for mouths and theatrical spotlights for eyes, human spectators
in the crowd were surveilled by the robotic lights and individually picked out by mounted

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Figure 7.5 Louis-Philippe Demers. L’Assemblée. Elektra—Usine C, 2001. Photo © Peter Dimakos.

cameras sensing movement (figure 7.5). L’Assemblée invoked a nightmarish machine

spectacle: a court and assembly where the nonhuman judged the human.23

Machines for Themselves

The exploration of human-machine co-presence explicitly enabled through sensing and

computation was also taken up by a number of artists not working in performance contexts
per se but in new media, who nevertheless developed articulate, expressive machine
systems. Indeed, the autonomy of machines became one of the central themes in the arena
of the new media arts during the 1990s. Dozens of festivals presented hybrid performance-
installations in which machines would enact self-driven and autonomous behaviors as a
result of mechanical and/or computational processes, from artists such as Norman White,
Ted Krueger, Simon Penny, Ken Rinaldo, Max Dean, Adrianne Wortzel, Susan Collins,
Arthur Ganson, Eduardo Kac, and others.24
The kinetic environments of artist Ken Rinaldo, for example, exploited emergent
phenomena and the co-productive possibilities between natural and artificial systems. In

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projects such as The Flock (1994) and Autopoiesis (2000), Rinaldo experimented with
machines that through a minimum amount of sensing technology could be programmed
to exhibit complex movement behavior through their interaction with a spectator moving
in proximity to them. The works of Australian artist and educator Simon Penny, such as
Petit Mal (1993) and Pride of Our Young Nation (1990), critiqued the zoomorphic and
anthropomorphic tendencies of much robotic art, instead focusing on the “kinesthetic
intelligences” (Penny n.d.) expressed through physically enacted and artificially con-
structed electromechanical bodies rather than A-Life-esque computer simulations.
Others, like Canadian artists Norman White and Max Dean, built more playful robotic
constructions that demonstrated the joint fragility of machines and human beings. White’s
The Helpless Robot (1996) featured a quasi robot kinetic sculpture that only responded to
the presence of visitors by voice synthesis. Asking its observers to reposition it, the
machine grew more demanding in time based on the level of interaction. In a more auto-
kinetic direction, Max Dean’s “Robotic Chair” (1994–2006) was a six- to twelve-minute
performance consisting of a mechanically controlled chair that would fall apart and
then put itself back together again in order “to elicit empathy, compassion, and hope”
(Dean n.d.).
Even works that were sited in the decidedly nonperformance context of museums and
galleries explored the tensions generated by machine co-presence. One of the more bizarre
hybrids was invoked in the Cloaca series of performance-installation machines by Belgian
conceptual artist Wim Delvoye—byzantine contraptions dedicated to enacting the human
gastrointestinal system. A nonanthropomorphic, biochemical system, Delvoye’s numerous
Cloaca variations from 2002–2007 were formed from an assembly line of lab glassware,
vials, hoses, housings (later, a trio of washing machines), and computer-monitored ele-
ments enhanced with more than four hundred types of human digestive enzymes, acids,
and human bacteria. In what Delvoye referred to as Cloaca’s “performance,” attendants
fed the system’s garbage-disposal mouth opening with food, which was then gradually
broken down over a twenty-seven-hour period, with visible excrement finally produced
as the result (Delvoye 2008).
In an entirely different context, the mechanomorphic objects of Rebecca Horn [Non-
invasive Extension, chapter 6 ] provided a strong contrast to machine art’s predominantly
industrial-age male flavor. Horn’s mysterious performing apparatuses simultaneously
conjured up feelings of menace, wonderment, and pathos in a spectator who became
inscribed into their performances based on simple presence. Self-propelled, precision-
designed, and elegantly controlled by small motors, for Horn, such automata suggested
no less than the cycle of an organism’s birth, life, and death: proxies for bodies that as
“melancholic actors performing in solitude” would “shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart
and then come back to life again” (Celant 1994, 18).
Fabricating a world of things that, as curator Nancy Spector explained, “mischievously
revealed the hidden, amorous impulses of the human psyche” (Spector 1994, 56), Horn’s

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Figure 7.6 Rebecca Horn. Concert for Anarchy, 1990. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn.

strange creations of miniature metal hammers, mechanical unfolding peacock feathers,

rotating binoculars, mercury-filled funnels, and self-playing musical instruments danced,
kissed, slept, fought, and kept watch over each other in performing installations that
elevated ordinary objects to the surreal and the fantastic.
In Les Amants (1991), a menacing aluminum paint gun continually sprayed a white
wall with dark black ink, totally oblivious to the observer’s presence. 1990’s Concert for
Anarchy comprised an enormous upside-down grand piano suspended in the air, which,
in spasmodic bursts, would suddenly begin to play itself, expelling its keys in full force
until its lid fell open with a loud bang (figure 7.6). Similarly, Ballet of the Woodpeckers
(1986) featured a gallery of mirrors upon which tiny hammers beguiled by their reflection

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gently hammered away at the glass, continuously recoiling from their images like a
frightened Narcissus.
Although not computationally advanced, Horn’s imperfect machines also exhibited
similar physically animistic characteristics as their more technologically sophisticated,
computer-controlled emergent cousins: repetition, dynamic motion, reaction, and unfold-
ing patterns of both periodic and nonperiodic behavior. Arresting in their visual elegance
and puzzling in their behavior, her automata confronted viewers with deep-seated philo-
sophical questions concerning their position in a world of seemingly useless yet animistic
systems. If machines were no longer designed to assist and augment human abilities, but
instead to act on their own volition based on special internal laws, then what role did
they play in a human-centered Weltanschauung? What could eventually be unleashed in
performances for and by machines? What role did such performing automata give their
human counterparts other than to simply trigger them into action or to act as fleshy
voyeurs in an electro-mechanical-computational peep show?
Perhaps the most provocative answer to these questions came from artist Woody
Vasulka’s epic Theater of Hybrid Automata and Brotherhood series of media constructions
that explored mankind’s “never ceasing attempt to reorganize nature itself” (Vasulka
1998b). Co-opting instruments of warfare to redefine perceptions of space, Vasulka’s
media instrumentaria were culled from military-industrial salvage from surplus dealers
and scrap yards near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Unlike SRL’s direct use of military hard-
ware to produce violent spectacle, however, Vasulka’s discarded war artifacts mainly served
as scenographic elements in a “closed world” theater of cryptographic devices, feedback
algorithms, mathematical models, and computer-generated simulations. With artists,
curators, and theorists originally embracing the utopia of information-driven, military-
influenced Cold War cybernetics, Vasulka’s work revealed the nightmarish, dystopian side
of C3I (Command, Control, Communication).25
His earliest “space exploring machine,” entitled the Theater of Hybrid Automata, (1990)
invoked the blur between real and computer-generated space so prevalent in the “infowar”
military simulations used to train fighter pilots for advanced aerial combat. Consisting of
a RPT (rotate, pan, and tilt) robotic head armed with a video camera and equipped with
infrared sensors, Vasulka’s “automated theater” was surrounded by a series of screens upon
which computer-generated images of virtual spaces triggered by the sensors were dis-
played and in which the moving RPT head could “travel” through, providing an articulate
example of computer-augmented “machine vision.”
These early machines by and large showed little interest in the spectator’s presence, a
topic that Vasulka addressed on a much larger scale with The Brotherhood. Commissioned
by the NTT/ICC media arts center in Tokyo in 1998, The Brotherhood comprised six
interactive media assemblages whose names immediately triggered military associations
(“Translocations,” “Automata,” “Friendly Fire,” “Stealth,” “Scribe,” and the “Maiden”;

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Figure 7.7 Woody Vasulka. The Brotherhood, 1990–1998. Photo Bruce Hamilton. Courtesy of the
Vasulkas.

figure 7.7). Described as “a series of tables representing the core with its instrumentation
able to produce, compose and display varied acoustic and visual structures, surrounded
by an exoskeletal support, carrying media (projectors, speakers, screens, lights and
sensors),” The Brotherhood referred to a society of devices that artificially prolonged a male
sexual drive displaced onto information age control systems; what Vasulka and David
Dunn called “the male idea of the machine’s destructive potential” (Dunn and Vasulka
1998b). Made up of three components including “actors” (software), “authors” (specta-
tors), and “drivers” (hardware), each assemblage provided the possibility of spectator and
environmental interaction by which a machine could be influenced not only by human
onlookers but by also by its own mechanisms.26
For Vasulka’s theater of automata, actors not only denoted the pneumatic pistons
and printed circuit boards of the material hardware but also the “acoustic evocations,
logic processes and finally, necessary machine rituals, machine states, resets and cali-
brations” (Vasulka 1998a, 33) caused by endogenous software processes and exogenous

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perturbations from the human environment. The contraptions of The Brotherhood thus
occupied the same precarious space that so many other machine performances previously
had: between control and freedom, structure and anarchy, order and disorder.
At first glance, the use of machines involving the military paraphernalia of industrial
capitalism seemed like a strange approach for artists interested in a form, however much
abstracted, of political critique. Yet, as Vasulka eloquently pointed out, the potential of
interactive systems and scenarios was not only to enable observers and participants to
communicate with the machine through its own intrinsic languages of binary code but
also to generate an act of potential resistance, an “interference pattern” in the autonomous
behavior of a system such that unscripted behaviors and patterns might emerge between
the machine’s life and our own. Such computationally embedded interaction processes
would go far beyond the idea of choice among a finite set of alternatives and instead
“provide the user/perceiver with a sense of exploring an environment of new [elastic]
sensory relationships rather than a mere description of such a world” (Dunn and Vasulka
1998a).
The spectator’s power to perturb the animism of the machine through interactive
processes could ultimately contribute to a co-productive understanding of what machine
autonomy actually signified: the potential of interaction between machines and us to create
a new “environment in a state of awareness” (Vasulka 1988a, 15).

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 8

Interaction

The technical evolution from mechanization to direct interaction with machines through
hidden logic and calculation catalyzed the fervent desire for artistic events that would
never be completed but would, as Umberto Eco described in 1962, be “in continuous
becoming.” Based on “the linear purity of a mathematical program,” Arte Programmata
or “programmed art,” as Eco and Bruno Munari named it, would directly embody the
counter-cultural longing for spontaneity, open systems, and the dissolution of borders
between artistic experimentation and quotidian life, through its programmed ability to
continually reconfigure itself (Eco n.d.).
Positioned between artistic forms that would replicate the mathematical order of nature
and those that gravitated toward a world of randomness and disorder, Arte Programmata
encompassed “fields or events where random processes can happen . . . we would have a
singular dialectic between chance and program, between mathematics and accident,
between planned conceptions and free acception of what will occur, anyway might occur,
given that basically it will occur directly following precise, predisposed formative pat-
terns, which do not negate spontaneity, but rather enlarge its boundaries and possible
directions” (Eco n.d.).
In a technical as well as a social sense, the concept of interaction functioned beyond
a purely technological paradigm, becoming, according to Margaret Morse, a kind of
“cultural novum” in the early 1960s.1 To bestow belief onto electronic logic to instigate
socio-political-cultural liberation and fracture hierarchical modes of control was ironic,
considering that it was mainly United States and European military systems of command
and control that drove research into man-machine interaction in order to develop
the battlefield of the future. Furthermore, the fact that artistic practice straddled the
increasing interest in advanced information technology for military applications and,
simultaneously, almost anarchistically inspired aspirations for freedom from the same
apparatus, demonstrates the turbulent status of cultural production in the Cold War
climate.
Generated by both concept and device, the use of chance procedures in the production
of performance events in theater, dance, and music was one of the means harnessed to
question existing hierarchical authorial structures, represented through the traditional
roles of the author, composer, choreographer, or director. Following these techniques,
many artists also took hold of emerging paradigms from research into cybernetics
and computing as a way of activating a normally passive public, structuring radically
new possibilities of feedback between spectators and the environments they could
inhabit.
Moreover, if both the theatrical and the plastic arts sought participation and interaction
as their modus operandi, the intention and realization of these concepts had sometimes
radically divergent paths. Although some notable exceptions like 9 Evenings: Theater and
Engineering employed state-of-the-art engineering research, participation and interaction
in the stage-based arts was to be mainly achieved through the liberation of the politically
and socially constrained body. Theatrical events such as the Performance Group’s Dionysus
in ‘69 (1969) and, most notoriously, the Living Theater’s Paradise Now (1968) sought
an abolition of the authoritative structure dividing spectator and performer by inviting
audience members onto the stage to disrobe and collectively engage in protorevolutionary
rituals of ecstatic excess. These theatrical events were no longer representations of political
revolution carried through the medium of already existing narratives but real-life
enactments of defiance and revolution.
Those in visual arts contexts operating in the realm of Jack Burnham’s system aesthetics
[Performing Machines: Mimetic or Machinic, chapter 7], however, sought the liberation
of the passive spectator through the creation of kinetic, sensory objects and spaces aug-
mented by technologies that challenged engrained perceptual habits, enfolding their
participants into unstable, variable contexts in which they could react to changing
stimuli as only one part of a larger organism. In wrestling with the very possibility of
systemwide variable relations partially facilitated by machines, interaction shifted from
a technique to a medium in and of itself, thus forming the basis for artistic works that
set into oscillation the usually fixed relationships of spectators, performers, objects, and
spaces.
The growing interest in the dissolution of the spatial and temporal locus of the artistic
object or theatrical event into larger participatory environments linked what appears at
first to be a disparate set of artistic practices while providing a new performative context
in which such fluidity of interaction among space, participant, environment, and system
could be designed. In his 1968 essay “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater,” Richard
Schechner depicted the theatrical event as a set of related transactions among performers,
audience members, and production elements embodying new aesthetic practices of “inter-
action and transformation.” Performance—no longer conceived as solely taking place on

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a stage—should occupy a continuum between public events or demonstrations, nonma-
trixed2 performances like happenings, “environmental” theater and finally, the traditional,
rigid frame of “traditional theater” (Schechner 1968, 44–46).
Similarly, in Allan Kaprow’s discussions of happenings, the notion of environment was
paramount in which the “environment, the activity of the people in that environment are
the primary images, not the secondary ones. . . . There is an absolute flow between event
and environment” (Schechner and Kaprow 1968, 154).
Histories of technologically oriented art practice have unabashedly situated the founda-
tions for interactive and participatory computer mediated work that arose in the 1980s
and 1990s in the happenings and participatory artworks of the 1950s and 1960s.3 Media
archeologist and historian Erkki Huhtamo wrote:

The roots of interactive media art are found in the 1960s [. . .] The expansion of the traditional
field of art, the dream about “Total Art,” the annihilation of the barrier between life and art, the
“ ‘dematerialization’ ”of the art object” (Lucy Lippard), process art, participation art, concept art,
Fluxus, the Happening-movement and Situationism, “Art and Technology,” kinetic art, cybernetic
art (Jack Burnham), closed circuit video installations—these phenomena may be heterogenous,[sic]
but they are part of one and the same process which had a profound effect on the relationship
between art and its audience.4 (Huhtamo [1992] 1997, 5)

Oddly enough, as singular, situated, unrepeatable events temporally unfolding over

structured as well as improvised relations among spectators, architecture, techniques and
social space, the performative aspects of happenings, Robert Rauschenberg’s “reactive
environments,” and cybernetic art have been downplayed in the historical literature in
favor of interaction as the medium in and of itself—on the singular communication
between human and computer (usually discussed as software) to influence or alter the
machine’s output behaviors.5 As Andreas Broeckmann reminds us, “in interactive systems
the interacting person is typically not executing a more or less open programme, but is
included in the technical system as a secondary factor, or as a trigger, who can then observe
passively the programmed results of his or her action.” Though performance in interactive
systems may be “realized by physical involvement,” the overall teleology of the interacting
individual is constrained by what he calls “narrative structuring of the programme”
(Broeckmann 2007, 200).
Broeckmann’s statement becomes even more prescient when examining the histories
of late-twentieth-century new media works that almost exclusively viewed interactive
artistic production and experience as the result of interaction between the user and
the screen, enabled through standard computer-industry interface devices such as mice,
track pads, and joysticks. Focused on the usually visualized results of action, the spatial
co-presence of multiple and oscillating spectator-performers mixed within a larger tran-
sitory and transforming machinic environment that was so central to happenings and

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participatory events in the 1960s seems to have disappeared, along with the physical and
social space surrounding the participant.
As a complement to these histories, this chapter proposes another perspective on inter-
action that couples with the practices of scenography, architecture, dance, and body-based
arts, in other words, the arts de la scène, outlined throughout this book. Rather than
emphasizing the unique and unprecedented characteristics of the human-machine or
human-computer relationship, I shift the focus to interaction in physical space that
involves a multitude of untrained performers, that is, the general public. In this sense,
this chapter picks up where chapter 3 left off, examining works that while spatial in
design are mostly not discussed or accepted within architectural discourse.6 While working
both consciously and unconsciously with the techniques of the stage, however, the ideas
and projects that are explored go far beyond it, spanning into the hybrid territories of
research labs, world’s fair pavilions, transient media festivals and the urban cityscape.
In what has been variously dubbed responsive environments, interactive ambients,
“spazio interattivo,” reactive environments or performative spaces, these technologically-
enabled rooms and events toy with the set lines between spectating and performing
and involve physically engaged, embodied and improvisational play on the part of the
participants (both human and non). This change of emphasis from computer-human to
inhabitant-performer-environment not only reflects a move taking place in the rarified research
circles of ubiquitous and pervasive computing with their ever increasing interest in sensed
and aware spaces for multiple participants. It also seeks to readdress historical practices
that arose under the influence of information and computation sciences from artists,
designers and architects struggling to interface to the world of computational wonder
through space and bodies themselves.

Cybernetics and the New Tendencies

Art practices that focused on what Jacques Rancière (2009) has called “the emancipated
spectator” formed one thread of the history of interactivity but the other is the post-war
history of computing marked by a series of milestones which through Cold War military
funding, advanced research into the sophisticated construction of human-machine rela-
tionships. Forged from established disciplines such as engineering and mathematics and
exotic new ones like cognitive science, concepts and writings like Turing’s computational
machine, Warren McCullough’s and Warren Pitts’s work on neuronal activity as a complex
network, Claude Shannon’s information theory, mathematician Norbert Wiener’s scripting
of Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine and The Human Use
of Human Beings, J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Machine Symbiosis” and Ivan Sutherland’s
development of Sketchpad, the first working prototype of human-machine interaction at
MIT’s Lincoln Labs in 1956 all researched new ways of manipulating the control cycle
between human beings and their environment.

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 Norbert Wiener’s 1948 publication of Cybernetics still acts as a breakthrough event of
the period, both for the scientific community that was interested in the steering and
control of complex human and machine systems and for the cultural paradigm that the
word brought with it. Even though only a small percentage of artists read Wiener’s work
and even fewer most likely grasped his intricate mathematical exegesis’ on negative feed-
back and control theory, cybernetics became a kind of “cultural mindset” as Edward
Shanken has described it; the buzzword for the creatively forward-minded who became
interested in the libratory possibilities of constructing interactive situations between
humans and a technically constructed environment.7
Regardless of the conceptual importance of this advanced engineering and computer-
based research and the exception of a handful of isolated institutionally supported
examples (Bell Labs’ artist in residence program and its initial connection to Experi-
ments in Art and Technology in the mid 1960s or the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art’s (LACMA) Art and Technology Initiative), the fusion of plastic/media arts and
technology-based research remained quite separate until the early 1970s, and then only
sporadically supported.8 Instead, the proliferation of concepts from scientific research into
cybernetic control and human-machine interaction had to trickle down into artistic scenes
in the 1950s–1960s by way of a small handful of philosophers like McLuhan and Eco,
curators/historians/impressarios like Burnham, Reichardt, Frank Popper, and John Brock-
man, artists such as Cage, Paik, Rauschenberg, Kaprow, Nicolas Schöffer, and Roy Ascott
and even scientists like Wiener and the English cybernetician Gordon Pask, among
others. In other words, despite the growing interest in technoscientific research applied
to art, there were few opportunities where artists could get their hands on the actual
technologies.9
Even as it concentrated on new kinds of cybernetically modeled performing machines,
sculptures, and bizarre artworks that attempted to respond to their environment through
feedback mechanisms and thus blurred the lines between art, science, and research,
Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity and other similar landmark art and technology exhibi-
tions of the 1960s were still organized primarily around the perceptual structures of the
visual arts.
Focused on object-dominated, observation-based models of interaction, many of the
artworks displayed were based either on visual representations (the computer drawing
or painting) or, when they sought input from spectators (now participants) to function,
still placed them in a distant relationship to both their own body as well as space.
In strong contrast to this mode of practice, works such as 9 Evenings, the Philips
Pavilion, and early proposals by James Turrell and Robert Irwin to investigate
sensory perceptual environments within the framework of curator Maurice Tuchman’s
Art and Technology initiative at LACMA, all acknowledged the temporal and durational
aspects of participatory interactivity as well as its spatio-architectural-environmental
characteristics.10

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 Another early meeting point of cybernetics and participant-activated environments
that attempted to move away from objects and focus on larger spatial-perception concerns
was the work of several groups associated with the New Tendencies (Nouvelle Tendance–
Recherche Continuelle or NTrc) movements situated across Europe. A loosely structured
entity of around sixty artist-researchers initially formed out of the Zagreb-based exhibition
Nove Tendencije in 1961, NTrc’s principle of continuous research emphasized open, collec-
tive working conditions, anonymity, indeterminacy, and activation of the spectator.
Even as most of the NTrc artists focused on kinetic and op art–based works, a few
collectives like GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), Gruppo N (Padua, 1959),
Gruppo MID (Milan, 1959), and Gruppo T (formed in Milan in 1959) moved far ahead
of their North American counterparts at the end of the 1950s. Producing what Peter
Weibel has described as “the first interactive art works,” these collectives appropriated
Eco’s principles of Arte Programmata to construct polysensual environments that com-
pletely enmeshed the viewer in optical phenomena, challenging their normal perceptual
habits of spectating (Weibel 2007, 23–25).
One of the most interesting collectives to apply cybernetic principles of interaction in
their work was Gruppo T (Tempo), founded in Milan in 1959 by Giovanni Anceschi,
Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi, Gianni Colombo, and Grazia Varisco. Gruppo T’s
founding manifesto, the “Miriorama 1” statement that accompanied the collective’s first
exhibition in Milan, argued for opere in divenire (“works in becoming”), which emphasized
the use of three-dimensional materials and incorporated “spatiotemporal” phenomena that
could be set into constant transformation through reciprocal relations between the work
and its participants. “Thus, by considering the work as a reality produced with the same
elements that constitute that reality surrounding us, it is necessary that the work itself
be in continuous flux” (Gruppo T 1959).
Working at first individually and collectively on kinetically influenced objects that
involved a series of public prototypes, Gruppo T’s aesthetic design research increasingly
shifted toward the creation of ambienti interattivi (interactive ambients): physical rooms
that used the possibilities of cybernetic criteria in order to bring the spectator into a co-
productive relationship with the artwork. In what are some of the earliest sensor-activated
environments on record, Gruppo T’s ambienti interattivi comprised physically closed off
spaces augmented by light, sound, mirrors, and other optical distortion devices that the
spectators could set into motion by tripping sensors and thus altering the perceptual
characteristics of the space.
Spazio linee luce spettatori (1964), the collective’s first sensor-based interactive envi-
ronment shown in the New Tendencies exhibit at the Louvre in Paris, was a 4 m s 4 m
s 4 m enclosed room containing a square grid of thirty-two tightly focused spotlights.
Coupled with eight photoelectric sensors, these switches could be triggered by moving
spectators, thus creating continual transformations of pin-pointed light on the floor and
walls (figure 8.1). In Anceschi’s and Boriani’s Ambiente per un test di estetica sperimentale

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Figure 8.1 Davide Boriani. Spazio linee luce spettatori (1964). Photo Johnny Ricci.

(1965), a mercury switch over the entrance triggered by visitors launched a series of twelve
algorithmically programmed cycles of additive color changes caused by rotating plates of
color gel, generating changing color fields in different segments of the room.
Other works, such as Ambiente multidimensionale a programmazione aperta (1966), Ambiente
stroboscopico 3 (1967), and Progetto di installazione luminosa interattiva (1968), all applied
similar principles of using photocells to launch programmed cycles of changes to optical
phenomena like lighting color and intensity changes within claustrophobic rooms lined
with mirrors and op art floor patterns. Likewise, solo projects like Colombo’s Spazio Elastico
(1967), a shifting room constructed of UV-lit elastic ropes appearing like a 3D wireframe
whose shape would change based on a motor pulling the ropes at specific points, also
explored similar perceptual techniques.
Although the collective officially broke up in 1968, its individual members continued
to work and collaborate throughout the 1970s, increasingly on public art projects, large-
scale interactive environments (Ambiente cronostatico, 1974), as well as reconstructions of
their earlier works being rediscovered by media theorists and curators exploring the
origins of media art in the kinetic and op art of the 1960s.11

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 The Interactive Fun Palace

In their ambitious but ultimately unrealized Fun Palace project from the 1960s, left-wing
British theater director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price also sought to apply
cybernetic principles of spectator-environment interaction to create a total performa-
tive environment transforming the general public into participants. Famous for her decid-
edly low-tech, politically charged, working-class Theater Workshop, Littlewood joined
forces with Price between 1963 and 1974 in the hopes of creating what she called “a
people’s palace”: an ever-changing, interactive “university of the streets” that would be
“a laboratory of pleasure, providing room for many kinds of action” (Price and Littlewood
1968, 130).
Contrasting the perceptual experiments of the New Tendency groups, the Fun Palace
was a far more politically motivated attempt to use technologies of interaction for social
engineering accomplished without top down hierarchies. In Price, Littlewood found a
kindred spirit who might be able to realize her lifelong dream of a public theater without
divisions between spectator and performer and event and visitor in architectural form.
Price’s architectural concept for the Fun Palace was the construction of a technological
vision of London’s eighteenth-century Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, the famous
Thames-sited, open-air promenades. Variously described as a huge “toy,” a “social machine
of interchangeable parts,” and an “anti-building,” the dream of a transformable environ-
ment adapting to the changing whims of fifty-five thousand visitors at a time would be
realized by the construction of a vast architectural organism employing the latest material
and electronic innovations to create an improvisational social space of leisure and learning
for the masses. In seeking maximum flexibility, Price designed a skeletal frame in which
multiple interchangeable module-like environments could be constructed, rearranged by
a mass-scale moving gantry crane that ran the length of the structure (figure 8.2).
Not satisfied simply with enclosures, Price articulated his vision of the Fun Palace’s
transformability through its capacity to vary public movement patterns by adjusting
mechanical movement aids, such as escalators, moving walkways, and moving structures
(Lobsinger 2000, 24). Price’s almost ephemeral architecture would consist of warm air
currents, vapor and light curtains serving as walls, electronically controlled sky blinds,
inflatable structures and volumes, variable screens, pneumatically controlled floors and
subenclosures, and massive gantry cranes that would turn the mammoth seven-acre
Fun Palace into a space of which Price claimed, “ I doubt it will ever look the same
twice.”12
Sounding as if they were inspired by (and inspired) Archigram’s paper architectural
musings, Price and Littlewood, however, sought to go much further than visual pop
culture representations.13 Desiring more direct forms of interaction between the Palace’s
ever-shifting physical structure and the social behavior of the participants, the two col-
laborators enlisted the help of cybernetician Gordon Pask.

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Figure 8.2 Cedric Price. Interior Perspective of Fun Palace (1960–1964). Fonds Cedric Price. Collection
Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

Pask, who began his cybernetic explorations with a feedback structured, light organ–
like performance instrument called the Musicolour Machine for a Cambridge University
musical comedy, brought to the project his immense technological knowledge of feedback
and control systems, game theory, statistical modeling, and other quantitative techniques
that Littlewood and Price believed would be essential in creating both a flexible environ-
ment for learning and an environment that could learn. As a member of the “Fun Palace
Cybernetics Subcommittee,” Pask’s proposal for a “cybernetic theater” in which the
audience’s seats would be wired with detectors that could gauge their emotional response
and instantiate a feedback loop between spectators and actors, served as a model for the
larger performative direction the project would take.
But as Price historian Stanley Matthews describes, Pask and his cybernetic subcom-
mittee also began to move the Fun Palace away from Littlewood’s agitprop, egalitarian
aesthetics and toward a model of social control. Electronic systems would be enlisted to

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gather information about the visitors in order to influence not only the physical modifica-
tion of the spatial environment but also the emotional modification of the visitors them-
selves.14 Sensor-gathered data on visitor preferences, movement patterns, and behavior
would be processed by punch card–based IBM computers and used to allocate various
resources to alter the Palace’s physical shape as well as activities.
Although taking place in the 1960s, the technical ideas for the Fun Palace read like a
page from Wired magazine in the 1990s. Mathematical models would search for emergent
behavior and patterns emitted by the public, which then would affect the duration of
overall events, ensuring that activities would last only as long as the peak of sustained
interest. Furthermore, predictive modeling and other advanced statistical procedures would
be employed so that the building could learn patterns generated by the public in the
hopes of being able to computationally model future processes and events within the
Palace.
Ultimately, Price and Littlewood’s grand social architecture was not to be realized due
to bureaucratic complications. Yet, Pask’s theatrical understanding of cybernetics as a
dynamic conversation between spectators and performers coupled with the project’s
desire to turn passive spectators into active shapers of their lived environment guaranteed
that the Fun Palace would still play an essential role in the history of interactive
environments.

E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey: 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion

In many ways, the Fun Palace was a groundbreaking experiment in terms of its vision of
a fluid environment that could come alive only by interaction among its technical, social,
political, and corporeal components. In contrast to the Italian kinetic art collectives’
home-grown and programmed electronics and sensor circuits that initiated the transfor-
mation of spectators into performers, had it been built, Price and Littlewood’s dream
would have been dependent on high-end, most likely repurposed military technology to
facilitate its complex fantasy of large scale social-spatial interaction.
Another initiative to mobilize research lab-based computer and engineering technolo-
gies in the service of new possibilities for activating the public was Robert Rauschenberg’s
and Billy Klüver’s founding of E.A.T. in New York in 1966, subsequent to 9 Evenings.
As discussed in chapter 6, the landmark 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering at the New
York Armory in October 1966 ranks as one of the earliest postwar experiments to combine
military industrial research culture with the avant-garde performing arts community.
Although described as theater, the audiences who attended 9 Evenings were rudely
awakened to the possibility that theater and performance itself might no longer be a
spectacle apart from the spectators, but was in fact ontologically dependent on them.
In the decidedly nontheatrical, site-specific surround of the disused armory, 9 Evenings
created a total environment that attempted—through new techniques reappropriated

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from military research—to create a wholly other form of Schechner’s “environmental
theater” fusing happening, event, stage, environment, and real life.
Out of the ten performance projects shown, however, only three (those of Cage, Paxton,
and Rauschenberg) were dependent on new models of audience participation for their
evolution and success. John Cage’s Variations VII, which featured the electronic filtering
and processing of multiple simultaneous audio feeds in locations distant from the Armory,
by default became participatory when friends of the composer descended from the grand-
stands and entered the stage area, surrounding the two lit tables of artists and encouraging
other audience members to do the same. But participation in Variations VII was limited
to changing one’s physical position in relation to the performers, while Cage and his col-
laborators’ live manipulation of sound still remained the focal point.
Open Score, Rauschenberg’s happening-like performance, went only slightly further in
using infrared technologies to confuse the line between witness and participant. Structured
in two acts, part 1 of the piece featured a tennis match played live with contact micro-
phone–equipped racquets that both amplified the reverberations from the balls as well as
used them to gradually shut off thirty-six theatrical lights illuminating the match, even-
tually blacking out the performance space.
In the darkness, a crowd of extras numbering between three hundred and five hundred
then appeared on stage, executing a series of prescripted actions that Rauschenberg had
signaled by way of flashlights from the balcony of the Armory. Illuminated by infrared
light and filmed with a Japanese IR camera attached to an American-made industrial one,
the mass crowd on stage appeared projected on three suspended screens, mirroring the
seated crowd by occupying the same physical space, yet visible only as black-and-white
projections.15
The most participatory event by far was Steve Paxton’s 1,858-square-meter, walk-
though installation environment Physical Things. In distancing himself from the theatrical
framework of the other works and taking a cue from the expanded cinema events of the
time, Paxton quickly dissolved the line between audience and stage by placing the specta-
tors into choreographed physical spaces that forced a direct confrontation between their
bodies and the surrounding environment. In effect, Paxton created a performance environ-
ment that exclusively would come into being through the public’s co-present interaction
with it. Mixing prescripted performers into the interior of the environment, the colossal
inflatable architecture of Physical Things was divided into four specific arenas through
which the spectators moved, transforming what appeared to be at first a fixed sculpture
into a temporary habitat.
Armed with wireless, wearable radio receivers that would individually pick up a
barrage of prerecorded music and noise loops, the public crossed and climbed through
narrow tunnels that opened up into larger spaces, confronting both the scripted performers
engaged in a series of mundane tasks as well as their fellow unscripted audience members
in a continually changing game. To further heighten the disorientating effect, Paxton

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highlighted certain areas of the partly translucent inflated environment with powerful
spotlights in order to ensure that the spectators’ shadows cast inside the opaque parts of
the environment would be seen even by those audience members who remained seated in
the bleachers, and were taking in the whole spectacle from the secure position of the
passive onlooker.
With its complete environmental context, prerequisite of physical engagement and
the continual circulation of roles between observing and participating, Physical Things
was the singular work in 9 Evenings that attempted to break the spatial and social
divides between the stage and the theatron. This attempt might seem ironic within the
context of an event largely focused on creating a new kind of participatory stage through
cutting-edge electronic technologies. As researcher Clarisse Bardiot notes in her exhaus-
tive analysis of the performances, however, Paxton’s more distanced approach to tech-
nology and his closer relationship to the body helped shift the emphasis of Physical Things
away from using devices to create representations of interaction (as many of the other
works did) and instead refocused it onto the participants’ own interaction with their
bodies.16
Paxton’s understanding of the difference between interaction at a distance versus inter-
action close up, between watching a performance and becoming it, epitomized one of the
central criticisms of 9 Evenings’ attempt to create an interactive stage: namely, that the
recognition of human to machine interaction was extremely difficult to perceive due to
the perceptual-architectural barrier erected between an active stage and a passive, seated
audience. Without the direct, felt experience of tripping a sensor or getting automatic
feedback from a system, the complex process of interaction taking place on a stage would
remain largely unknown and invisible to the seated spectator.17
This realization perhaps unknowingly acted as an unspoken modus operandi for what
would next become E.A.T.’s most ambitious project: a specially designed pavilion initially
sponsored by Pepsi-Cola for Expo ’70 in Osaka. Here, the frame of “theater” was shifted
in favor of the design of a complete multisensory environment that was both performance
site and event itself. Although the Pepsi Pavilion follows in a long history of the inter-
national exposition pavilion as an all-encompassing technology-enabled event, E.A.T.’s
project was one of the earliest attempts to create a participant-driven interactive environ-
ment at such scale.
Responding to an invitation from vice president of Pepsi marketing Dave Thomas,
Klüver, filmmaker Robert Breer, Robert Whitman, David Tudor, and Forrest Myers
proposed to create an unprecedented “open-ended situation, an experiment in the scientific
sense of the word” (Klüver, Martin, and Rose 1972, ix). Ensconced within a corporate
exposition environment, the Pepsi Pavilion would incorporate all of the hallmarks of
participatory art of the time: democratic freedom of choice for the visitor, open responsi-
bility, and the encouragement of individual expression through nondidactic exploration.
Ironically, to accomplish such lofty ideals, Klüver and his team turned to an even larger

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array of engineering human resources and technological gadgetry to enable the visitors to
sculpt both individual and collective experiences.
In keeping with its open-ended agenda, the team proposed that the pavilion would
not have a fixed presentation but rather, in what Klüver dubbed live programming,
continually change based on the interests and whims of artists who would be invited to
create works utilizing the technical infrastructure. In this sense, engineers were enlisted
to help build a gargantuan sculptural instrument that artists would then compose for and
that would be activated by the presence and behavior of the public. The pavilion would
constitute, as art critic Barbara Rose later wrote, “an unprecedented structure with unprec-
edented capabilities for visual, aural and theatrical experience . . . unlike any other per-
formance arena in that performers were as entirely absorbed into its shimmering mirrored
surface as the audience” (Rose 1972, 100).
Events where sculptures would transform into interactive performances would take
place on both the exterior architecture of the building, which structurally resembled a
gigantic, white Fuller geodesic dome, as well as in the sensory overwhelming interior.
Materialized through 2520 custom-designed spray nozzles, visitors first encountered
Fujiko Nakaya’s massive fog sculpture, which enrobed the entire surface area of the
dome, generating a 300-meter-diameter, 2-meter-thick moving surface. Accompanying
Nakaya’s undulating mist, Breer had installed seven of his 1 m s 2 m marshmallow-
looking sculptural forms called “Floats,” which would creep slowly on their own volition
at 0.6 meters a minute on battery power, emitting a strange array of sounds and changing
direction whenever they encountered a human or architectural obstacle.
The interior of the pavilion further amplified the exterior’s impression of a vast, psy-
chedelic organism sputtering away on its own volition. Equipped with wireless receivers
that could pick up sounds being generated by those walking on different surfaces already
in the pavilion’s inner sanctum, visitors slowly descended through a tunnel and emerged
into the strange “clam room,” where they were treated to a four-color laser performance
designed by Lowell Cross. The pièce de résistance, however, lay upstairs in the main space,
where a colossal 210-degree, thirty-meter spherical Mylar mirror transfigured the visitors
into three-dimensional holographic others—transforming morphs that embodied both
poetic distance and a fluctuating virtuality.
With their vision defamiliarized though such morphed reflection, visitors were also
treated to dense sonic immersion by way of a David Tudor–designed multichannel diffu-
sion system made up of thirty-two speakers hidden behind the mirror’s surface and a
complex control device that enabled the point source movement of audio around the space
in all possible azimuths and angles. Combined with Tony Martin’s equally intricate light-
ing system, the Pepsi Pavilion’s combination of light, sound, and spatial transformation
added up to a veritable “trip” for visitors who were encouraged to become inseparable
from the space’s media saturated mise-en-scène and, simultaneously, become creators of
their own perceptual experiences.18

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 With its rhetoric of remaking the spectator into an active shaper of new forms of
perceptual-social space, the Pepsi Pavilion’s overarching goals bear an uncanny resem-
blance to Price’s and Littlewood’s socially engineered utopia of the Fun Palace. Even as
its highly experimental nature eventually lead to unsolvable frictions with its sponsor,
the Pepsi pavilion’s creation of the emancipated spectator eventually fit well with corpo-
rate capitalism’s co-opting of participatory aesthetics in its 1990s fashioning of the “con-
sumer as creator.”19 Yet the project also acted as a standard bearer for the ever-increasing
emphasis that artists and designers would place on computer technology in their quest
to emancipate the human spectator’s perception, all the while coaxing hidden enunciations
out of the technologically saturated environment.

Responsive Environments: First Generation

The work of American scientist and artist Myron Krueger marked the beginning of a
major artistic and epistemological shift in interactive environments. Trained in computer
science at the University of Wisconsin, Krueger’s research signaled the first attempts to
create human-machine environments with sophisticated computer technology in which
interaction was perceived to be a medium in and of itself, rather than a side feature.
Moreover, Krueger’s starting point was not necessarily motivated by artistic concerns
about activating participation through perceptually altering experiences, but rather with
the general research topic of human interfaces for new kinds of artificial realities made
possible by new technologies of computation.
Earlier work into human-machine interaction from scientists like Ivan Sutherland
focused on interface research in which the human body was encumbered by worn instru-
ments like 3D stereoscopic glasses and HMDs that would make possible the simulation
of new realities through computer-generated, real-time graphics. Instead, Krueger
addressed the issue of the artificial environment that one could construct and inhabit itself
as both “interface” and expressive means. How could a space become an interface to a
machine whose goal would be the creation of an artificial, computationally constructed
world in which the participant would not be tethered to worn devices in order to interact
with it?
Originating not in an exhibition or exposition context, but instead a hermetic univer-
sity computing lab, Krueger’s first installation, Glowflow (1969) a collaboration with
computer graphics expert Dan Sandin, computer scientist Richard Venezsky and sculptor
Jerry Erdman, was a computer-generated environment with light and sound that responded
to the physical presence of small groups of visitors (figure 8.3).
Named by Krueger as participants, small groups of ten to twenty visitors at a
time entered a darkened room whose walls were lined with four translucent tubes filled
with phosphor-treated particles floating in water together with a series of constructed
vertical columns. As visitors navigated the disorienting space, stepping on pressure-

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Figure 8.3 Myron Krueger. Schematic to Glowflow. Courtesy Myron W. Krueger, Vernon, CT.

sensor-augmented floor mats, voltage changes sent to a central computer switched on and
off twenty-four lights distributed in the vertical columns, causing the phosphor particles
to glow. Additionally, the sensors triggered precomposed synthesized sounds and moved
these sounds across a six-speaker array, adding to the overall hallucinatory atmosphere of
the space.
Exhibited at the university’s art gallery, Glowflow’s presentation served as an aesthetic
experience for the community and, more important, as a public prototype for Krueger’s
research into what he labeled responsive environments: “environments in which a computer
perceives the actions of those who enter and responds intelligently through complex
audio-visual displays” (Krueger 1996, 473). As Glowflow was designed to be responsive
to the presence of visitors, Krueger’s analysis of the level and depth of the participant’s
interaction with the space provided valuable data on how to evaluate the quality of the
installation’s design, technical implementation, and aesthetic impact—something that
had been hinted at by groups like GRAV and Gruppo N but not to the same rigorous
extent.
It is crucial to briefly detail Krueger’s lessons learned because they provided both valu-
able feedback for his design of subsequent spaces like Metaplay (1970), Psychic Space (1971),
and Videoplace (1972), which went much further in technological and conceptual directions

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toward exploring computer-augmented responsiveness and signaled a paradigmatic shift
in how human-machine interaction within spatialized media environments would begin
to be understood by both artists and scientific researchers.
Krueger’s key discovery, that the responsiveness of the environment based on real-time
interaction between the participant and machine is a medium in its own right bears some
explanation. Medium, in Krueger’s sense of the word, denoted “sensing, display and
control systems” or the entire machinic apparatus enabling interaction to come into being.
The locus of perception in a responsive environment, however, was diffused among the
human participants and computational components, that is, the interfaces that attempted
to “understand” human physical phenomena and turn such “real-world” behavior into
binary numbers for the machine to process. “The perceptual system will define the limits
of meaningful interaction, for the environment cannot respond to what it cannot perceive”
(Krueger 1996, 481).
The types of machine perception that Krueger suggested as potential media such as
object tracking, gesture recognition, elapsed time between input events, voice analysis,
or facial expression sensing are still the stuff of computer science research today; per-
ceptions that make possible the construction of meaningful (i.e., recognizable to the
machine) relationships between participants’ behavior and the corresponding output
display that registers this behavior are still complex technological problems. If the artist
or designer’s role is to clarify the “composition of the relationships between action
and response,” then aesthetic experience, in Krueger’s terms, is an implicit recognition
of the machine’s “perception” of us and hence, of our connection to the environment
(Krueger 1996, 481).
The manner in which Krueger treated the visual display, the second component of
responsiveness was even more telling of his research approach to the aesthetic issues arising
in Glowflow. “Responsive displays have a variety of functions in an Environment. The
responses establish relationships between participants’ actions and what they perceive as
well as forming expectations about the consequences of future actions” (Krueger 1983,
76). Display, in common art historical terms, signified the artwork itself—the sets of
audiovisual-plastic-material relationships that formed the object or event of observation
and contemplation. Yet, in carrying forth with his agenda of responsiveness as a new
aesthetic criteria, Krueger downplayed the visual or aural quality of the display (“the
slickness of the displays is not as important in this medium as it would be if the form
were conceived as solely visual or auditory”) (Krueger 1983, 44) in favor of that which
most logically demonstrated the “laws of cause and effect”: the successful computational
articulation of machine perception and response.
Finally, the control system or logic of the computer acted as the glue, connecting the
percepts of the machine with the eventual display output of the system, thus generating
the response. Although an emphasis on the action-response feedback loop at first appears
to be merely one of direct response, “allowing the environment to show off its perceptual

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system” (Krueger 1996, 482), Krueger was quick to state that many more complex
responses were possible. For the machine to show off its perception, the constructors of
the system must be clear in what the response space would be and how they would design
such real-time calculated response with minimum lag or latency between the participants’
action and the system’s reaction.
That Krueger labeled his technological apparatus an instrument, of course, strangely
resonates with the work of Theremin (in the analog circuitry domain) as well as more
recent gesture-augmented computer music in which direct, low-latency response must be
taken into account to guarantee any believable real-time musical expression between the
human and machine. But he also described the responsive environment as an instrument
in another sense, that of a generalized software-hardware system composed of a designed
set of parameters or later, as software libraries that would enable multiple forms of respon-
sive experiences to take place.
Videoplace (1976), Krueger’s most well-known environment, applied knowledge gained
from previous installations through refocusing on the interactive dialogue of participant,
control system, and display. More of a framework for interaction than a singular work,
Videoplace consisted of participants facing a video projection screen that mixed their image
with real-time computer graphics. Picked up by the far more sophisticated perceptual
system of a video camera, the participants’ movements were captured; analyzed through
computer vision techniques such as background subtraction, thresholding, and edge detection;
and then used to generate and control visual responses. Treating Videoplace as an instru-
ment to compose for, Krueger developed some fifty compositions using the system’s
framework.
In “Body Surfing,” for example, the participant’s image painted continuously changing
shades of color on the screen, leaving its trails of movement’s memory behind. In contrast,
“Critter” involved a strange, playful creature that would follow and interact with the
participant’s movement, its behavior determined by artificial intelligence methods. These
and other techniques implemented for the various Videoplace compositions were of such
complexity that Krueger’s graduate students working on the software for the systems
wrote entire master’s degree theses on the technical problems of implementation, thus
providing another example of scientific knowledge production intersecting with artistic
practice.
Even if Krueger still labeled Videoplace an environment by virtue of its controlled,
darkened setting, the proprioceptive experience of encountering others traversing
the spread-out, ambient spaces of Glowflow or Psychic Space was replaced by the par-
ticipant standing, interacting, and moving before the display—a conception of naviga-
tion not in physical space but on the surface of the screen. Similarly, responsive
environments involved a whole array of enactive entanglements among the human,
technical, and material, but Krueger’s understanding of performance was nothing less
than ambiguous.

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 Acknowledging that responsiveness leading to the participants’ “direct performance
of the experience” (Krueger 1996, 483) was tantamount to the goal of establishing mean-
ingful relationships of action and response, the crucial social performances that usually
arose among participants were downplayed in favor of clearly establishing the loop of
action and response between the participant, the computational apparatus, and the
screen.
At the same time, even as physical engagement appeared in Videoplace to be reduced
to gesturing before a mirror, the participant’s body was still critical to Krueger’s overall
conception of responsive environments. First, his shift toward the disembodied interface
of the video camera lay in the desire to keep the participant’s body unencumbered by
devices and, at the same time, to guarantee a richer set of perceptual possibilities for the
computer.
Second, the participant’s performance in front of the camera acted as the trigger for
the hidden layers of responsiveness buried in the software of the system, thus suggesting
that the participant would gain a renewed sense of their body by exploring the mapping
between bodily gesture and system behavior. “Awareness of your body is a vital part
of experiencing the medium. When you find that bending an elbow has one effect and
tilting your head has another, you discover a new way of relating to your body” (Krueger
1983, 50).
This unresolved tension between human movement as an interface and the simultane-
ous reduction of proprioceptive experience and social space in order for the “user” to
legibly zero in on the system’s immediate response at the simulated visual and auditory
level marked a shift in Krueger’s own work from Glowflow’s “kinetic environment” to
Videoplace’s interactive, screen-based dialogue. But it also exemplified the tension that the
interactive media arts would face a decade and a half later in their equally ambiguous
relationship to performativity.
In his 1974 dissertation—later published as the books Artificial Reality I and II—
Krueger was anxious to point to antecedents in happenings and process art as root sources
for his work. He appeared, however, unaware of other ambitious interactive environment
attempts that took place in European architectural contexts like the Fun Palace or Coop
Himmelb(l)au’s reactive spaces of the late 1960s that more broadly explored the position
of the body within a architectonic-media surround, focused not just on screen representa-
tions but media’s explosion into ambient space and physical memory.
Nonetheless, Krueger’s work was a critical development in bringing scientific research
agendas into the production of artistic experiences. In distinction to the applied engineer-
ing of E.A.T. in which engineers were put in the service of artists, with Krueger’s aim to
“raise interactivity to the level of an art form” (Krueger 1998) art was put into the service
of human-computer interaction research. Moving away from direct concentration on
embodied, social and co-present interaction with other participants in space, “participa-
tion” in Krueger’s work was radically reenvisioned as dialogue with the machine.

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 Performative Interfaces and Spaces

The transition from kinetic space that challenged engrained modes of perception to com-
munication between human and machine was indicative of the larger transformation of
computer mediated participatory spaces from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Through
the increased interest in simulation, virtual reality, and the development of interfaces to
set such simulations into interactive dialogue with their users, the screen and the com-
puter became a new kind of stage, as Brenda Laurel pointed out.20
What further distinguished the second wave of participatory artwork was, of course,
the shifting political context. No longer considered political in the way in which the
perceptual politics of the 1960s helped activate interest in participatory spaces, artists in
the late 1980s and 1990s who were encouraged by the rapid developments in real-time
graphics and interface technologies focused increasingly on the mechanics of interac-
tion—how a new kind of unprecedented relationship could be instantiated between
human users and machines. “Instead of being a commentator standing outside society,”
as Söke Dinkla perceptively described this political shift, “the artist now decides to take
part in the socio-technological change and judge from within” (Dinkla 1994).
The world of international institutions, festivals, residencies, and research institutes in
the 1990s was filled with dozens of interactive works that ultimately struggled to liberate
the passive art spectator once and for all through the possibilities of computer technology.
These projects featured every imaginable form of interaction—which “users” would step
on, click, push, and occasionally dance with—new kinds of interfaces in order to make
the connection between human and computer intuitive and transparent. In such interface
practices, the body was increasingly seen as an appendage of the machine: an extension
of the interface to trigger a dialogue latent in code and thus release Platonic image fields
that challenged the real and its appearance.
The emphasis on the surrounding, immersive environment that marked earlier partici-
patory work disappeared in favor of the visual and auditory display adorning the walls of
galleries, museums, or festivals, where it was subject to the noise and distraction of so
many other displays around it like in a shopping mall. In other words, the inherent per-
formative constitution of interactive media, from the emergent, on-the-fly social chore-
ographies of spectating (observers) and performing (interactors), felt spatiality, duration,
temporal shape, concentration (as Krueger originally demanded), full bodily engagement,
and the staging of an overall mise-en-scène of such experiences took a secondary role in
comparison to the emphasis on computer responsiveness. At the same time, a handful of
media artists contextualized interaction in larger theatrical contexts, placing emphasis
both on the machine-mediated interaction of the environment as well as the explicit per-
formances that could be engendered within such an environment.
The work of media artist Jeffrey Shaw, for example, exemplified the tension between
interface-driven and body-based performative environments. Originally creating expanded

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cinema projects and inflatable sculptural spaces with the Eventstructure Research Group
in the 1970s [Event, chapter 3], Shaw’s later work, beginning with Points of View in 1983,
shifted away from the physical, bodily engagement of these earlier architectural events
and toward the manipulation of interfaces to control all-encompassing computer-
augmented and -rendered projected media spaces. “The term movement does not any
longer signify the movement of the performer in space, like in the former Happenings,
but the movement of the image caused by the joystick” (Dinkla 1994).
A “theater of signs” based on the model of a flight simulator, Points of View consisted
of an audience seated in front of a large-scale, computer-generated 3D projection in which
one audience member could manipulate the various angles of view with two custom-made
joysticks, controlling both the visual perspective as well as the auditory landscape. Using
pared-down visual aesthetics derived from an early Apple II computer, Points of View could
be described as a virtual stage in which the visual representation of the actors was denoted
by simple, Egyptian-inspired hieroglyphs.
Although both spectators and performer-joystick controller were seated, Shaw quickly
recognized the triangular relationship between performer-director (the spectator at the
interface and the response of the system), work (the event), and spectator (who was both
the seated audience member and the controller). “It is the particular audio visual journey
made by a spectator who operates the joystick which constitutes a ‘performance’ of this
work. For the other spectators that performance becomes “theater” (Dinkla 1994).
Shaw’s next works, The Narrative Landscape (with Dirk Groeneveld, 1985), Inventer la
Terre (1986), and Heaven’s Gate (1987) increasingly focusing on projection-based environ-
ments with little physical movement demanded of the spectator. With The Legible City
(1989), another collaboration with theater director Groeneveld, however, Shaw returned
to the realm of fuller bodily expression and perception. Continuing to engage with high-
end computer-generated graphics, The Legible City went far beyond “point-and-click”
interface technologies. Instead, Shaw began to explore devices that demanded full physical
engagement, in this case, a bicycle that the participant pedaled that transported her
through cities constructed solely of Silicon Graphics–generated, 3D letter forms, displayed
on a liquid crystal monitor and in later versions, projected onto a screen in front of the
bicycle.
Here, too, the performance of participants became key for both the gathered onlookers
in that more exertion moved them forward faster through the artificial landscape of let-
terforms, while slower pedaling decelerated the experience for both observer and player.
Suggesting a strange solo cycling machine in a private gym (The Legible City played in a
darkened, enclosed room), like Points of View, the dramaturgical and spatiotemporal mise-
en-scène of The Legible City again demonstrated that a kind of theater ensued, by way of
direct physical engagement with the interface and between the user and the observers. “A
new aesthetics comes to the fore. The artwork is more and more embodied in the interface,
in the articulation of a space of meeting between the artwork and the viewer, and even

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in the articulation of a space where the artwork as an artifact seems to disappear altogether
and only communication between the viewers remains” (Shaw 1995).
The fusion of media within a total spatial environment coupled with interactive explo-
ration hybridizing cinema and theater reached its apotheosis in Shaw’s 1993 development
of the EVE (Extended Virtual Environment). A massive inflatable sphere measuring 12
meters in diameter, the EVE consisted of a stereoscopic, motorized projector mounted in
the center of the environment that could rotate 360 degrees as well as pan and tilt 90
degrees, projecting a moving window across the dome’s interior surface. Akin to the
spectator/participant strategy present in many of Shaw’s other environments, observed by
onlookers wearing wireless headphones, a single performer in the center of the sphere
controlled the movement of the projector by way of a head-mounted accelerometer and
thus revealed the varying visual and auditory parts of a specially shot film mapped across
the surface.
As a space of representation enveloping the viewer, the EVE (later renamed EVE Inter-
active Cinema) referenced Shaw’s earlier three-dimensional and architectonic exploration of
expanded cinema combined with the possibilities afforded by machine-augmented inter-
action in which the “performer” in the center was a vicarious ersatz for both the eyes and
ears of the spectators. Through the worn interface, a complex relationship of control,
gazing, and performing again occurred as the performer wearing the head-mounted sensor
became the eyes, ears, and body of the spectators surrounding her and followed only a
narrative that the performer chose to reveal to them.
What was and is captivating about Shaw’s work was the creation of situations in which
interface, body, and space were merged to produce unscripted explorations driven by
participants through prescripted material conditions. During his tenure as founding direc-
tor of the Institut für Bildmedien (Institute for Visual Media) at the ZKM in Karlsruhe,
Germany, between 1991 and 2003, Shaw directly supported the work of many artists (as
artists in residence) who were interested in similarly exploiting the unresolved tensions
of screen, environment, and the performative interface.
In projects such as Handsight (1992) and Memory Theater VR (1997), Hungarian artist
Agnes Hegedüs challenged both existing computer interface paradigms of keyboard and
mouse as well as reigning models of virtual reality (VR). Handsight utilized an eyelike
sphere as a tracking sensor that would enable the viewer to navigate through a 3D simula-
tion projected in front of them, thus extending vision through hapticity. A similar tactic
was taken with Hegedüs’s, Shaw’s, and Bernd Lintermann’s ConFIGURING the CAVE,
which utilized a standalone, puppetlike interface as a real-time controller for intricate
graphics and sound inside a CAVE (Cave Audio-Visual Experience Automatic Virtual
Environment): a high-end, stereoscopic immersive computer simulation projection
environment developed at the University of Illinois’ supercomputing center that was
normally navigated through handheld wireless devices or tracking sensors tethered to
the body.21

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 The American Perry Hoberman, another artist associated with the ZKM, created
interactive works that were playful and socially critical commentaries on digital technol-
ogy. The performers of Faraday’s Garden (1990–1999) were a room of thrift-store house-
hold appliances, electrical apparatuses and other motorized detritus that would be triggered
into cacophonous life by participants stepping on hidden floor sensors. In Cathartic
User Interface, (1995, with Nick Philips), visitors could “effectively work through their
conflicting emotions concerning the benevolent yet pernicious influences of computer
technology” by hurling balls at a matrix of keyboards mounted on a wall and receive
sound and video responses dealing with technology’s encroachment in everyday life
(Hoberman 1995).
In the work of Polish-born artist Miroslaw Rogala, space itself, like in Krueger’s
projects, became the interface to computationally manipulated video images. In Lovers
Leap, his most well-known work, the changing location of a visitor in the environment
formed the gateway to temporally navigating 360-degree images of Chicago and Jamaica
projected on two screens facing each other on opposite sides of the installation, thus
converting full body movement into interface, eye, and editor simultaneously.22
Shaw’s interest in alternative navigation spaces at the ZKM also involved other
institutes engaged in several European Union–funded projects researching new forms of
interface technologies and the resulting potential of new authoring and control systems
arising from such research, specifically oriented toward generating unique forms of art,
performance, and entertainment.
One of the key projects was the European Union funded eRENA (Electronic Arenas
for Culture, Performance, Art, and Entertainment) action, which ran between 1997 and
2000 and partnered seven European cultural and research institutions to develop tools
and techniques examining “the changing roles of performers and audiences” brought on
by computer technologies. With a particular emphasis on “spatial technologies” and
“inhabited information spaces in which all participants can be mobile and socially active,”
several eRENA projects explicitly developed body-centric interfaces and environments
that could elicit new performance forms based on multiparticipant real-time interaction
(eRENA project 1997).
Distinct from Shaw’s consciously sculptural interface-apparatuses, the body-based
interaction in projects like eRENA and others presupposed an untethered participant who
was free to move around inside the media space, and increasingly lead to the creation of
technical platforms incorporating multimodal sensing that could be used in a variety of
contexts. One of the central eRENA partners, the MARS (Media Art and Research Studies)
group led by the researcher-artist Monika Fleischmann and architect Wolfgang Strauss at
the former Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) mathematics and
computer science research center in Bonn, created a system called eMUSE (Electronic
Multi-User Stage Environment) in which various sensor modalities such as vision (camera-
based), haptics (touch-based), acoustics (speech recognition), balance (gravity), and motion

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(proximity) could be used to track the participant’s body in order to influence the behavior
of computer-generated media within a quasi-theatrical environment conceived as a stage.
In another project, the mixed reality installation Murmuring Fields (1997), Fleischmann
and Strauss sought a fusion of “virtual and real space . . . linked to each other as indepen-
dent reference levels for action and perception using an intuitive interface (body tracking)”
(Fleischmann and Strauss 1997). In the spirit of Krueger’s Videoplace—albeit with
more detailed real-time image and audio processing—Murmuring Fields turned several
spectators at a time into active performers before a computer-generated “data body” of
themselves.
In addition to the interface technologies developed through EU research initiatives,
other European media collectives working in the commercial as well as cultural arena also
created innovative media environments involving sensor-based interaction that converted
the general public into performer. Founded originally by Fleischmann, Strauss, designer
Joachim Sauter, programmer Dirk Lüsebrink, and others in 1988, Berlin-based media
company ART COM was one of the few to successfully cross over between the avant-garde
media arts festival circuit and commercial media design for museums, expositions, cor-
porations, and trade shows, through projects that involved custom research / development
of interface technologies and conceptual design and implementation of responsive environ-
ments that could be used by the general public.
Body Mover, a multiuser audiovisual environment commissioned by then-Daimler-
Chrysler for the 2000 Hannover World Expo used camera tracking “to make the partici-
pating players aware of their bodies as an interface between man and machine” (ART
COM 2000; figure 8.4). More unusual in context, ART COM’s The Famous Grouse Experi-
ence was a responsive media environment for the similarly named Scottish whiskey manu-
facturer installed in Famous Grouse’s Glenturret Distillery visitor center in Scotland.
Done in collaboration with the London-based Land Design agency as a new kind
of interactive brand promotion, the environment was a room with floor and wall pro-
jections in which, through camera tracking and vibration sensing, up to twenty visitors
at a time could trigger perturbations in the images. In addition to setting off ripples
and cracks through the animated floor images, the room involved interactive sound and,
most interestingly, a ventilation system that sent a whiskey aroma wafting through the
space.23
The majority of these projects focused on interaction with images and sound; however,
there were also individuals who explored the translation of sensing-based data into other
kinds of nondigital materialities. The installations of Supreme Particles, a collective
founded by media artist and programmer Michael Saup, utilized numerous sensing tech-
niques to investigate the transmission of human energy into both the digital and organic
realms. In Plasma/architexture (1994), physical movement of the participants morphed both
real-time-produced images and sounds as well as the pneumatically controlled projection
surface that transmitted such images.

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Figure 8.4 ART COM in cooperation with Atelier Markgraph, Frankfurt am Main. Body Mover (2000).
Expo 2000, Hannover. Courtesy of Joachim Sauter/ART COM. Berlin.

Analogously, the numerous iterations of the spatially encompassing interactive envi-

ronment R111 (1996–2001) transduced human presence into nonhuman materialities.
“Energy potentials” were, in Saup’s words, “cannibalized off the Internet and from the
local movement of spectators . . . and then transformed into various states of matter—both
physical and virtual—and presented by the installation with the help of physical and
virtual modules” (figure 8.5). Harnessing data from a wide range of sources, R111 pro-
vocatively fused the computation and physical, “choreographing particles of matter as if
they were pixels” and translated gathered “sensations” not only into the typical interactive
liquid morph of the image, but also into the physical waves of infrasonic sound, the vibra-
tion of silicon oil, and the shifting of magnetic particles, all installed on tables in the
space (Saup 1999).

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Figure 8.5 Michael Saup. R111, 2001. Photo Canon Art Lab.

In a wholly different vein, but also involving the blurring between material and digital
borders, another eRENA project that explored performative participation within a total-
izing environment was that of the mixed-reality theater work Desert Rain from the British
collective Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality research lab at the Uni-
versity of Nottingham. Founded by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr, Nic Tandavanitj, and
Jamie Iddon in 1991, Blast Theory originally created site-specific performances in aban-
doned buildings, clubs, parking garages, and other nontheatrical spaces, using combina-
tions of video, installation, and live performance as well as the participatory elements of
club, pop, and media culture. Already, the group’s 1998 work Kidnap—in which two
people were randomly kidnapped and held for forty-eight hours based on a Blast Theory–
initiated public lottery—played with the fragile line between media-orchestrated fiction
and reality.
Desert Rain (2000), the collective’s response to Jean Baudrillard’s provocation that the
“Gulf War did not take place,” materialized in a twenty- to thirty-minute performance-
installation that combined techniques from distributed virtual worlds, interface, and
mixed-reality research: the fusion between the digital and the physically situated. Navi-
gating by way of a footpad interface through a series of both computer-generated spaces

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projected onto the unusual surface of a 4-meter-long rain curtain as well as physically
architected rooms, the spectators to Desert Rain began as a theater audience and metamor-
phosed into the players of a precarious and disconcerting game of war staged between the
simulated-projected and the physical world. The visceral effect of Desert Rain, however,
was generated not only in the development of innovative interfaces to elicit the possibility
of performative interaction among the players but also through the conscious perforation
of the borders between tangible and synthetic space.24
Desert Rain withstanding, most of the projects within the burgeoning interactive new
media art and design world involving sensor-activated interfaces shared a common interest
in translating human movement into abstracted digital representations, “data bodies,”
and similar forms. Emphasizing the novelty of the participant’s ability to instantaneously
become part of the immediate feedback loop between motion and computer response, the
majority of interactive works focused on a one to one set of representations (between the
player and the screen) in which participants stood before the projected image and through
semaphore-like gestures, attempted to elicit response from the mirror.25 An even stronger
repercussion of the “interaction is the medium” paradigm inherited from Myron Krueger
was the fact that with the overarching emphasis on discrete demonstration of feedback,
of getting the system to react on each step or movement, the effect of temporal evolution,
and the experienced subtleties of bodily time in relationship to machine time were, in
the majority of cases, lost.
In relation to such definitions of interaction, the work of Canadian media artist David
Rokeby marked a significant departure. Starting already in 1982, Rokeby began develop-
ing what he called the Very Nervous System (VNS), a hardware- and software-based tool
incorporating infrared, camera-based sensing and computer vision techniques together
with a set of corollary interactive installations that deployed the system. Distinct from
the later interactive media work we have surveyed that used similar strategies, Rokeby’s
early installations, such as Reflexions (1983), Body Language (1984–1986), and Very Nervous
System (1986–1990), focused exclusively on interaction with the invisible movement and
shape of audio over time. “Time, in interactive art,” wrote Rokeby, “is more a material
to be worked and formed than a given framework within which the work is constructed.
The collisions and interferences between Newtonian time, psychological time, biological
time, reflex, consciousness and reflection are a natural area of exploration for interactive
art” (Rokeby 1995).
In Rokeby’s VNS works, the action-response cycle did not materialize through the
mirrored image of the body, whether real or as an abstracted data representation, but
instead through the interwoven spatial and temporal richness of sound. Sudden bursts of
movement, shifts of tempo, and fluctuating intensities of bodily change could be regis-
tered by the system and converted into musical compositions that behaved differently
over time depending on the subtleties and nuances discovered by the participants and the

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system itself. Inherently focused on the volumetry of space as a body-driven, musical
performance arena activated and shaped by multiple participants, Rokeby also extended
the VNS system into video image–based installations.
In Silicon Remembers Carbon (1993), a 4 m s 3 m, top-down projection onto a bed of
sand, became a surface for shifting images of elements (water, waves, fire) interfered with
by the shadows and reflections of past and present visitors’ movement alongside the frame
of the image. In many ways, Silicon Remembers Carbon utilized the indirect information
provided only by an environment, its human and nonhuman gestures, noises, rhythmic
fluctuations, memories, and shifts in half-noticed phenomena and spectator effects to
transform space and time itself into an interactive medium—a lived experience for the
visitors of the present, past and future.
The experience of the body shaping time within a responsive environment was also
a strong element in the narrative fictions of American digital media artist Toni Dove.
Dove’s highly detailed, large-scale and cinematic environments such as Mesmer: Secrets
of the Human Frame (1990), Archaeology of a Mother Tongue (1993), Artificial Changelings
(1998), and Spectropia (2006) were situated at the intersection of interactive cinema
and responsive installation and researched how body-based movement and gesture could
be used as an interface to travel through different visual-temporal layers and shapes of
narrative.
Artificial Changelings (1998), a “romantic thriller about shopping,” was a spectator-
driven interactive movie focused on the span between nineteenth-century Paris and the
future whose temporal flow was altered by both performer and spectator. By way of sensor-
augmented floor mats, the public used their bodies to activate four distinct spatial zones
and thus revealed hidden layers of the narrative by blurring time, changing image quality,
changing the character’s POV (point of view) and influencing what aspects of the narrative
were revealed over time.
Similarly, in 2006’s Spectropia, a project in gestation for five years, trained performers
as well as untrained audience members performed before a camera to drive the experiential
flow of a science fiction narrative focused on time travel between 1931 after the stock
market crash and a dystopian future. Like Kleistian Übermarionettes or what Dove termed
cinematic bunraku, her main characters Spectropia and Arathusa were subjected to spatial-
temporal-ontological choreographies of manipulation and transformation, inhabited
and orchestrated by the performed gestures and movements of human specters (“the
ghosts of agency”) exogenous to the narratives, yet essential for their evolution. Operating
on and entangling human, animal, technical, and historical subjectivities, Dove’s
machinic performances were emblematic of the hauntings that sociologist Avery
Gordon so eloquently defined—”how that which appears not to be there is often a
seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (Gordon
1996, 8).

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 Responsive Environments: Second Generation—Crisscrossed Agencies,
Phenomenologies, Situations

As Dove’s work revealed, subjectivities within the realm of machinic systems were not
fixed in time and space but subjected to the performative enactments of spectators and
performers who fabricated them into being. The question of how one could physically
inhabit such symbolic-material environments of crisscrossed machinic enunciations that
moved beyond digital image and sound representation and mixed together bodies, instru-
ments, devices, algorithms, materials, and temporal-spatial systems in their processes of
becoming also framed the interdisciplinary work of several art research collectives whose
specific goal was to question accepted notions of interactivity.
Founded in 1997 by Laura Farabough, Sha Xin Wei, and the author of this book, the
art research group Sponge became known in the international media art circuit for large-
scale environments fusing investigative art, speculative design, technoscientific research,
and critical public discourse. Emerging from an interdisciplinary seminar at Stanford
University in 1996, Sponge set its sights on materializing in built-form questions con-
cerning the ways in which different disciplinary fields (mathematics, theater, computer
science, music, architecture) interacted and interpenetrated each other, producing new
forms of embodied knowledge that could be tangibly experienced through what the group
called “public experiments in phenomenology, perception and desire.”
At the heart of Sponge’s work was a sustained investigation into the ways in which
performance could be interpolated across different temporal-disciplinary registers, from
the unintentional and ordinary actions and gestures that constituted “the making of traces,
making of symbols, the shaping of objects” (performance at the micro level) to perfor-
mance as an event involving the demarcation between spectator and performer (Salter and
Sha 2005, 94). Although the micro scale of the unintended gesture might ride on the
threshold of perception and not be recognized as a performance, an enunciation or enact-
ment, the macro level of theater with its architectural separation between theatron and
stage normally guaranteed that any gesture executed in this setup would be construed as
having and making meaning.
Beginning with m1 (1997) and continuing with m2 (1998) and the series m3 (Sauna
and TGarden) between 1999 and 2003, Sponge eschewed the stage entirely, developing
mediated situations and events where “unpredicted spatial and social conventions could
emerge out of locally situated actions” (Salter and Sha 2005, 95). Focused on the question
of how an ordinary gesture might evolve over time to be perceived as performative, in
Sponge’s first experiment m1 (1997), a group of trained performers enacted an algorithmi-
cally scripted series of ordinary gestures and actions over an eight-week period in a public
eating area at Stanford University, gradually varying the intensity, speed, and orders of
the gestures in search of an ideal spectator: a spectator that intuited but somehow could
not directly articulate that a performance was taking place.

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 Occurring in the controlled indoor confines of The Lab, a well-known San Francisco
experimental art venue, Sponge’s next project m2 continually cycled small groups of visi-
tors through a series of real spaces mixing emotionally charged video images of isolation
and abandonment with sound, light, heat, paper, and the spectator’s bodies in an environ-
ment that over time evoked human erotic experience coupled with the deformation and
decay of media.
The performance-installation TGarden, a collaboration with the Belgian art research
group FoAM that was staged at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and V2-Rotterdam Cul-
tural Capital between 1999 and 2002, amplified Sponge’s investigation of performance
and agency by creating an experimental media environment in which small groups of
participants from the general public influenced and played with real-time-generated sound
and image through improvised movement and gesture.
Visitors to the environment—which consisted of a completely enclosed space without
an audience—chose and wore sensor-embedded clothing that enabled them to “play” the
room as a real-time media instrument based on individual as well as group movement
patterns (figure 8.6). The clothing or costumes were designed with unusual properties,
including uncommon materials (plastic tubing, springs, wire, crinkled, oversized organza)
and exaggerated proportions organized to defamiliarize the visitor’s relationships to their

Figure 8.6 Sponge/FoAM. TGarden, 2001. Photo Sponge/FoAM.

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own bodies, while the room’s media output consisted of projected images on the floor and
multichannel, spatialized audio. Through worn sensing and wireless communication,
spontaneous gestures and movement of the participants were tracked and analyzed in real
time.
In marked contrast to standard black box models of computing, by which algorithms
were abstracted from the world outside of the machine, TGarden’s computational guts
attempted to model a virtual physics in software in the attempt to recover a lost physical-
ity as a result of the abstracted digital processes. Players who expended effort by jumping,
bouncing, and dragging themselves in the space encountered musical and visual equiva-
lents of this physicality in the lowest levels of software: phantom masses and springs,
virtual kinetics, friction, and energy. Here, in the software physics, “the physicality of the
performance interface gives definition to the (musical) modeling process itself,” wrote Joel
Ryan, one of the project’s collaborators, suggesting the resonances among the space,
interface (i.e., sensors), and software (Salter and Ryan 2004, 88).
Sponge conceived the physical performance space occupied by the public “players” as
a mediated substance shapeable by way of social play. Yet TGarden’s performative “agen-
cies” extended across multiple media, not just electronic: “We are equally fascinated by
the agency of the material, the friction of cloth, the decay of data, the elasticity of MIDI-
controlled sound, and by the agency of disciplines—grammar, algebra, systems of orthog-
raphy, legal systems, and so forth” (Sponge 2002, 102).
Sponge and FoAM’s approach to responsive environments examined how performative
play from the participants could shape and influence the conjunction of media and social
behavior. Shifting away from the invisible interface, the worn costumes of TGarden pro-
vided a real world materiality to the on-the-fly experience shared by the participants
involved in shaping immaterial media. Departing from the one-to-one relationship
between user and system reaction in which each individual was seen as a discrete subject
in relationship to discrete media objects, performance and play in TGarden emerged
and was reshaped through the spontaneous social entanglements that took place during
the event.
As Sponge continued to explore the issues brought up by TGarden and Sauna (a respon-
sive architectural project for public space developed at the same time) in computer science
and computer music research contexts from 2002 onwards, the group’s Belgian collabora-
tors collectively known as FoAM further dedicated themselves to the blending of “digital
and physical realities in materials, interfaces and environments” (FoAM 2003). Founded
by Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney, and Lina Kusaite in 2001 and utilizing the moniker
“grow your own worlds,” FoAM’s biomimetic, organic worlds were in conscious contrast
to the hard-edged, reduced digital aesthetic that constituted many interactive media
works. Working with and extending the TGarden software and hardware infrastructure,
FoAM developed several large, multisensory, responsive environments, including txOom
(2002) and trg (2006).26

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 In the responsive environment txOom (an amalgamation of the words “texture” and
“bloom”), staged in the massive Hippodrome in the downtrodden British seaside resort
of Great Yarmouth, the worn costumes deployed in TGarden were extended into archi-
tectural scale, creating a “wearable architecture” of walls and dresses. Serving simultane-
ously as projection surfaces and sensate devices, as well as trapeze harnesses from which
the audience members were suspended, txOom encouraged bodily intertwining with the
sensations of real physics and simulated, computational physics in the room’s media.
Projecting visual and aural media onto the architecturally shaped textiles in order to
“drench the physical space with synthetic nutrients,” txOom examined how the synthesis
of media, fabrics, and architecture could create a living environment of fleshy and synthetic
agencies (FoAM 2003).
FoAM’s next environment, trg (Transient Reality Generators), focused on “interaction
with an environment modeled as an ecosystem or a universe that reshapes itself on a human
scale” (Kuzmanovic 2005, 11). Working again with mixed-reality environments where
“digital media becomes tangible and the physical architecture appears simulated and
irreal” (FoAM 2003), trg, however, sought to pull back on the architectural scale of txOom,
to a more haptically augmented space constructed at human scale.
Structures of interconnected stretched fabric and inflatable surfaces were mixed together
with projected, localized images and sound, the tangibility of which was augmented by
physics-based software simulations, responding to sensor data produced by visitors climb-
ing around, pushing surfaces, and exploring the multiple modalities of the environment.
trg’s visitors first were treated to a liminal preparation session including massages, sensory
deprivation, and the like. After the initial preparation, the visitors (now participants) then
entered into the fabric-based space of soft and elastic surfaces, spindly textile membranes,
and discrete “pools” of image and sound. Activated by the participants’ movements and
physical interaction with the elasticity and potential physical deformation of the environ-
ment, the space’s perception was diffused and distributed from the computer into both
invisible forms (camera-based sensing) as well as tangible ones, such as stretch sensing
and acceleration embedded into the surfaces and substrates of the textiles.
trg was part of a large European Union cultural project that researched the potential
of new cultural practices arising from the fusion of media simulation and architectural
materiality in mixed-reality environments. Another partnering organization also occupied
with the creation of play-based, sensor-augmented responsive environments involving “the
physics of simulation and the simulation of physics” was the Austrian media organization
Time’s Up. Founded by Tina Auer, Tim Boykett, and Just Merrit in 1996, this Linz-based
“laboratory for the construction of experimental situations” conducted “protoscientific”
research examining the interdependence and chain reactions among biomechanics (the
study of the mechanical laws of movement in living organisms), control, and machine-
animal perception. Creating game-like worlds in which participants would interact with
immersive media environments through the use of body-based interfaces, many of Time’s

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Up’s projects demanded intense physical exertion on the part of the participants (Boykett
2006).
In Hyperfitness Studio, also known as Hypercompetition for Beginners (1996–1999), partici-
pants encountered a science-fiction-themed fitness studio made up of situationsapparati:
workout devices such as bicycles that rotated on their own axes the harder one pedaled,
a bar mounted on a ramp-like structure that dispensed drinks only if the participant could
pedal up the ramp (“you sweat, you drink”), and a video game driven by the physical
exertion of eight cycling participants in competition with each other. A hybrid of game,
sporting competition and mock psychological experiment, Hypercompetition set out Time’s
Up’s agenda to examine the sensorimotor coupling between the human organism and its
environment (Boykett 1996).
Hyperfitness’s follow-up projects SPIN (Spherical Projection Interface) and Body Spin
(1999–), attempted to “close the gap between physical and virtual environments,” inte-
grating the body into a complex and disorienting physical feedback loop. With the motto
“a journey to the core of your physicality,” the project’s first iteration, SPIN, consisted of
a 3-meter-diameter translucent plastic ball that participants could enter one at a time
(Time’s Up 1999). Mounted on a pedestal that allowed rotation in all directions from the
participants walking inside, SPIN’s virtual content was beamed against the surface of the
ball from a series of four corner-mounted projectors, allowing the participants to oscillate
between the physical sensation of walking coupled with the loss of spatial orientation
generated by the distorted images on the entire surface of the sphere.
The project’s second iteration, Body Spin went further by using participants’ psycho-
physical data such as pulse rate, breath, and stress levels gathered from worn body sensors
to generate game-like situations with a projection-based environment—what the group
dubbed IRS (Inverted Reality System). In the game “Brain Maze,” for example, participants’
stress levels regulated the visual complexity of a wireframe projected labyrinth on the
sphere’s surface that had to be navigated, while “Breath Surf” transferred the differing
rates of the participants’ chest expansion and contraction into a virtual surfing competition
on the surface of a Tron-like animated ocean.
Sensory Circus (2004–), arguably Time’s Up’s most ambitious project and part of the
EU trg cooperation, extended the work from previous projects into a children’s playground-
like environment divided up into several zones (Reality Shift, Integrative Balance Space,
Systemic Bar), all inhabited by multiple interface-apparatuses interconnected with each
other over a central network. Interface groups like “Carousel Labyrinth,” “Gravitron,”
“Sonic Pong,” “Lightning District,” and “Cavity Resonator,” among others, all involved
the public’s interaction with a range of custom-built mechatronic and sensate machines,
each challenging the participants’ experience of physical space and phenomena.
The “Gravitron” environment featured large-scale floor projections of animated, gravi-
tational fields distorted in real time by way of six balance-driven, force-feedback platforms
that participants stepped on and tilted by displacing their weight (figure 8.7). Another

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Figure 8.7 Time’s Up. “Gravitron.” Photo Time’s Up—Robert Zauner.

Sensory Circus game, the “Carousel Labyrinth” was a maze of twelve human-scale rotating
cylinders with side-by-side openings that when matched up with other cylinders allowed
the participant to cross through the labyrinth.
In addition to functioning independently, “Gravitron,” the “Carousel” and other groups
of interface machines in Sensory Circus were also networked to a central set of computers,
forming a “protocognitive” system. With the ability to take the numerous feeds of sensor
data that registered the participants’ manipulation of the system and, through statistical
processes, “fuse” such data to help generate reactions and responses in sound, image, and
light, interaction with the environment could be articulated at the local level of a particu-
lar interface group as well as globally throughout the entire Sensory Circus world.
Researching the possibility of a media environment functioning as a neuronal model
in which the numerically weighted connections of input/outputs would change the
system’s response based on the system’s history and “learning” of patterns, Sensory Circus
thus attempted to transfer the human-oriented biomechanic feedback loop between

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sensorimotor coupling and environment directly into a space of protomachine interfaces
with their own behaviors and presences.27
Even with aesthetic and philosophical intentions, what the media environments of
Sponge, FoAM, and Time’s Up shared was a strong interest in extending machine percep-
tion across all aspects of the total environment itself. In questioning the paradigm of
interaction as that which occurred solely between a human participant and a projected
image, responsiveness in worlds like TGarden, txOom, and Sensory Circus was alternately
defined across multiple time scales: from the immediate response generated by participants’
interaction with an interface (whether clothing, architecture, or a machine-like device) to
much longer time durations, where individual responsiveness would percolate throughout
and change the environment based on the history of interactions with the system. Like
the earlier perceptual-phenomenal researches of the New Tendencies, the kinds of respon-
sive environments from new 1990s art research collectives also hybridized visual, aural,
sensory, and corporal perceptions across the entire machinic apparatus.
This emphasis on the physically felt interfaces of sensor-augmented wearables and
sensate textiles at both body and architectural scale enlarged the spectrum of embodied
possibilities for performative interaction in responsive environments by enabling the
gathering of “personalized” psychophysical data that could be used to shape and transform
media at a more “intimate” level. Indeed, the mediation of touch and intimacy through
worn, body-based technologies was another topic that numerous artists working with
performative interfaces explored.
In her widely acknowledged “immersive virtual environments” Osmose (1994–1996)
and Ephémère (1996–1998), Canadian computer graphics artist Charlotte (Char) Davies
delivered a blistering critique at the purely ocular-centric world of immersive computer
graphics and VR simulations, instead shifting toward the “intensified experience of being
embodied in the space-time of the living world” (Davies 2003, 322). Eschewing the tra-
ditional interface of sensor-augmented gloves and “phallic joysticks,” and influenced by
her experience as a scuba diver, Davies’ navigation system for both projects consisted of
a worn vest embedded with motion-tracking sensors: breath (measuring the expansion
and contraction of the chest) and balance (measuring the participant’s degree of bodily
tilt).
By donning a head-mounted stereoscopic display, participants worked with breath
inhalation and exhalation and their own balance to move upwards, downwards, left, and
right through a series of evocative, real-time, and computer-generated—yet almost paint-
erly—3D worlds composed of spatially ambiguous, subterranean landscapes of forests,
ponds, skies, and the vessels and organs of the body, which suggested connections between
interior life and the earth itself.28
As individual, intimate experiences for one person at a time, both Osmose and Ephémère
evoked strong affective responses in the thousands of participants or immersants, as
Davies dubbed them, that engaged with the work, with many professing profound bodily

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sensations ranging from floating and feelings of ecstasy to “eerie-ness,” a sense of haunt-
ing, and deep loss. Within the realm of public exhibitions, however, Davies introduced
a far more performative model. As the real-time sound generated by the immersant’s
navigation through Osmose and Ephémère filled the gallery or museum space, audiences
outside the system vicariously lived through the immersant’s experience by way of two
projections: the participant’s orientation and view from inside the HMD on one wall and
the silhouetted shadow of the performing participant directly responding in her own body
to the work. Osmose and Ephémère thus perceptually juxtaposed two different types of bodies
and worlds simultaneously—a projected experience of simulation and a shadow play of
the real body.
Both of Davies’s works successfully relied on the inherent tensions between the sup-
posed immateriality of digital technology versus the materiality of bodily experience. This
tension was most exemplified in the conflict not only between the private experience of
the immersant’s body made public as performing shadow, but also between the bulky,
almost alien apparatus of the HMD and vest and the participants’ embodied navigation
of Davies’ pulsating, immaterial environments of soft and translucent 3D forms that
sometimes bordered on the edge of disappearance.
Like Davies’s reembodiment of the immaterial, another Canadian-based artist, as well
as choreographer and professor, Thecla Schiphorst [Software for Dancers, chapter 6],
aspired to recover what she perceived as a loss of touch and bodily intimacy in the face
of much interactive digital media, for example, in the widely exhibited installation Body-
maps: artifacts of touch (1996–1998). An interactive video and sound environment that
explored, in Schiphorst’s words, “the sensuality and anarchy in the act of touching and
being touched” (Schiphorst n.d.), Bodymaps consisted of a velvet projection surface incor-
porating electric field sensing to gauge proximity from the surface and FSRs (force-sensitive
resistors) that measured varying degrees of pressure from participants’ fingers. As fleeting
images of Schiphorst’s own body were projected onto the surface of the material, its pro-
jected form could be interfered with, stirred up, gazed at, marked, molested, and revealed
by the haptic responses of the participants pressing at its luminous surface.
The intimacy of touch also served as a basis for Schiphorst and Susan Kozel’s 2002
project whisper, an acronym for wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive,
responsive system. Arriving at different sensory modalities (touch, breath, pulse, and so on)
through a series of exploratory workshops with test participants, whisper developed small
sensing and wireless communication devices embedded into special garments that were
worn, or attached to the surface of the skin. As these devices gathered physiological data
like pulse and breath from the participants, the results were visualized and sonified
and then “reprojected” back into the installation space in localized pools on the floor,
amplifying intimate moments and contacts that normally would go unnoticed.
As whisper was presented in public performances in the UK and Rotterdam in 2002–
2004, exhale (breath between bodies), another project from Schiphorst’s and Kozel’s team,

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then based at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, continued the investigation of
technologically augmented intimacy, this time using breath to drive tiny, actuator-like
fans, vibrators, and speakers embedded in the seams of garments. If whisper’s media
was environmental, exhale’s focus on intimacy shifted the scale of response away from
public media display toward personal, body-based enactments such as tickling, stroking,
vibrating, and the like, using physiological data as a form of affective communication.
Although not based on wearables, Kozel’s own responsive environment Trajets (2004),
co-created with Gretchen Schiller, also carried forth the examination of bodily intimacy
within a responsive environment. Projected onto twelve motorized screens turning on
their axes, ephemeral images of moving bodies and other kinesthetic phenomena danced
across the gauze-like surfaces. Turning in response to the floor patterns of the public
moving through the maze of rotating screens as well as the public’s internal parameters
of attraction, proximity, and repulsion, Trajets also played with the interaction between
bodies as one agency distributed among others.

Urban Interactions: Playing in Public Space

The use of worn and distributed interactive systems at the end of the 1990s effectively
began to shift the discourse from interaction per se to questions of embodiment, intimacy,
touch, social play, and the shaping of what Edward T. Hall originally labeled as “spatial
proxemics.”29 This performative play was not restricted to the closed, culturally defined
spaces of museums, galleries, and festivals but spilled out into the urban environment
itself, transforming everyday spaces into what architect Ed Keller called a new, “freewheel-
ing version of Homo Ludens” (Keller n.d.). Fusing architecture, sensing systems, computer
networks, distributed devices, and psychogeographic strategies, artists, designers, and
architects transformed cities into responsive zones.
In the 1960s, Dutch Situationist artist and urbanist Constant Nieuwenhuys, known
as Constant, had already outlined a civic utopia where inhabitants of the city would no
longer become spectators but active shapers of the urban space. In “New Babylon,” Con-
stant’s concept of the utopian city of the future, the artist foresaw the bidirectional influ-
ence of social, technological, and physical space: “space as a psychic dimension (abstract
space) cannot be separated from the space of action . . . for us, social space is truly the
concrete space of meetings, of the contacts between beings” (Constant 1996a, 155).
Depicted in his utopian musings, space was not metaphoric but an ambient surround-
ing that could be enlivened by play and social presence in relationship to technology.
“The ambiance of an environment possessing certain specific plastic and acoustic charac-
teristics depends on the individuals who find themselves there . . . the quality of the
environment and its ambiance no longer depends on material factors alone, but on the
manner in which they have been perceived, appreciated and used” (Constant 1996a,
167–168).

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 Some thirty years later, the metropolitan interventions of a number of international
artists attempted to fulfill Constant’s prediction. For example, with his interactive
relational architecture performance events that bordered on the monumental, Mexican-
Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer questioned the boundaries of public and private
space. Defined as “the technological actualisation of buildings and public spaces with alien
memory,” relational architecture put a technological spin on the way we read and inter-
acted with the embedded cultural narratives of buildings and public spaces, defamiliariz-
ing and transforming them by breaking down both the space’s intended use and its
patterns of behavior (Lozano-Hemmer 1999, 53).
Internationally recognized for his massive light sculptures including Vectorial Elevation
(2000), first shown at the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main square, at the start of the new mil-
lennium and then with follow-ups in France, Spain, Japan, Toronto, and other cities
between 2000 and 2008, Lozano-Hemmer’s Body Movies (2001) more specifically magni-
fied the intimate play between the passersby and their digital reflection to city scale.
With influences from the large-scale, critical public artworks of Polish artist Krzysztof
Wodiczko, the Situationists and other visionary social architects of the 1960s, Body Movies
transformed the façade of the Pathé Cinema in downtown Rotterdam into an interactive
shadow play using a combination of Xenon lighting sources, robotically controlled projec-
tors, and the general public.
Playing directly off Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s seventeenth-century engrav-
ing “The Shadow Dance,” which depicted the grotesquely large shadows produced by
actors moving in front of theatrical light sources, Body Movies took urban space itself as
the new proscenium and an unsuspecting public as its actors. Although the work used
computer-based tracking to sense the position of spectators, Lozano-Hemmer’s most effec-
tive technology was an age-old one: the mesmerizing, giant shadow selves in performance
with the Pathé’s building façade.
Lozano-Hemmer’s interest in transforming urban environments through interactive
plays of bodies, light and shadow continued in a series of works such as Pulse Front (2007),
Pulse Park (2008), and the memorial work Voz Alta (2008) that employed technologies
such as heart rate sensors and modified microphones to transduce the pulses and voices of
visitors and convert them into luminous patterns projected into the urban night by large
robotic Xenon searchlights. These enactments between people’s internal rhythms, and the
shadows produced by external amplifying technologies became the stimulus for defining
a new performative territory, one that Johan Huizinga noted in Homo Ludens as “temporary
worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga
1950, 10). The public’s dance with their oversized shadows “casts a spell over us that is
enchanting, captivating” and the typical flatness of the screen gave way to the three-
dimensionality of pedestrians’ heart beats and protest voices rendered across the city.
Paralleling his work with trained performers, William Forsythe’s [The Body’s Limits
in Dance and Theater, chapter 6] inquiry into our perception of the body as it was

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choreographed by technologically derived systems of rules, games, architectures, and
algorithmic constructs was also directly played out on the bodies of the public through
a series of installation events labeled “choreographies for public and public spaces.” Origi-
nally shown at the Roundhouse in London, the installation-environment Tight Roaring
Circle (later called White Bouncy Castle [1999]), set the record for the world’s largest bouncy
castle: a massive version of the popular fairground attraction in which children jump up
and down within an inflated structure. Researching the ballistics of the human body that
could be freed for a split second from the constraints of gravity, Bouncy Castle, along with
the “choreographic objects” Scattered Crowd (2003) and City of Abstracts (2002), was just
one of a number of Forsythe’s public choreographies that attempted to catalyze movement
potential in ordinary spectators within extraordinarily circumscribed spaces.
The use of media to choreograph public play was also a device in Forsythe’s choreo-
graphic public space installation City of Abstracts (2002), in which urban sites were con-
verted into temporary, technoscenographic heterotopias. In City of Abstracts, Forsythe used
the potential of spontaneous interaction between everyday inhabitants of the city and their
interactive projected images to enable a self-generated choreography in the public envi-
ronment (figure 8.8). Constructing a semihidden, self-contained apparatus of live cameras,

Figure 8.8 William Forsythe. City of Abstracts, 2007. Photo Philip Bussmann.

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a projection screen, and real-time image processing installed in public locations through-
out the city of Frankfurt in 2002 and subsequently other cities, City of Abstracts trans-
formed everyday spaces into stage and playground simultaneously.
Software that had been originally developed in consultation with Steina Vasulka
morphed a live video feed of participants standing in front of the camera/screen setup. By
selectively removing scan lines from the final image and creating a time delay between
every other scan line, pedestrians that moved before the camera were converted into
turning, spiral forms: a mirrored reflection of passersby stranded between multiple digital
temporalities.
Like many interactive-participatory performance works sited in the urban wild, City
of Abstracts depended on improvised, unscripted movement from the general public to
activate response in the system—a viable stage of chance based on real-time variables that
were not predictable at the onset. The technologies of image interaction that City of
Abstracts deployed drew out threshold co-presence and interaction rituals and projected/
exhibited them as conscious artifacts in situ—microperformative events before a public
that was unsuspectingly pulled into a social dance.
In a similar spirit, literally hundreds of other interactive or digital works from
individual artists and collectives as well as experimental design and architecture studios
like Usman Haque, Greyworld, Cécile Babiole, Paul De Marinis, Paul Kaiser and the
OpenEndedGroup, Jason Bruges, MVRDV, Christian Möller, Aram Bartholl, West 8,
ART COM, Todd Winkler, Sponge, Ben Rubin, Association Creation, Erik Adigard/
Chris Salter, HeHe, Pneuma, Graffiti Research Lab, and Zero-th, also endeavored to
reinvent public spaces and the urban environment. With events and interventions
ranging from responsive façades and gigantic public projections to sensor-activated
and -actuated architectures, sculptures, and active objects, many of these urban
technology–based performance projects sought to offer experimental media alternatives
to advertising and other forms of visual and aural information pollution plaguing
the city.
In the playful domain, composer Paul De Marinis’s Rain Dance/Musica Acuatica—
originally built for the Swatch Pavilion at Expo 1998 in Lisbon—transformed umbrella-
wielding spectators into performers/listeners/composers as they stood underneath twenty
streams of sonically modulated water sprays. Not driven by sensing technologies, another
street-based media environment, Paul Kaiser’s and Shelly Eskar’s Pedestrian (2000),
projected a walkover, computer-animated image of miniature pedestrians moving on a
sidewalk, thus shifting the scale between that of the real pedestrian in the city and their
micro image in the projection.
More activist types of urban media interventions were realized by the Brooklyn-based
organization Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), founded by James Powderly and Evan Roth
in 2005 during a residency at the Eyebeam Atelier Open Source Lab in New York.

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Figure 8.9 Graffiti Research Lab, Rotterdam, 2007. Photo Graffiti Research Lab.

GRL turned the act of tagging into public performance by outfitting urban activists with
open source technologies. By integrating laser tag and traditional graffiti concepts
with computing, GRL’s international cells in countries such as Austria, Amsterdam, and
Holland as well as the New York Headquarters engaged in high-tech graffiti practices
working with cheap LED technologies (“LED throwies”) or the practice of “projector
bombing”: using portable high-lumen projectors to throw images of real-time-generated
digital graffiti created by camera tracking a moving laser pointer aimed at and writing
onto a building’s surface (figure 8.9).
Metamorphosing an urban display environment saturated by advertising through
unusual forms of displays was not confined to street level, however, or to the surfaces
of screen façades themselves. Known for his and statistician Mark Hansen’s interactive
Listening Post installation, designer and artist Ben Rubin was commissioned by Adobe
Systems to create San Jose Semaphore (2006), a temporary, large-scale projection-based
public artwork installed in the top floors of Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose, California,
and visible from the air and ground.

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 Rubin’s work based itself upon the earliest telecommunications network in which
pulley-driven wooden panels on top of buildings sent messages to other relay towers five
miles away, developed at the end of the eighteenth century by Claude Chappe. A “machine
for communication,” the artist’s semaphore entailed four 3-meter-tall and 20-meter-long
yellow disks that rotated to one of 256 possible combinations seven times a second.
Constructed from twenty-four thousand computer-controlled LEDs, Rubin’s semaphore
visualized the movement of information at city scale, transmitting its message to the air
in a calculated ballet of visible signals and waiting to be deciphered by passing observers
on the street and in their cars on the freeways below.30
In designer and architect Usman Haque’s mass participation airborne installation-
performances like Sky Ear (2003) and Burble (2007), thousands of balloons massed together
and containing color-changing LEDs, infrared senders/receivers, or cell phones were
released into and hovered in the air, their color-changing abilities controlled by large
groups of public participants on the ground via electromagnetic fields generated from cell
phones and from atmospheric disturbances (Sky Ear) or by sensor-embedded handles that
held up the structure in the air (Burble). Percolating the movement of crowds through
the entire LED system, Haque’s transient, flickering urban events could compete with the
scale of buildings.
A similar strategy was evident in Light Dome, a 2006 project from the Dutch architec-
ture studio MVRDV’s Winy Maas, the young Estonian architects ZiZi and Yoyo, and
Arup’s Rogier van der Heide and realized in the darkest winter in Tallin, Estonia.
MVRDV and the younger Estonian architects constructed a cupola of hundreds of white
weather balloons suspended in the winter air above the city’s central square and illumi-
nated with intense blasts from sports stadium flood lighting instruments in the interest
of proposing a solution to Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD), the onset of depression
due to the lack of light in northern winter climates.31
The artist duo HeHe’s (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) Nuage Vert (green cloud) real-
ized an urban airborne performance of a different sort. Part of the couple’s ecosophically
minded Pollstream series (2003–2006), a series of environmental interventions focused on
making temporarily visible the effects of energy and waste consumption patterns “by
speeding up the normal time it takes for our actions in and on the environment to have
consequences,” Nuage Vert projected a contour-tracing high-powered green laser onto
the surface of smoke and vapor emissions from a power plant in residential Helsinki
(HeHe 2008).32 Resembling the famed “toxic event” in White Noise, novelist Don DeLillo’s
infamous novel of contemporary suburban American decay, Nuage Vert’s shape, chemical
composition, and behavior was tracked by a thermal camera, with its size altered in real
time through changes of electricity usage in the surrounding areas. Creating a mass green
neon sign-event in the sky, Nuage Vert generated the “ultimate” hybrid of natural and
cultural phenomena or, as HeHe labeled it, the visual and material “aesthetization” of
industrial pollution.

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 Supergames in Public Space

The arena of urban interactive projects became so diverse in the late 1990s and early 2000s
that entire websites, archives, and festivals were created around the topic.33 Many of these
works involved ambient, unfocused play in which large groups of distributed visitors
drifting through or by open spaces, windows, screens, or buildings would set media into
motion, the effects of their interaction sometimes apparent and sometimes not. Yet, there
were other interactive projects in public space that attempted to involve larger groups in
more ludic-based engagement, based on specific rules or constraints of game-structured
social interactions.
One of the most interesting early experiments in mass public gaming was the use of
the CINEMATRIX Audience Participation System by American scientist and Pixar cofounder
Loren Carpenter and his partner Rachel. Presented at SIGGRAPH in 1980 and the Ars
Electronica Festival in 1994, the Carpenters created a game of Pong for the masses. With
games broadcast onto a large public screen and driven by red- and green-colored handheld
paddles whose color changes were picked up by a camera, Audience Participation enabled
hundreds of participants to steer both the Pong game as well as other computer models
(a flight simulator, a moving cube in a 3D landscape) by simply rotating the paddle to
either red or green, thus transforming public space into a quasi sporting match and mass
video game (Carpenter and Carpenter 1994).
The psychogeographic tendencies of new urban performance scenarios were also facili-
tated by locative, worn, and handheld technologies such as cell phones, GPS receivers,
and mobile devices embedded with sensors, as well as social networking sites like Face-
book and MySpace. These technologies enabled distributed forms of communication and
interaction over city-scale environments and thus the possibility of organizing mass col-
lective action performances/resistance acts both in specific locations as well as across the
city itself.
In what digital guru author Howard Rheingold first described as smart mobs—the
phenomena of people who are able to “cooperate in ways never before possible because
they carry devices that possess both communication and computing abilities” (Rheingold
2003, xii)—sudden forms of public protest, actions, and games spontaneously erupted
in urban locales, enacting what Michel de Certeau called “pedestrian enunciations” (de
Certeau 1984, 116).
One example of such pedestrian enunciations was the early-twenty-first-century phe-
nomenon of flash mobs, in which unplanned happening-like events would rapidly defamil-
iarize urban locales through their ability to generate mass public play without a pyramidal
hierarchy of control. Launched in summer 2003 by Bill Wasik, a senior editor of Harper’s
magazine, the concept of the flash mob was an attempt to critique “hollow hipster
cultures” of conformity in New York City as well as being a riff on viral marketing.
Organized via email with instructions on where, when, and what to do at a specific

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location, the first flash mob surreptitiously orchestrated by Wasik took place at the main
Manhattan branch of the Macy’s department store and involved a group of several hundred
people gathered in the rug department who claimed to be from a New Jersey hippie farm
and were looking for a “love rug.”34
Around the same time in 2003, another set of flash mob events arose in a series of
actions that took place in San Francisco. In what researcher and game designer Jane
McGonigal labeled “supergaming”—massively scaled public collaborations that generated
an audience—groups of people who had never met gathered in public locations to stage
collective games. In the Go Game, four hundred and fifty people received instructions over
mobile phones and proceeded to act out live scavenger hunt-like actions in superhero-
costumed personas with the help of passersby.
Likewise, in a 2004 action dubbed by the press as “flash mob computing,” a mass of
more than seven hundred people gathered at a University of San Francisco gymnasium
with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and PDAs to create a “grassroots” supercomputer. Other
supergaming actions like the use of public payphones by more than four thousand people
in the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) I Love Bees (2004), Intel’s research project Asphalt
Game or the Big Urban Game, where teams moved giant board game pieces through the
cityscape of Minneapolis and others also involved hundreds of participants in public play
and were organized through distributed systems like blogs, public payphones, web-
enabled cell phones, and the like.35
With the rapid spread of flash mobs, smart mobs, ARGs, or what McGonigal described
as “ubiquitous games” (McGonigal 2005) literally thousands of participants from multiple
countries and continents began to stage performances. Despite being played out in diverse
contexts and organized by very different sets of constituents (corporations, marketers,
university research labs, independent artists, and others), many of these events shared
structural and organizational similarities: (1) the use of distributed mobile and online
technologies to aggregate large collectives, (2) the embedding of the game within the
everyday physical geography of the city, (3) the amassing of a group of untrained, non-
professional participants within a defined and fleeting time duration, (4) the shifting of
perceptual thresholds between performers and audiences, and (5) the temporary disruption
of social norms and habituated patterns of action.
These characteristics could also be found in the so-called urban prankster movement,
another smart mob-like urban performance trend. Partially the brainchild of a New
York–based improvisation group called Improv Everywhere, urban pranks were character-
ized by spontaneous events orchestrated through online social network sites. Setting out
to upset established conventions of behavior in public spaces, urban prank actions ranged
from the innovative to the ridiculous: slow motion dérives through department stores,
mass water balloon fights in the middle of city squares, wandering around in cultural
venues in single file and having impromptu dinner parties in the furniture showrooms
of Ikea. Originally responsible for actions such as Mp3 Experiment 2.0 (2005), Slow Mo

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Figure 8.10 Improv Everywhere. Frozen Grand Central, 2007. Photo Chad Nicholson/Improv Everywhere.

Home Depot (2006), and The Camera Flash Experiment (2007), in which seven hundred
people released a wave of camera flashes on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, Improv
Everywhere’s Frozen Grand Central (2007) involved a group of 207 public “agents” who
froze in place simultaneously for five minutes inside the Main Concourse at Grand Central
Station (figure 8.10). Achieved by the public agents synchronizing their watches, the
“freeze-in” at Grand Central, like other smart mobs, led to the spread of even larger freez-
ing actions around the world.36
In addition to the smart mob model, another genre of game-like or explorative events
in the urbanscape were catalyzed by locative or mobile-based technologies in projects
from Blast Theory, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Katherine Moriwaki, Mixed Reality Lab in
Nottingham, Brooke Singer, Michelle Terran, Terri Rueb, Erik Conrad, Drew Hemment,
Eric Paulos, the PLAY studio at the Interactive Institute, Jason Lewis, Active Ingredient,
Marc Tuters, Julian Bleeker, and others. Though many of these artist-technologists turned

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to the city as a context to examine the politico-aesthetic impact of location-based tech-
nologies and their potential to generate new forms of networked communities, there was
also increased interest in university and industrial researchers to use the public perfor-
mances of urban space as a testing ground for ideas originally hatched in both the research
lab environment, as well as occasionally the co-opting structures of corporate marketing
divisions.
Another key issue that arose within the locative media-pervasive gaming arena was the
tension between centralized control and distributed, “on-the-ground” gaming. A case in
point was the high-profile pervasive gaming projects of Blast Theory such as Can You See
Me Now? (2001), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), I Like Frank (2004), Day of the Figurines
(2007), and Rider Spoke (2008), developed in collaboration with ubiquitous computing
researchers from the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab.
Fusing the “overlay of a real city and a virtual city to explore ideas of absence
and presence,” Blast Theory’s best-known project Can You See Me Now? comprised
(up to) fifteen online player-participants and a series of four physical actors (“runners”)
situated on the ground in a real city. Sharing an online map and equipped with handheld
computers and GPS receivers, the physical runners hunted down the online players
until they were within 15 (virtual) meters of the runners, capturing them and thus
winning points in the game. Through online chat and digitized audio, the runners
and players both communicated with each other during the distributed game of catch
(Blast Theory n.d.).
Similar pervasive games that took place between the brick and mortar world and the
simulated, computationally navigated one like PacManhattan (NYU/ITP 2004) and
Human Pac Man (2004), developed at the Mixed Reality Lab of the University of Singa-
pore, also played on the tension between control from above and command on the ground
as well as the vacillating experience of embodiment between players in the online city
and the real one.
Yet the lingering question that remained in such pervasive gaming examples was the
nature of performance in tandem with the array of digital representations, avatars, and
other “virtual” models of city experience. How could such games that treated the city as
a mapped-out grid of points and obstacles for “players” provide the dwellers and perform-
ers in the urbanscape with the real power of pedestrian enunciation through “ways of
operating” that would go beyond an experience of the city as a strategic map generated
from the code of GPS or Wi-Fi systems? “The presence and circulation of a representation
(taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advance-
ment) tells us nothing about what it is for its users” (de Certeau 1984, xiii).
In other words, if Can You See Me Now? and other like-minded games could be played
in any city landscape across the globe, reducing the experience of the localized and situ-
ated urban context for the online as well as on-the-ground user-participants as another
interchangeable technological representation, then what would become of practices of

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collective civic experience and participation that involved habitation lasting longer than
the millisecond durations of handheld network time?37
Finally, although the ambiguity and complex nature of this question was not easily
answered, one thing for certain was that pervasive games, scenes, and situations all shared
a new vision of the city in the age of connected communities: the conversion of the urban
environment into a vast, distributed stage that blurred the distinctions between players
and onlookers, and spatial and human performances. In transferring the possibilities of
interaction from the controlled spaces of culture and directly into the urban wild, perfor-
mance became something that could be catalyzed and articulated through devices, infor-
mational triggers, inscribed rules, and other forms of structures that were both pregiven
as well as emergent during play. Taking interaction into account as both medium and
site of action, public performances made possible by technologically as well as socially
augmented concepts of mobility sought to generate urban spaces no longer inhabited by
passive onlookers but active shapers—an acute but fitting revival of the early Situationist
dream to transform the tedium of quotidian life into a fabulist, performed enterprise.

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 Conclusion: The Everyday

I write this conclusion while sitting in the inner courtyard of a fourteenth-century cloister
cum hotel in the Italian town of Pisa, a few days after a Dante-esque installation period
for a new project at the Eleventh Annual Architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Entitled Air XY, the project, an intensive collaboration with designer Erik Adigard, was
an interactive multimedia installation that explored many of the themes brought up in
this book: screen versus scene, the materiality of media and real time, dynamic and inter-
active processes that mix human and technical presences.
Installed by Adigard, myself, and a team of dedicated multimedia professionals in
steam bath–like conditions within the gargantuan space of the Corderie dell’Arsenale in
the dead of the Venetian August, Air XY was part of a group show that addressed the
theme “at home in the modern world.” Walking through the massive, vault-like spaces
of the Corderie, a 319-meter-long building dating from 1613 where ropes were produced
for the Italian navy, one encountered what amounted to a series of large installations
conjured up from many of the world’s most illustrious builders and thinkers: UN Studio,
Asymptote Architecture, Coop Himmelb(l)au, M Fuksas D, Droog Design, Greg Lynn,
MVRVD, and many others. Ranging from a colossal white propellerlike twisted form
(UN Studio) and a re-realization of Coop Himmelb(l)au’s 1971 interactive Feedback
Circuit Program to a gigantic series of subway train cars coated in green plastic (Fuksas),
these “momentary constructions” tried to reflect the exhibition’s larger theme: Out There:
Architecture Beyond Building, the brainchild of director/curator Aaron Betsky.
“Architecture is not building,” wrote Betsky, “buildings are objects and the act of
building leads to such objects but architecture is something else. It is the way we think
and talk about buildings . . . architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps
even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment . . . in a concrete sense,
architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world” (Betsky 2008). Although
Air XY dealt with fleeting, digital images, light, space, and the movement of bodies
before the screen and within space, some (but not all) of the other works also played with
the tension between representation and performance: between static objects and processes
that dynamically create and adapt to their environment.
I write about this work because architecture has played a large role in this book, not
just from the point of view of erecting edifices or buildings, but rather by way of produc-
ing new kinds of material, technologized spaces. It is here where architecture shares much
in common with the texture and materiality of artistic performance (in all its myriad
guises, as we have witnessed), through the creation of equally imaginary spaces that, at
the same time, are tangible, felt, and inhabited. Like performance, architecture is situated
on the cusp between the built and the imaginary.
Yet in contrast to the nonutilitarian fantasy worlds of theater, sound, dance, or the
visual arts, architecture still must straddle the quotidian. As we saw in our explora-
tion of architecture’s performativity in chapter 3, even when tinkering with the pheno-
mena of ephemerality, event, movement, and disappearance, architecture is by and large
a child of the everyday. We cannot help but encounter its spaces in daily life as they
surround, occupy, and influence our momentary experiences.
In his 1964 manifesto “The Great Game to Come,” Constant Nieuwenhuys [Urban
Interactions, chapter 8] wrote of an upcoming life in the city of tomorrow.

Our conception of urbanism is not limited to construction and its functions but rather takes in all
of the uses that can be found, or even imagined . . . we can already expand our understanding of
the problem through experimentation with certain phenomena linked to the urban environment:
activity in a certain street, the psychological effect of different surfaces and constructions, the
rapidly changing appearance of a space produced by ephemeral elements, the speed with which
ambience changes and the potential variations in the overall ambience of different neighborhoods.
(Constant 1996b, 62)

Constant’s utopian city of tomorrow was not the one of architectural science fiction lore
depicted in the annals of early filmic visions like Metropolis or The Shape of Things to Come,
but rather life without spectating. As a place of drifts and ambiences, the Situationist city
of the future would consist only of participation: social and aesthetic games and per-
formances of and in the everyday. In a rapidly changing surround of technology, the ennui
of daily life would be eradicated by the perfumelike spell of new inventions embedded
into and activating the very environment in which one lived. Thwarting an encroaching
“impossibility of realizing a creative life within utilitarian society,” space could become
“intensified” by technical means and reordered by performances “playing with the
elements that make up the environment” (Constant 1996b, 162–165).
The futurologist’s and management pundits’ claim that “the future has already hap-
pened” is perhaps true. As seen from the lens of technology, quotidian life in our age has

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become a continual, round-the-clock performance. But these ongoing enunciations enabled
through technology are not just the privy of a handful of artists and curators interested
in opening up the deadness of urban space through the latent potential of interactive
paradigms and locative media. Rather, as further evidence of the prescience of the Eric
Hobsbawm quote that opened this book, the sense impressions and belief machineries of
the aesthetic now saturate daily life, in all of its facets.

Sense impressions, even ideas, were apt to reach the public from all sides—through the combination
of headlines and pictures, text, and advertisement on the newspaper page, the sound in the earphone
as the eye scanned the page, through the juxtaposition of image, voice, print and sound—all, as
like as not, taken in peripherally, unless, for a moment, something concentrated attention. This
had long been the way in which city people experienced the street, in which popular fairground
and circus entertainment operated, familiar to artists and critics since the days of the Romantics.
The novelty was that technology had drenched everyday life in private and public with art. Never
had it been harder to avoid aesthetic experience. The work of art was lost in the flow of words, of
sounds, of images, in the universal environment of what would once have been called art. (Hobsbawm
1996, 520)

Written in 1996 at the tip of the Internet’s explosion into mass culture, Hobsbawm’s
observation of the permeation of the everyday with the extraordinary of the aesthetic
might find its most salient manifestations in our age of so-called social media where the
instruments of social networking, from blogs and Facebook to MySpace and Twitter, have
transformed the minutiae of private life into public event.1
How have our electronic networks and mobile appendages scaled everyday behaviors
like taking out the trash or eating dinner into something far beyond de Certeau’s “pedes-
trian enunciations”? Why are the most banal daily tasks viewed, tracked, monitored,
captured, and saved to a global audience’s hard drives or MP3 capsules? Could it be that
our greatest fear is not the collapse of economies or the pulverization of the glaciers but
the sudden loss of connectedness to the exploding digital repositories that store our
endless, everyday routines that in the past were ignored as workaday and necessary for
survival? Many would find it hard to perceive the world without these technologies of
subject creation and subjectification that transform our everyday lives, bodies, and envi-
ronments, and simultaneously transfer their own idiosyncrasies onto us.
Even if the future has happened already, let us imagine for a moment the further per-
formative “revolution of everyday life” (Vaneigem 2001) beyond the individual behind
their screen. Although the natural environment melts, we will certainly be overcome with
the desire to create ever-more-appealing artificial ones that explode the surface of screens
into lived space.
The ubiquity of information appliances will most certainly move toward portable
experience devices, allowing us to instantly change the entire sensory spaces in which we

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live with a flick of a switch. The DSP chips in our increasingly smaller cell phones will
power up embedded DLP projectors held within the circuitry, enabling home movies and
media rich blogs to be projected out into real (not screenal) space. Urban spaces like
streets, airports, cinemas, and classrooms will suddenly convert into DIY immersive media
spaces that until now were the exclusive territory of expensive art and technology
centers.
The archival retrieval systems for image and sound media that now proliferate online
like mushrooms may be no longer searched and unlocked through keyclicks and mouse
movements, but instead by the presence of gesturing bodies. Likewise, wireless cameras,
sensors, and actuators embedded into our walls and floors that change ambiences and
relations will push us further toward Constant’s dream of the “image of an immense
social space which is forever other; a dynamic labyrinth in the widest sense of the term”
(Constant 1996a, 168).
But if everyday life becomes a media spectacular “scenographic syrup” (Payne 2007, 56)
and an ongoing ludic artifice, all made possible through technical beings, a central question
remains: namely, what role does artistic performance, particularly that dependent on new
technology, still have to play? After all, the estrangement of daily life’s routines that long
was the territory of artists is now in the hands of everyday people who, in their attempt
to elevate the workaday to the status of the fantastic, upload videos of their daily cooking
and cleaning rituals, going to church and taking out the trash on YouTube, like so many
home movies, hoping to achieve the millisecond attention of our increasingly saturated
eyes. What could possibly counteract such a widespread cultural transformation?

This book has tried to comprehend the polyphony of ways that artistic creators across
disciplinary divides have historically sought to shape the fabric of the world in a situated
and embodied way through the technical/material practices of performance. Like living
itself, performance, as medium and method, conjures up something fragile and ephemeral
that is forever bound in time and space. Undeniably, it is strange and even confounding
to think that in our “anytime, anyplace” media-mobility, storage-driven present, creators
would also engage the technical instruments and apparatuses of our time to make some-
thing that purposefully exists only in the moment of its constitution and eventually
evaporates. The practice of performance reminds us of immortality—our experience of
something in the course of its birth, evolution, and passing.
Performance as an entanglement among humans, instruments, algorithms, and machines
on the stage, in the laboratories, and through the streets of cities thus “unfolds in an
operative or immanent mode” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, 1) yielding new
knowing about the world through its sudden presence and equally sudden disappearance.
It is in this sense that performance as knowing takes us beyond the quotidian. It is also
why its stubborn makers still seek to create artificial events that remind us that the
everyday is extraordinary only when we can observe and experience it as such.

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 Notes

Preface

1. See Diller and Scofidio n.d.

2. See Dixon 2007, Rush 2005, and Carlson 1996, among others.

Introduction

1. For example, performance has been used in the following contexts: human–computer interaction
as performance, performative science, performative environments, performative architecture,
performance in archaeology, performative ethnography, performance as knowledge. See Diebner
2005, Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, Pearson and Shanks 2001, and Latour, Woolgar, and Salk
1986 for different disciplinary interpretations.
2. Of course, this is a bit of exaggeration as certainly performance has been an important part of
media art practices. Rudolf Freiling’s and Dieter Daniels’ 1990s online archive medienkunstnetz.
de has a small but important section on performance (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themen/
medienkunst_im_ueberblick/performance). However, as a study object in relationship to the now
being written histories of media art, it would appear that theater, music, opera and dance do not
exist. This was made clear, for example, in the fact that the first conference for Media Art Histories
at Banff in 2005 that aimed to discover the roots of the field, had out of 120 international papers,
only four focused on performance contexts. Another example is the writings of Lev Manovich,
in particular his article “Cultural Interfaces and Data Aesthetics” (http://interface.t0.or.at/
levmabstract.html).
3. Later, as the Greek dramatic tradition developed, the lesser known ekkuklema appeared: a wheeled
platform that rolled out of the wooden skene building at the back of the stage to display the slaugh-
tered bodies of characters. See Leacroft and Leacroft 1985 for a further discussion of early Greek
stage inventions.
4. I use the term “immanent” throughout the text in its philosophical connotation meaning to be
within the limits of possible experience or knowledge.
5. Sandeep Bhagwati, personal conversation, June 2006.
6. See McKenzie 2001 for a further discussion of this notion of performance.
7. For a further discussion, see Latour 1999, 174–215.
8. For a full and detailed discussion of performance from linguistic, anthropological, and cultural
(but not science or technology perspectives), see, for example, Carlson 1996, Fischer-Lichte 2004,
Turner 1982, and Schechner 1988.
9. Although art critic Lucy Lippard is credited with coining the concept of the “dematerialized”
art object, signifying the increasingly ephemeral nature of artworks in the 1960s, artist Eduardo
Kac in a footnote in his work Telepresence and Bio Art points to the work of the Brazilian theorist
Oscar Masotta, who first referred to the notion of “dematerialization” in a 1967 lecture entitled
“Despues del Pop: Nosotros Desmaterializamos.” Lippard was known to have met Masotta on her
visit to Brazil in 1968, but never cited his lecture in her own work. I thank Jens Hauser for bring-
ing this to my attention. See Lippard 1973, Masotta 1990, and Kac 2005.
10. See Artaud 1958 for a further discussion, as well as Derrida 1980 for a critique of Artaud’s
critique of representation.
11. See Varela et al. 1991.
12. For another take on Varela and performance focusing on his and Humberto Maturana’s notion
of autopoiesis, see Fischer-Lichte 2004, 61.
13. In the realm of performance studies, see, for example, McKenzie 2001, Auslander 2002, and
Sussman 1999.
14. See Latour 1993.
15. Science “studies” infatuation with performance has recently come under criticism, particularly
from feminist critics. See Herzig 2004 and Thompson 2005.
16. Callon 1998; Callon 2006.
17. For a brief introduction to SSK, see Biagioli 1999.
18. As ANT has been the subject of much argument and debate, Latour has attempted to
describe it as well as the erroneous readings that have been made. In particular, Latour strongly
opposes the idea that ANT is a theory, but instead suggests that it is a method (much like perfor-
mance theory sees performance as a method). See Latour 2005 for a further analysis of this aspect
of ANT.
19. Barad’s use of the word “post-humanist” differs from Pickering’s, owing much to Donna
Haraway’s idea of the cyborg or simian.
20. While the word posthumanism seems mainly appropriated to describe a decentering of the
human subject through technology, a glance at other societies that do not make cuts between the
human and natural worlds suggests that posthumanism might be a strange choice of words.

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21. See, for example, the debate between Auslander and Blau concerning the attribution of
nonhuman agency to a machine (Auslander and Blau 2002).
22. Although the word entanglement originally derives from quantum mechanics, I use the
anthropological understanding of the term. See Thomas 1991 for a discussion as well as Callon
2006.
23. See McCullough 2004 for a further discussion of “situatedness” in architectural terms.
24. See Dixon 2007 and Laurel 1993.
25. See Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2004 and 2007, Laurel 1993, and Murray 1998 for this
perspective.
26. For example, Birringer 1989 and 1998, Rush 2005, and Carlson 1996 all focus on stage-based
work with technology from a visual or projection-based “media” perspective.
27. See, for example, the debate between Phelan 2003 and Auslander 2002.
28. See Jaspers 1953 and 1963 and Heidegger 1977.
29. There is much that unites Guattari’s notion of the machinic with Latour’s networks and
collectives, although the two supposedly never met. See Stengers 2000 for a discussion of the
resonances between each.
30. A case in point is the exemplary New Media Reader from MIT, which although quite com-
prehensive, has little in it representing the history of the performing arts. Better is Randall Packer’s
and Ken Jordan’s Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (2001), which does feature many more
texts from artists involved in performance practices (e.g., Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Marinetti,
Klüver, Cage, and Paik).
31. See Munster 2006 for a discussion of Laurel’s notion of embodiment within the realm of
simulations.
32. In Computers as Theater, Laurel devotes a small part of the text to recognizing the achievements
of avant-garde theater artists like the Living Theater, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson,
and John Cage who experimented with performances that “began to dissolve the boundaries
between actors and audience by placing both in the same space.” Laurel’s analysis here, however,
focuses on the contributions of these artists to the ongoing dialogue of interaction and not about
questions of human-machine embodiment and materiality. See Laurel 1993, 52.

1 Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

1. See Banham 1960, 2.

2. The innovations that Wagner introduced in the Festspielhaus were not all entirely original.
During a period conducting in Riga, Latvia, between 1837 and 1839, Wagner became fascinated
by some of the innovations implemented in a small theater there; in particular, a steeply raked
seating arena, an orchestra that was situated slightly below the stage floor line of sight, and perhaps
most importantly, a slight dimming of lighting during performances. Although the dimming of
house lights was already common in nineteenth-century Italian public theaters and had as well

Notes

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been proposed by the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, in practice few of these
techniques had reached the German stage. Wagner had also been impressed by the theatrical magic
of Garnier’s Paris Opera in 1840, when during a concert rehearsal, he sat in a separate, screened-off
area, not seeing the orchestra, which would have distracted from the power of the dramatic pre-
sentation. See Spotts 1994, 30.
3. See Spots 1994 for more detail concerning the exact acoustic attributes that Wagner had
installed in Bayreuth.
4. “In itself, lighting is an element that can produce unlimited effects; restored to its freedom, it
becomes for us what the palette is for the painter . . . through projections that can be simple or
complex, stationary or shifting, through partial obstruction, through varying gradations of transpar-
ency, we can obtain an infinite number of modulations” (Bablet 1982, 43).
5. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), a state-supported federation, was founded
in 1907 by architect and former director of the Prussian Board of Trade for Schools of Arts and
Crafts, Hermann Muthesius. Influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth
century, which aimed to restore the role of the craftsman in the shadow of the industrial revolution,
Muthesius hoped to couple artistic and design activity with industry in an effort to ensure a com-
petitive role for Germany in mass industrial production in the early twentieth century against the
encroaching economic dominance of the United States.
6. Although Marinetti’s interest in performance was explicitly announced in his earliest manifestos,
the Futurists originally turned to theater, less because of the artistic possibilities it offered but
instead for its inherent publicness—its ability to stir an audience in real time and real space and to
act as a weapon in the political and artistic fight for a total renewal of public life in Italy. Early
manifestos such as “The Pleasure of Being Booed” (1911) mainly critiqued traditional forms of
theater and begin to propose the literary equivalent of a new form of Futurist drama. Performance
as event is given a tertiary priority, however, with little mention of technology or of methods for
realization.
7. See Berghaus 1998, 253–259.
8. To demonstrate Prampolini’s hatred of representational theater forced on by the anachronism
of the proscenium, we just have to cite the following: “Do directors think that it is absolutely
necessary to represent reality?? Fools! Don’t you realize that your efforts and unnecessary preoccupa-
tion with realism only diminish the intensity and decrease the emotional content.” See Berghaus
1998, 264–290, for further discussion.
9. These attempts by Prampolini included trying to get Diaghilev to engage him for the Ballets
Russes at the same time as Balla worked on Feu d’Artifice.
10. See Gordon 1992, 210–219, for a further discussion of Khlebnikov’s sound poetry.
11. Derived from Cubism, Malevich’s notion of Suprematism was guided by elementary, basic
geometrical forms (e.g., the square). Searching for a kind of “supremacy of pure emotion,” Supre-
matism emphasized the exploration of a nonobjective, nonrepresentation world that aimed to find
analogous equivalents to lived experience in the modern world. See Lodder 1983, 251, for a more
detailed description.

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356
12. The urgency of the streets was also amplified in massive outdoor stagings of key events in the
Russian Revolution. For example, the stage director and theorist Annenkov collaborated with
Evreninov on one of the largest outdoor theatrical events in recorded history, The Storming of The
Winter Palace, which featured a cast of 6,000 actors, 500 musicians, and over 100,000 spectators.
See Baer 1991, 72–73.
13. See Braun 1979, 74, for the differences between cinema and theater in Russia during
Meyerhold’s time.
14. See Baer 1991, 41.
15. Having been left without a theater after the closure of the R.S.F.S.R. No. 1 due to shifts in
economic and cultural policy with the implementation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1921,
Meyerhold was searching Constructivist practice for not only aesthetic innovations but also prag-
matic ones—for instance, how to create a freestanding, freely moveable scenic structure that could
be easily transported and set up in a variety of physical environments. See Baer 1991, 47.
16. The Magnanimous Cuckold had more far-reaching implications, particularly within the harsh
economic and social climate of the struggling revolutionary republic:

If the young Russian republic was too poor to erect Constructivist towers, skyscrapers, glass palaces,
clubs in the shape of screws, etc., the days of new structures had not yet arrived. But in the theater the
ideas of the Constructivists were realized with the aid of ordinary boards and common (although in
equally short supply) nails. Furthermore, the absence of real cement, concrete, iron, and glass and the
very poverty of this Republic, which was racing forwards into the future, stimulated with unusual energy
the appearance of Constructivist stage machinery. Stage Constructivism was a sort of realization of
the artists’ dream of the future, of a technology that would bring the country from poverty into the
mechanized, electrified finely organized kingdom of socialism. (Rudnitsky 1981, 293)

17. See Braun 1979, 240.

18. See Gordon 1975.
19. With the normalization of relations with Russia through the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920,
Germany and Berlin, in particular, became Europe’s center for an outpouring of Russian artists and
their ideas. Additionally, cultural exchange policies of through the IAH (International Workers’
Aid) organization created for the express purpose of opening up exchange between German and
Russian cultural workers, guaranteed a steady stream of the most current Russian films, literature
and art into Germany.
20. See Willett 1978a and 1984.
21. See Mansbach 1978.
22. See Lesák 1988b for Taut’s background and his connection between Expressionism and
architecture.
23. See Lesák 1988a, 78. In her description of Kiesler’s set, Rose Lee Goldberg ([1976] 1988)
states that Kiesler was anticipating television. Of course, there was no television at the time, but
whether Kiesler anticipated it remains unclear.

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357
24. As Kiesler wrote in 1923, “R.U.R. was the first attempt to design an electro-mechanical
scenery. The fixed scenery has become alive, an active part in the play. De la nature morte vivante.
The means to fill the stage with life are: movement of lines, sharp contrasts of colors, the transfor-
mation of surfaces toward reliefs and curved human forms (actors). There is the interplay of moving
lights of various colors on the scenery, in rhythm according to speech intonation and the movement
of the actors” (Kiesler Foundation n.d.).
25. See Lesák 1988a for detailed information in German and English on the concept of the
Raumbühne.
26. The sole realized outdoor architecture work realized by Kiesler was the Shrine of the Book in
Jerusalem, a museum housing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
27. Kiesler’s use of the word endless was used to describe his later utopian projects such as the
Endless House and the Endless Theater. In particular, the Endless or Universal Theater, conceived in
1924 but never built was envisioned as the ideal performance environment of the future: an egg-
shaped shell of reinforced concrete, steel and glass where the stage would be in the shape of an
endless spiral whose levels would be linked by elevators, platforms and ramps. As the ultimate
realization of the raumbühne, the Endless Theater would be without proscenium, projecting itself out
into an audience who would essentially no longer be separate from the stage space. For Kiesler,
Endless was not simply an architectural invocation but rather, a philosophical construct that preoc-
cupied the architect till the end of his life. “The Endless House is called endless because all ends
meet, and meet continuously. It is endless like the human body—there is no beginning and no
end to it. The endless is rather sensuous, more like the female body in contrast to sharp-angled
male architecture” (Kiesler 2003, 67).
28. See Otwell 1997 for a longer description of Kiesler’s more commercially oriented design
practice.
29. Although the Lumière brothers also integrated live action into their first cinematic presenta-
tion, Piscator was the first to consciously use projected media for direct political commentary and
as a dramaturgical device. See Giesakam 2007, 39–50.
30. It is unknown whether Meyerhold or Piscator knew that the other was also utilizing projection
devices in the early 1920s, a point that Piscator later articulated in his only theoretical work, The
Political Theater (1931): “Later it was often maintained that I got the idea from the Russians. In
fact, I was quite ignorant of what was happening on the Soviet stage at this time-very little news
about performances and so on came to us . . . in any case, the question of priority is irrelevant.
It would merely prove that this was no superficial game with technical effects, but a new
emergent form of theater based on the philosophy of historical materialism which we shared”
(Piscator 1978, 93).
31. Upon leaving Germany in 1931, Piscator went first to Russia to make films and eventually
emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the New School and at the New York Play-
wrights workshop. As one of the few German exiles to come back to Germany (along with Bertolt
Brecht), Piscator returned to West Germany in 1948 and continued to direct new productions
until his death in 1966.

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32. If Piscator’s embracing of a capitalist technological apparatus to convey revolutionary socialist
sentiments appears at first to be contradictory, the director too addressed this issue in The Political
Theater:

It is not by mere chance that in an age whose technological achievements tower above its achievements
in every other field that the stage should become highly technical. And it is not by mere chance that
this technical innovation should receive an impetus from a sector that is in conflict with the social order.
Intellectual and social revolutions have always been closely bound up with technical upheavals. And a
change in the function of theater was inconceivable without bringing the stage equipment up to date.
(Piscator 1978, 189)

33. See Gropius 1961, 10–14.

34. In the Bauhaus curriculum, Gropius aimed to fuse the fine and applied arts, organizing varying
disciplines such as printmaking, painting, metal work, weaving, bookbinding, and sculpture into
workshop form under two specific categories: Formlehre (fine art) and Werklehre (applied art), each
taught by an artist (Formlehre) and a master craftsman (Werklehre). Thus, students were exposed to
both approaches in order to set the conditions for a so-called fusion to take place in their actual
practice.
35. Regarding Loew’s mechanical stage: “It would seem that a task for the future would be to
develop a technical personnel as important as the actors, one whose job it would be to bring this
apparatus into view in its peculiar and novel beauty, undisguised and as an end in itself” (Gropius
1961, 84).
36. In fact, Meyerhold, who was also planning a similar flexible structure with variable performance
areas and multiple projection points and angles in Moscow, met with Gropius in 1930 and had
been inspired to incorporate features of the Total-Theater into his own design—one that was also
never realized.
37. Essentially a string of disconnected narratives, Claire’s virtuoso film, which he referred to
as “visual babblings,” made use of a number of cinematic techniques, including slow motion,
superimposition, rapid tempo shifts, and stop and start motion effects. A hearse carried by a camel,
a game of chess between Duchamp and Man Ray on a roof, and a ballerina (Picabia) revealed to
be a bearded man were only some of the narrative treats awaiting the audience during the
intermission.

2 Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

1. The literature on Svoboda in English translation is little and what currently exists was mainly
done by the late Czech theater historian Jarka Burian. See Burian 1971 and 1983 as well as Svoboda
1993.
2. See Burian 1983, 57–59.
3. Such lighting techniques were put to high effect in a series of German productions in the
mid 1960s in which Svoboda generated a series of kinetic stage spaces that oscillated between

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immaterial and solid constructions. In his 1967 production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Wies-
baden, Germany, which featured a single spiral ramp in the center of the space and a cyclorama
constructed from thousands of closely bunched together vertical strings, Svoboda managed to con-
struct a huge column of light in the center of the space through a combination of a circular array
of low voltage footlights projecting onto finely sprayed electrostatically charged aerosol particles,
which would cling to the airborne dust. See Burian 1971, 65–66.
4. See Brehms n.d.
5. The German cultural critic Bazon Brock was quoted as stating “Whoever wants to see a thor-
oughly organized, totalitarian ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ today has to travel to the new EPCOT Disneyland
or to satellite towns around Paris. Whoever wants to experience a ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ will find what
he is looking for in Wagner’s works, in those of the followers of the Big Bang theory or in the
nightly TV marathons” (Hattinger 1988).
6. See Aronson 1981, 499–500.
7. “I imagined the branches of the mobiles in movement and saw the end sections of these branches,
the colored shapes, transformed into small mobile convex rooms which would move in all three
dimensions, surrounded vertically and horizontally at 360 degrees, by a performance which was
itself moving in the three dimensions.” Sadin 1999, 31–32.
8. Aronson 1981, 501–502.
9. See Flusser 2002, 70–74.

10. From Towards a Poor Theater:

This [relationship] challenges the notion of theater as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines—lit-
erature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur en scène). This
“synthetic theater” is the contemporary theater, which we readily call the “Rich Theater”—rich in flaws.
The Rich Theater depends on artistic kleptomania, drawing from other disciplines, constructing hybrid-
spectacles, conglomerated without backbone or integrity, yet presented as an organic artwork. By mul-
tiplying assimilated elements, the Rich Theater tries to escape the impasse presented by movies and
television. Since film and TV excel in the areas of mechanical functions (montage, instantaneous change
of place, etc.), the Rich Theater countered with a blatant compensatory call for “total theater.” The
integration of borrowed mechanisms (movie screens onstage, for example) means a sophisticated technical
plant, permitting great mobility and dynamism. And if the stage and/or auditorium were mobile, con-
stantly changing perspective would be possible. This is all nonsense. No matter how much the theater
expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and televi-
sion. Consequently, I propose poverty in the theater. (Grotowski 1968, 19)

11. See Schechner 1973, 3–4.

12. Born with a speech impediment, Wilson’s development of slow motion in his productions was
partially based on his work with a dancer (Ms. Byrd Hoffman) to slow down his movement. See S.
Brecht 1978, 13–18, and Rockwell 1980.
13. See Shier 1986.
14. See Foreman n.d.

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15. Brecht’s use of the German word Verfremdungseffekt has usually been translated as “alienation
effect.” Its original meaning, however, derives from the Russian formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky’s
use of the term ostranie, literally translated as “to make strange” or defamiliarize. See B. Brecht
1978, 136–140.
16. Using perspectival shifts continually alternating between close range and long shot spatial
configurations, performers and spectators alike were confronted with each other almost face to face
and then just as suddenly, in a 25-meter depth of space described as “the shock effect of a vista
disappearing into darkness.” See Foreman 1985.
17. ”The strings have something to do with what happens when you’re sketching and don’t know
quite what you want to draw, you don’t know how to draw, and you scratch out energetic lines,
you feel a thrust, a direction, and then from this tendency grows a face or a house or whatever it
is” (Bernstein 1992, 122).
18. Marranca and Goldberg both have extensive comments about the high “tech-ness” of the
theater of images. See Marranca 1977 and Goldberg 2004.
19. Wilson’s impact in Europe was nothing short of remarkable, with Surrealist Louis Aragon
writing to André Breton that Wilson’s Deathman Glance was “what others such as ourselves of whom
surrealism was born, have dreamed would emerge after us” (S. Brecht 1978, 50).
20. Wonder achieved a suitable degree of notoriety in the German-speaking theater world with
his radical designs for the late East German writer and director Heiner Müller. For a 1982 produc-
tion of Müller’s text The Task (Der Auftrag) in the industrial West German steel town of Bochum,
for example, Wonder, treating Müller’s text as a kind of spoken noise, erected an elaborate glass
tube-shaped cylinder spanning the back of the theater to the lip of the proscenium and bisecting
the audience space in two parts. During the performance, which could be glimpsed from the audi-
ence only from a triangular hole cut into the proscenium, a swinging piano hung on aircraft cable
and swung across the stage while real rain, snow, and firestorms occurred. Wonder’s coup de théâtre
was a live black panther that paced up and down inside the tube, leaving its scent for the audience
to experience close-up. See Riddell 1980 and Wonder 2002.
21. The goal of running multiple productions simultaneously ran into a wall when it was discov-
ered that the expensive modular walls used to divide the space up were acoustically not sound-
proofed. Personal conversation with former Schaubühne sound engineer and composer Hans Peter
Kuhn, December 1993.
22. Squat’s questioning of the fixed spectator’s gaze onto a simultaneously live and technically
mediated performance already foreshadowed the 1990s era of reality TV shows while also harkening
back to the tropes of theater history. “This frontal view—the Italian stage, not without irony—
exhausts every aspect of the arrangement, every illusory perspective—because nothing can be more
illusory than the real rendered theatrical without the artifice of its own reconstruction on a painted
canvas. Life, forced to be looked at from both angles, is captured on the ‘backdrop’ ” (Buchmuller
and Koós 1996, 102–103).
23. “It’s as if suddenly there’s movie music and you’re in the movie and you’re standing in the
scene; it’s almost that vivid. That’s how strong stereo imaging can be. I realized that if I connected
this powerful audio experience to the physical world, a person could be in the movie . . . the tape

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could tell them to sit down and they would sit down . . . and they would realize that they are
actually performing . . . it’s an amazing new position for the audience to be in” (Shank 2002, 289).
24. See Coates n.d.
25. A detailed examination of Lepage’s tour technical riders reveals just what kind of technology
Lepage has used, which included the standard tools of any large theater houses.
26. The essence of the theater as “the meeting point for all the arts,” involves a response to fields
outside of the theater; “to gathering what is happening in every field of art, not only in acting, but
also in writing, in music, in architecture, in everything” (Lepage 1997, 218).
27. See Lehmann 2006.
28. See Irwin and Eda Čufer 2000.
29. Dumb Type founding members included Teiji Furuhashi, Shiro Takatani, Toru Koyamada,
Yukihiro Hozumi, Takayuki Fujimoto, and Hiromasa Tomari.
30. This point is acutely stressed by the production’s set of central questions, posed to the audience
at the start of 036 Pleasure Life:

Just how do they communicate with each other in this systematized life in the Colony? How do they
learn the systems of this society? How do they express their love? What does pleasure mean to them?
What about life? Technology has in many ways created a network covering the globe, making the world
smaller, and sending information tens of thousands of miles, from point A to point B, in just a few
seconds. In reality, however, when we try to communicate, for example, the few words “I love you,” just
these words, we are forced to realize the vast distances that lie between us. (Dumb Type n.d.)

31. Personal experience at rehearsals, Salzburg 1994. Coop Himmelb(l)au reworked the design for
a remounting of the production at the Netherlands Opera in the fall of 1994. A more recent experi-
ment with architects working within the opera production framework was the scenography of
the star Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron for a 2006 production of Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde at the Staatsoper in Berlin. The architects designed a rubber membrane that stretched
across the back of the stage and could easily through the aid of vacuum pumps change its
form over the course of the opera. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/arts/music/29gure
.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1.
32. See Goldberg 2004, 203–220.

3 Performative Architectures

1. Prix 2005, 25 (my translation).

2. Ibid., 46. See also Papadakis 1990, 65.
3. See Archisculpture 2004.
4. See Hannah and Khan 2008, 4–5.
5. I am indebted in this analysis to architect and professor Patrick Harrop for his observations
about duration and rhythm in structures without direct mechanical movement.

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6. Vitruvius 2001.
7. “Performance and architecture find their mutual site in theater auditoria where performance
is literally housed. These auditoria bring together theater as art form, fleeting acts of dramatic
practice that use ephemeral materials and disposable elements, and theater as built form, a
stable environment conceived to persist beyond the events it houses.” See Hannah and Khan
2008, 5.
8. Tschumi’s own early teaching at the Architectural Association in London in the mid 1970s was
strongly affected by his connection to the performance scene taking place at the Royal College of
Art, run at the time by curator and performance historian Rose Lee Goldberg. See Kaji-O’Grady
2008, 43–51.
9. See Spiller 2006 and Burden 1999.
10. Despite their references to psychology and “the economy of psychic energy” that was an integral
part of the “spatial and functional aspects of building,” the ASNOVA architects proposed experi-
mental structures that attempted, as Lissitzky phrased it in his work Russia: An Architecture for
World Revolution, to “elaborate new methods for scientific-objective elucidation of the elements of
architectural design—such as mass, surface, space, proportion, rhythm, etc.” (Lissitzky 1984, 30).
Such imagined and unrealized structures, like Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel (sky hook) that was composed
of two horizontally formed skyscrapers or Ladovsky’s plan for a glass restaurant precariously poised
on the edge of a cliff, appeared, however, to resemble the context of other European modernist
schools like De Stijl and the Bauhaus, rather than the specific political-social context that was
post–October Russia.
11. Chernikov was an outsider, both to the Moscow scene and VKHUTEMAS, in particular, being
more influenced by the rigorous formal abstractionism of Suprematist thinking than by the calcu-
lated, technological fetishism of Ginzburg and other “proper” Constructivists. “The fundamental
notion of constructivism is that we unite objects or bodies with each other in such a way that they
constitute a complete, harmonious form which conveys a quite specific and defined impression to
our brain” (Cooke 1984, 58).
12. “An Archigram project,” wrote member David Greene, “provides a new agenda where nomad-
ism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange and metamorphosis replace stasis; where
consumption, lifestyle and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an
electronic surface enclosing the globe” (Spiller 2006, 72).
13. British architectural historian Banham’s 1965 essay “A Home Is Not a House” was a seminal
theoretical document in the mid 1960s for architects like Archigram, particularly in Banham’s
observations about the role of the technical environment in architecture that was increasingly being
subjected to “a mechanical invasion.” See Banham 1965.
14. I thank Patrick Harrop for his description of Matta-Clark’s architecturally motivated frame-
work for intervention in Splitting.
15. See Jencks 2002.
16. These concepts also arose in Fuller’s transfer of the Dymaxion idea into the even more dynamic,
mobile context of 1930s U.S. automobile culture through his lightweight, aerodynamic Dymaxion

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transport units: a fully efficient, aerodynamic, tear drop–shaped vehicle whose form was inspired
by the aeronautics of ducks in flight. See Fuller and Marks 1973, 25.
17. See Goulthorpe n.d. for more specifics, including models of the partially built structure,
exhibited at the German electronics trade show CEBIT in 2004.
18. See Fritz 2008.
19. In 1989, Bernard Tschumi’s unbuilt competition entry for the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany also imagined the use of large-scale, building-sized
video surfaces. See Papadakis 1990, 32–37.
20. The Spots façade deployed 1774 circular and tube lamps with a refresh rate of twenty times
a second to generate higher-resolution images than those displayed in BIX. See realities:united
n.d.
21. See UN Studio n.d.

4 The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen

1. See Sadin 1999, 36.

2. See Rehm 2003, 22–23.
3. See Keeler 1987.
4. See Cubitt 2004, 42–69, and Giesekam 2007, 27–32.
5. See http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1305/American-Consumer-RISE-CONSUMER-
CULTURE.html. Accessed August 26, 2008.
6. See Hall and Fifer 1990 and Cubitt 1991.
7. Again, this reference to theatricality harkens back to Michael Fried’s criticisms of the blurring
of self-sufficient boundaries in the visual arts through movements like minimalism and theater.
8. Rosler, among others has a strong critique of the male dominated mythic “origins” of video art.
See Hall and Fifer 1990.
9. For more on the Nam June Paik Portapak myth, see http://marotzki.blogspot.com/2007/01/
video-art-ber-nam-june-paik.html. Accessed September 2, 2009.
10. Across the historical literature, there are contradictory statements about the exact number of
monitors that Paik used in the exhibit. See Paik 1991.
11. See Serres 2007.
12. Vasulka archive VAB34-C6.
13. “The music in particular carried a similar kind of schism; on the one hand, it was technologi-
cal, represented by people working with synthesizers or certain textures of sound, generated
by machines. On the other hand, it was an almost theatrical rejection of established musical
conventions of performing. It was difficult to separate these tendencies within new music. Our

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personal interest was performing video. Very soon, we understood the generic relationship of
video to other electronic arts, and this realization became our guiding policy” (Vasulka and Vasulka
1977).
14. See Etra and Rutt 1992.
15. MIDI stands for “Musical Instrument Digital Interface.”
16. Perhaps Viola’s idea of video revealing the self reached its ultimate infantilization in the
Internet era with the early JenniCam, and, later, video-based social networking sites like YouTube
and Vimeo, where exhibitionism of quotidian behavior that would reveal the “self” became the
norm.
17. See Wilcox 1996 and Svoboda 1993.
18. One of the premiere alternative media centers, Video Free America was occupied with similar
artistic concerns like their East Coast counterparts at The Kitchen. Although both Ginsberg and
Sweeney had theater backgrounds, they were, like many other artists, drawn to the performative
possibilities inherent in video technologies early on; particularly, in the aesthetic potential of live
imaging processes like feedback and working with monitors in a sculptural context. Interestingly,
Sweeney had long wanted to integrate media into theatrical performance contexts, inspired by the
use of the tape recorder in Samuel Beckett’s short solo play Krapps Last Tape. See Napoleon 1991
for more details.
19. Personal conversation with Skip Sweeney, March 2006, and Carl Weber, March 2006.
20. In fact, VFA had already shown their long-running San Francisco–based underground video
documentary soap opera, The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd at The Kitchen in 1972 while
working at Chelsea. Moreover, in a recent discussion with Steina Vasulka (December 2007) about
the early days of The Kitchen, she recalled Weber’s Kaspar as being important in transferring video
techniques into the more established theatrical realms.
21. Working conversation with Farabough, February 1996.
22. See http://www.e-felix.org/issue3/Jesurun.html. Accessed April 23, 2007.
23. Having worked with Sellars as a directing assistant on several occasions and having seen both
of the productions described, I have had numerous discussions with him concerning the use of
video within a theater stage context. The information concerning St. François—in particular, the
original plans for the JumboTron—come directly from conversations with him.
24. See Kirby 1976 for details on Schechner’s Marilyn Project.
25. Personal conversation with Chris Kondek, March 2006.
26. Ibid., March 2006.
27. See http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_wooster.html.
28. See Studio Azzurro n.d.
29. Ibid.
30. See Betsky 2004.

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31. Although the use of projected images has not been restricted to the West, its European origin
rests in the use of crude projection devices dating back to the Middle Ages and later, to the work
of Italian Giovanni Baptista della Porta and, most notably, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s
description of the magic lantern or Laterna Magika, an earlier predecessor to slide projection.
Nonetheless it is disputed whether Kircher actually built the device that he described in the treatise
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae or instead gave an account of an already existing invention. Kircher’s
magic lantern depicted a system constructed of either a parabolic or cylindrically shaped mirror
with an adjustable lens that could be used to reflect sunlight and thereby create an image on a
surface. While these later nineteenth-century image machineries such as the Laterna Magika or
Sciopticon, the Phantasmagoria, the Panorama, the Daguerreotype, the Diorama, Dissolving Views
(the use of two or more projectors set up to dissolve between alternative versions of the same image),
the Tanagra device, and Edison’s Kinetoscope, among many others, have thoroughly been
documented by Western-driven archaeological and image science (Bildwissenschaft) histories of
media, the technical, conceptual, and perceptual impact of projected images in a live performance
context has gone relatively unexplored. See Grau 2003, Huhtamo 2004, Zielinski 2006, and
Oetterman 1997.
32. See Mildenberger 1961, Kranich 1929–1933, and Giesekam 2007.
33. See Baer 1991 and Braun 1979.
34. “But where live scenes waste time with explanations, dialogues, action, film can illuminate
the situation in the play with a few quick shots; troops’ mutiny-abandoned weapons; the Revolu-
tion has broken out—a red flag on a speeding car” (Piscator 1978, 238).
35. See Federal Theater Project Collection n.d.
36. Burian 1971, 85.
37. See Whitman 2005.
38. See Packer n.d.
39. See http://www.ontological.com.
40. The profession of projection design in the United States had already begun in earnest in the
mid 1960s when lighting designer Richard Pilbrow devised projected images with designer Tony
Walton for the 1964 Broadway musical version of Clifford Odet’s Golden Boy.
41. Projection design was not acknowledged as a legitimate profession by the main stage designers
union in the United States (United Scenic Artists) until February 2008. See McElroy 2008.
42. For example, in the first ten years of the BAM’s Next Wave Festival, perhaps the premiere
American venue for large-scale, high-profile experimental performance in the 1980s and 1990s,
seven major productions from artists such as Squat, Impossible Theater, Steve Reich and Beryl
Korot, Laurie Anderson, and others featured large-scale projections.
43. Peter Sellars directed the actors, but the sheer resolution of the image coupled with the scene
suggested that his Noh-like staging could have easily been reduced to the singers sitting in a
circle—to the equivalent of a staged reading—this was the case in a more successful “partially
staged” version called the Tristan Project in Los Angeles in 2004.

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44. According to Stern, the technological lineup for “The World” featured thirty programmed
slide projectors and one of the earliest Eidophor black-and-white video projectors, similar to what
Svoboda had access to for his 1965 Boston production of Intolleranza. “We had, I think, around the
whole hangar about thirty slide screens, and we also had one of the first video projectors. It was
black and white, and it was an Idofor [sic], a Swiss machine; it could deliver an image which was,
I think, about twenty-five feet across, and we had three cameras that could take–for instance, the
jiggling behind of a young girl on the dance floor, blow it up across that whole screen, or back off
and take practically the whole dance floor.” See Calisphere n.d.
45. See Cage n.d.
46. See Svoboda 1993.
47. See Roads 2001 for a description of granular synthesis.
48. Personal conversation with the artist, July 2007.
49. See Skoltz-Kolgen n.d.
50. See http://cycling74.com and http://www.image-ine.org.
51. Conversation with the artist, Berlin 2006.
52. See D-Fuse 2006.

5 Sound

1. See Sterne 2002, Kahn 2001, and Thompson 2004.

2. Dodecaphonic, twelve-tone, or serial music refers to a system of procedures by which each of
the twelve chromatic tones of the equal-tempered scale are utilized in a strict rule-based fashion as
the central building blocks of an extremely systematized composition process. The structure of the
tone row or the prime (twelve nonrepeating tones) was then duplicated three times as the retrograde
(the backward row), the inversion, and the inversion-retrograde. In essence, the rule-driven process
of using the tone row, its inversion, and its backward flow might even stand as an early notion of
algorithmic process in composition.
3. Other exotic instruments included the strangely named AOMIEOT, an acronym for “Automati-
cally Operating Musical Instrument of the Electric Oscillation Type” from Edouard Coupleaux and
Joseph Givelet (1929); the Superpiano from Emerick Spielmann, which used photoelectric cells
that generated changes in pitch; and the Rangertone organ, introduced in 1931. See Holmes 1985,
30–54.
4. See Kittler 1999 for further discussion on the phantasmic qualities of tele-technologies.
5. The purity of tone arising from the Teleharmonium was unsurprising, considering the fact that
the device created sinusoidal and square wave–like sounds.
6. Heterodyning is a process in which two different but ultrasonic oscillators produce interference
or beat frequencies between the two frequencies at an audible range.
7. See http://120years.net/machines/trautonium/.

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367
8. Interestingly, in 1938, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, another female composer who was born in
Germany, immigrated to New York, and worked with composer Henry Cowell, had written an
opera (Status Quo) in which one movement entitled “Music for the Spheres” was scored for “electric
instruments,” making it one of the earliest composed electronic works. See Kennedy and Polansky,
1996, 749–750.
9. In addition to the instrument named for him, Theremin also developed other devices, including
the Terpsitone, a larger platform-like instrument in which pitch and amplitude could be controlled
by a dancer’s body, making it one of the earliest sensor-driven dance interfaces. See Mason 1936,
365. The original Theremin would not only feature prominently in Hollywood soundtracks, but
later gain a mass audience after the Beach Boys used it in the song “Good Vibrations” in 1966.
For a complete history of Theremin’s KGB background and associated espionage, see Glinsky
2000.
10. See Helmholtz 1954, 12.
11. See Treib 1996, 194, for Frits Philip’s quote that Varèse’s music was not “representative” of
Philips and the Western World.
12. See Treib 1996 for a complete description of the pavilion’s interior, particularly of the films
that Le Corbusier integrated onto the walls.
13. It is still a point of dispute exactly how many speakers were used in the pavilion. Reports
range from 300–400, with 325 being one of more accurate quotes.
14. Schaeffer’s perception of the studio as a compositional environment through its the ability to
record and shape sound through its technical apparatuses would be echoed some thirty years later
by musician Brian Eno in a famous lecture entitled “Pro Session: The Studio as Compositional
Tool.” “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the
sound—you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter—he’s working
directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to
chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.” See Eno [1979] 2004.
15. The word acousmatic refers to sound that lacks a visual source as the origin, only referring to
its own essence. See Chion 1994 for a discussion.
16. Another famous site, the Italy-based Studio di Fonoglia at the state-supported radio and televi-
sion studios of RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane—or Italian Public Broadcasting), in Milan, was
founded in 1951 and directed by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, two major composers who
would increasingly incorporate electronic sound manipulation into their compositional practices.
Indeed, Maderna has the distinction of being one of first composers to realize a work for traditional
instruments together with electronic tape: Musica su due dimensioni, which premiered at Darmstadt
in 1954. Maderna’s work, however, would soon be eclipsed by the dozens of composers, from Varèse
to Stockhausen, Berio, and Babbitt, for whom tape and instrumental music would fuse. See Salzman
2002, 152–155.
17. Pioneer computer music composer, improviser and scholar George Lewis has articulately
pointed out that many of Cage’s ideas concerning indeterminacy and spontaneity were already richly
embedded in African and African American musical traditions such as bebop and jazz, but oddly

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enough have been ignored both by Cage himself (particularly through his decidedly racist
comments on “hot jazz”) and the retinue of music scholars and critics that followed his work. See
Lewis 1996, 91–121.
18. In his work on the arts after Cage, art historian Branden Joseph perceptively describes Cage’s
“aesthetic of immanence”; the attempt “to insert indeterminacy into the relation between composer
and performer . . . to eliminate as much as possible from the acoustical experience the creation of
any abstract form that could be received as existing on a level above, beyond, or outside of the
immanent realm.” See Joseph 2008, 77–82.
19. Composed while Cage was accompanying dance classes at the Cornish College in Seattle,
Imaginary Landscape #1 still counts as one of the early works to use live electronic manipulation of
existing, previously recorded material.
20. For more information about Tudor’s real time electronic compositions, see Gray n.d.
21. See http://www.emf.org/tudor/Articles/cie_buffalo.html#altering.
22. Composers Inside Electronics included such future luminaries as the installation artist Paul
De Marinis and the video artist Bill Viola. See ibid.
23. In addition to better-known artists like Tudor and Berio, ONCE introduced younger experi-
mental composers La Monte Young, David Behrman, then-emerging Fluxus musician Philip
Corner, the New York–based Judson Dance Theater, and even jazz whiz Eric Dolphy, in addition
to presenting work from its composer-founders.
24. Such operatic attempts included works from composers such as Hans Werner Henze (The
Bassiards, El Cimarron, We Come to the River), Luigi Nono (Intolleranza, Promoteo), Bernard Allois
Zimmerman (Die Soldaten), Luciano Berio (Passagio, Traces, Laborintus II, Opera), Henri Posseur (Votre
Faust), Sylvanio Bussotti (La Passion selon Sade, Lorenzaccio), Harrison Birtwistle (Punch and Judy,
The Mask of Orpheus), and later, György Ligeti (Le Grande Macabre).
25. More recent research has revealed that Stockhausen had planned more technically ambitious
theatrical projects during the 1960s that were never realized, including a spectacular event entitled
Projektion in which a massive orchestra would have played with prerecorded video images of itself.
See Toop 1998 for a full discussion.
26. See Griffiths 1981 for further descriptions.
27. Key Fluxus participants included musicians and artists such as George Brecht, George
Maciunas, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Terry Riley, Takehisa
Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, and Richard
Maxfield.
28. ONCE’s combining of musical and theatrical performance was repeated by dozens of other
similar composers and collectives, including Eric Salzman’s Quog Music Theater, founded in 1969
and dedicated to exploring the “problems of performance” through a fusion of media, music, and
social improvisation techniques; the early psychedelic-inspired theatrical works of electronic com-
poser Morton Subotnick, such as Theater Piece After Petrarchs Sonnet Number 47 (1961) and Ritual
Electronic Chamber Music (1968); the Polish composer Boguslaw Schäffer; the work of Americans

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Donald Erb, Ronald Pelligrino, and Salvatore Martirano; as well as the colossal urban spectacles of
Robert Moran, whose vast projects such as 39 Minutes for 39 Autos (1969) and Hallelujah (1971)
involved thousands of participants in large-scale, citywide events. See Salzman 2002 and Cope
2001, 114–124.
29. See Del Farra 2006, 136.
30. Formed in Italy in 1966 by American composers Alvin Curran, Frederick Rzewski, and Richard
Teitelbaum.
31. Founded by Cornelius Cardew and jazz musicians Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Allan
Bryant, and John Phetteplace.
32. Founded by Cardew, Michael Parsons, and Howard Skempton.
33. With Rolf Gelhaar, Peter Eötvos, and Johannes Fritsch.
34. Formed by Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and Alvin Lucier.
35. With David Rosenboom, Jon Hassel, Gerald Shapiro, and Terry Riley.
36. Although having used electronics, David Behrman now admits that the avant-garde of Ann
Arbor was not strongly influenced by the rock music world of 1960s and 1970s. Personal conversa-
tion, New York, November 8, 2007.
37. Prendergast 2001.
38. Among those collaborating in Young’s ensemble were violinist and filmmaker Tony Conrad,
Velvet Underground cofounder John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Young’s wife, Marianne Zazeela.
See Joseph 2008.
39. Founding members of the ensemble included Glass, pianist Arthur Murphy, violinst Dorothy
Pixley-Rothschild, woodwind players Jack Kripl, Richard Landry, Jon Gibson and Richard Peck.
As Glass later stated, “I had to play my music myself. The musical establishment of the time
thought I was crazy, and foundation support was out of the question. We’d play for free or for a
small donation in old buildings where you had to climb six sets of stairs if you wanted to hear
what we were doing.” See Glass 1987, 19–24.
40. Equally successful composer Steve Reich, who first performed in an earlier version of Glass’s
ensemble in 1968, formed Steve Reich and Musicians in 1971.
41. Mills’s graduate students such as Rich Gold, John Bischof, Joel Ryan, Paul De Marinis, and
Maggie Payne were all early adopters of cheap computer technologies to use in performance.
Another California scene arose in the early 1970s around the University of California at San Diego,
where Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson taught.
42. For such histories, see the exemplary works from Roads 1985 and 1996, as well as Kahn 2007.
43. Although Matthews has usually been given the credit for generating the first digital sounds
from a computer in 1957, the mainframe CSIR Mk1computer at the University of Melbourne
generated digital sounds as early as 1951. See http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/
music/music.html.

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44. Other composers exploring algorithmic systems and predigital synthesis included Milton
Babbit at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studios as well as the Dutch composer
Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute for Sonology, first in Utrecht and then at the Royal
Conservatory in The Hague.
45. Those working at Bell Labs in the areas of digital sound production and composition included
Max Matthews, Lejaren Hiller’s former student James Tenney, Laurie Spiegel, John Pierce, David
Lewin, and Joan Miller. See Kahn 2007 for more detail.
46. “Time-shared” in this context refers to the ways in which distributed users on large mainframe
computers shared computing resources.
47. To give a sense of how non-real-time this non-real-time was, Curtis Roads points out that
between 1965 and 1968, a two-minute portion of the composition “Lyric Variations for Violin and
Computer” took nine hours to compute. See Roads 1996, 103.
48. By tinkering I refer here to historian of science Kristen Haring’s concept suggesting a playful,
hobby-based approach to technical systems in which a specific culture arises around a set of practices
or tools, such as Haring’s example with early ham radio operators or the Mills example of the
KIM-1 microcomputer. See Haring 2006.
49. See Kahn 2007 for further descriptions of the Mills period as well as Bischoff and Brown
2002.
50. Although there were also institutionally based attempts at real time synthesis in the early
1970s, for example, the pioneering work of Barry Vercoe at MIT in the mid 1970s, these were also
as impractical for live performance due to cost, logistics and equipment access as earlier non-real
time systems.
51. Another early real time system that Chadabe was connected to was the SalMar Construction
(1970), a massive computational real time electronic instrument designed by the composer Salvatore
Martirano. See http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/~martiran/HTdocs/salmar.html.
52. For a complete description and history of MIDI, see Roads 1996, 969–1016.
53. What is interesting about the shift to real-time computing for Ryan is that the machine
no longer remains an abstract machine, but rather becomes embodied through the principals
of real-time calculation. Due to his connections to scientific infrastructure, Ryan, who worked
at Lawrence Berkeley labs as a physicist at the same time that he was studying electronic
music with Behrman and Ashey at Mills, began to utilize software languages such as Forth
from one of the few real-time scientific areas: astronomy. Personal interview with Ryan, December
3, 2007.
54. The history of Max’s development is itself an entangled story. See Puckette 2002, 31–43.
55. Joel Chadabe was so convinced about the future potential of real-time processes for music
making that in 1983 he founded Intelligent Music, a company dedicated exclusively to the devel-
opment of real-time software for interactive composition.
56. See Machover n.d.

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57. Examples include composers such as Morton Subotnick (The Double Life of Amphibians [1984]
and Jacob’s Room [1993]), Robert Ashley (Atalanta [1983] and Dust [1999]), John Cage (the
computer-driven Europeras 1–5 [1987–1992]), John Moran (Book of the Dead-Second Avenue
[2000]), Mikel Rouse (The End of Cinematics [2006]) and Randal Packer (Arches [1991]).
58. See Hunt n.d.
59. See Cleveland n.d. Dresher’s system comes in a long series of tape looping systems, the most
famous being guitarist Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics.
60. Other composers active in the areas of theater and media included Italian-born Roberto Paci
Dalo and German sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn.
61. For the main atrium of the French pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montréal, Xenakis created a
responsive light and sound environment that he entitled the Polytope de Montréal (Polytope
suggesting “many spaces”), which consisted of steel cables with 1,200 attached lights suspended
through the space and forming a hyperbolic geometry like the Philips pavilion. Similar Polytopes
were constructed in Persepolis, Iran (1971), Paris/Cluny (1972) and Mycene, Greece (1978). See
Harley 1998.
62. For more specifics on each of these environments, see http://www.cycling 74.com (Max/MSP),
http://www.audiosynth.com (SuperCollider), and http://csounds.com (Csounds).
63. A very partial list would include the endless representatives of DJ Culture (DJ Spooky, DJ
Shadow, Coldcut, William Orbit, Goldie, Kit Clayton, Mixmaster Morris, Photek, Richie Hawtin,
and many others). For a full overview, see Shapiro 2000.
64. Obviously, this list is far from exhaustive, particularly as it largely focuses on laptop-based
genres or at least on genres of electronica that aimed to elevate the unique aesthetic elements of
digital computation to an art form.
65. The Fairlight Computer Music Instrument was the earliest commercially available, digital
sampling based synthesizer designed by Australian engineers Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie in 1978
and subsequently marketed to high-end studios in 1979.
66. See Föllmer 2001.
67. In addition to gestural-driven, body-based interfaces include dozens of sensor-augmented
musical input devices from the radio drum (Boie and Matthews), the Lightning (Buchla), the
Biomuse (Lusted), breath controllers (Yamaha Corporation), and ultrasonic range finders (Chabot).
For a full overview of such interfaces, see Roads 1996, 617–658.
68. In order to link The Hands to the outside world, STEIM was also one of the first institutes to
develop a sensor I/O (input/output) box (“The Sensor Lab”), which could take real-world physical
behavior and, through A/D converters, translate this into data for the computer to read. See STEIM
[Products] Sensorlab n.d.
69. See Tanaka n.d.
70. See Sonami n.d.

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 6 Bodies

1. For a full exposition of this history, see McCarren 2002.

2. Inspired by a similar device by the French astronomer Jules Janssen, Marey’s early chronopho-
tographic apparatus was ironically in the shape and form of a gun. Consisting of a lens anchored
in the barrel, a timing mechanism to set the machine in motion, and a series of rotating disks,
Marey’s improvement on Janssen’s “astronomical gun” allowed the device to take twelve photos a
second (1/720th a second each), leaving the traces of lived but past movement on a chemical plate
surface. Aimed at a subject in motion, Marey’s vision weapon enabled the rapid-fire capture of
images of sequential movement, thus depicting a continuous flow from moments of gulls in flight,
horses’ gallops, and humans’ walks and jumps through the freezing of time itself.
3. Stanford, who in addition to his railroad empire was also highly invested in equestrian pursuits,
employed the photographer to solve a bet: whether a horse would have all of its hooves in the air
at a given point in a race. See Solnit 2003.
4. See Arakawa and Gins 2002, xi.
5. Performing her aptly named “serpentine dance,” the 1890 Parisian performances at the
Folies Bergère elicited wild rounds of applause from the crowd, with audience members and critics
declaring Fuller a genius and cementing her European reputation. Fuller’s experimentation, talent,
and prowess made her a doyenne of the French artistic and scientific elite at the time (including
Pierre and Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and astronomer and publisher Camille
Flammarion). After charming one of the editors of Le Figaro, the newspaper published a statement
that all of Paris would rush to see Fuller “for no dance has ever been more alluring or more magical”
(Current 1997, 50).
6. In addition to stage instruments for lighting, Fuller had more exotic ideas. Through her
acquaintances with the Curies, she became interested in the potential use of radium to create glow-
in-the-dark costumes, an idea that the Curies quickly nixed as too dangerous. See Current 1997.
7. In his “Machine and Organism,” the philosopher Georges Canguilhem notes that the image of
the human body as machine can be traced back to Descartes and, even further, to Aristotle. The
machine would be defined as a “man made artificial construction, essentially functioning by virtue
of mechanical operations.” Machines and the mechanisms that constitute them are efficient, based
on the degree of movement that a set of interlinking and interacting parts allows for. “In every
machine, then, movement is a function, first of the way the parts interact and, second, of the
mechanical operations of the overall unit” (Canguilhem 1991, 46).
8. From Choreutics:

Movement is, so to speak, living architecture, living in the sense of changing emplacements as well as
changing cohesion. This architecture is created by human movements and is made up of pathways tracing
shapes in space. . . . The living architecture composed of the trace forms of human movements has to
endure other disequilibrating influences as they come from within the structure itself and not from
without. The living building of trace forms which a moving body creates is bound to certain spatial
relationships. (Laban 1966, 5)

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9. Identifying four different dimensions of weight, time, space, and flow and two extremes per
dimension (weight  heavy/light, time  sudden/sustained, space  direct/indirect, flow  bound/
free), Laban developed a taxonomy of eight movement expressions or “operations” derived from
combinations of the four different dimensions: slashing, gliding, pressing, flicking, wringing,
dabbing, punching, and floating. These eight effort motions were not just fanciful ideas projected
onto the human body but instead part of a much larger project to detail and record ranges of
kinesthetic behaviors that fluctuated between exertion and control and could help in organizing
and training the body for specific types of human labor activity. Indeed, Laban’s statement that “it
is in the working actions of man that efforts become most clearly discernable. It is in industry that
the control of effort has become an urgent necessity,” clearly set out the machinic context and
accompanying goals that were integral to his ambitious analysis. See Laban and Lawrence 1947.
10. In Effort, Laban wrote that “Taylor, the protagonist of what he called ‘scientific management,’
first used the expression ‘motion study,’ and he foresaw its application particularly in the field of
industry. . . . In this epoch of industrial revolution or evolution such research is bound to find its
first and greatest application in industry” (Laban and Lawrence 1947, xiii).
11. In scientizing his time motion studies, Taylor stated, “In most trades, the science is developed
through a comparatively simple analysis and time study of the movements required by the workmen
to do some small part of his work and this study is usually made by a man equipped with merely
a stop watch and a properly ruled notebook” (1913, 117).
12. “Based on data from the study of the human organism,” wrote an anonymous critic, “biome-
chanics strives to create a man who has studied the mechanism of his construction and is
capable of mastering it in the ideal and of improving it. Modern man living under conditions
of mechanization cannot help but mechanize the motive elements of his organism” (Rudnitsky
1981, 294).
13. See Baer 1986.
14. Like Meyerhold, in order to realize his high-precision-based machinic spectacle, Foregger
developed his own body/actor training system ironically called tafiatrenage (literally “taffy pulling”),
of which very few details remain except the fact that like biomechanics, it aimed at conditioning
the actor to find a physical means of expression through the external expression of a highly
disciplined body.
15. Responding to a criticism in the German dance journal Schrifttanz in 1931 that his work was
simply the demonstration of abstract, technical, and formal principles, Schlemmer answered,

The greatest misunderstandings were created by the terms “mechanical” or “mechanistic.” “Mechanical
dancers” was the cheap slogan used to describe the figurines of the Triadic Ballet. However, “mechanical
dancers” have quite a different nature from these figurines. . . . When I created the Triadic Ballet all
mechanical aspirations were far from my mind, for there was no such thing as a machine cult in 1919.
The formal approach I used when making the ballet sprung from basic rules of geometry and stereometry
which I translated into new and contemporary, interesting materials. It also sprang from the anatomy
of the human body which, apart from being made of flesh and blood and having a mind and feelings, is
also a miracle of biomechanical exactness. If we choose to look at this particular side of the human body
and use it in performance, we are not denying the existence of the other side. All we are doing is creating

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a balance in a field which is commonly called dance and in which the other side is so immensely
represented. (Schlemmer 1931)

16. See Banes 1987 for full coverage of this transition state of modern dance.
17. Suite by Chance also utilized one of the first purely electronic scores, a shrill sinusoidal
oscillator-driven work of tape music by Christian Wolff that was so lacking in formal rhythmic
structures for the dancers to follow that Cunningham resorted to using a stopwatch to keep the
chance-derived movements in temporally aligned sequence with one another.
18. For a description of the audio setup, see Gordon Mumma’s description in Klosty 1975,
67–68.
19. If Cunningham and company appeared to be overenthusiastic about the possibilities offered
by technologies that had normally seen industrial and military use, they were also flexible enough
to accept the probability of the machines’ failure. In fact, although the complex sensing systems
had potentially worked in rehearsals, they failed to function during the first performances, causing
Cage and the musicians to resort to improvisation that made it appear as if the sensors were working.
Malcolm Goldstein, personal conversation, December 8, 2006.
20. Cunningham’s 1969 choreography Canfield, for example, featured a set by sculptor Robert
Morris in which a gigantic vertical object filled with aircraft landing lights aimed upstage would
electromechanically move forward and backward across the proscenium at erratic speeds, throwing
the dancers in and out of light and darkness, while Pauline Oliveros’s score (realized by Cage,
Tudor, and Mumma) reached what was described as excruciating levels of loudness.
21. Brown’s “accumulation” pieces, such as Accumulation (1971), Primary Accumulation (1972), and
Group Primary Accumulation (1972), were based on constrained sets of tightly defined gesture or
movement sequences that would serially accumulate over time (1, 1:2, 1;2:3, 1:2:3:4, 1:2:3:4:5,
and so on). Taking place in site-specific locations like park benches or the plazas of corporate build-
ings, the accumulation works used a simple mathematical procedure to generate a string of increas-
ingly complex, repetitive, yet flowing movements that would then be conditioned based on the
physical architecture of the performance site.
22. Brown’s 1975 work Locus delved even further into formal techniques for generating dance by
organizing movement around twenty-seven points situated inside an imaginary cube around the
body’s kinesphere (à la Laban) with each point in the cube correlated to the alphabet and a written
statement. As each dancer moved through the four sections of Brown’s movement score, they would
revolve the position of the cube and spatially (but not gesturally) look for ways to move through,
touch, look at, jump over or do something about each point in the series, either one point at a time
or clustered (Goldberg 1986, 154).
23. Two Gutai members, Kazuo Shiraga and Akiro Kanayama, for instance, forged a coupling
between the body (using the feet) and mechanical objects like remote-controlled cars and ventilators
as paintbrushes in actions such as the 1957 realized performances “Remote Control Paintings” and
“Footpainting.” See Dreher 2001, 73–84.
24. In the scene entitled “Working Man’s Hell” in Athey’s controversial Four Scenes in a Harsh
Life, for example, the artist also directly imagined the body as a Kafka-esque, “hunger artist”

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mechanical writing surface. Serving as a tabula rasa on which to write words of judgment upon,
Athey cut African-inspired printing patterns into the back of an African American performer with
a knife and used paper as a blotting device in a primitive but effective onstage scarification ritual.
See Wessendorf 1995 for details on the performances of Athey as well as Bob Flanagan.
25. For more details on contemporary body-based performances, see Heathfield 2004.
26. See Sommer 1972 for details on Brown’s first Equipment Piece performance.
27. See Brett 1994.
28. See Osthoff n.d.
29. See http://orlan.net and Faber 2002.
30. Claiming herself to be the first artist to “use surgery for artistic ends in order to decry the
social pressures placed on the human body, especially women’s bodies,” Orlan’s first surgical Unicom
works were performed over four sessions during 1990 and involved liposuction techniques that
changed the shape of different parts of her body, including her hips, face, waist, and neck. Broadcast
to multiple international cultural venues from the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York, her 1993
performance Omnipresence took the first steps toward the realization of Orlan’s imagined mutant
body through the addition of silicone-based protuberances directly into her forehead as well as
large-scale breast implantations. Subsequent surgeries in 1998 embarked on what the artist labeled
“self-hybridizations,” exploring the image of beauty through different cultures—for example,
Olmec and Mayan images of cross-eyed vision, large noses, and deformed skulls, which she merged
with computer-generated images of her own face and body. See Orlan n.d.
31. See Jordà 1998 and http://www.marceliantunez.com.
32. See Stelarc n.d.
33. See Massumi 2002, 89–132. Stelarc’s more recent work, such as Third Ear, has shifted to the
direction of biotechnological art. See Stelarc n.d. and Hauser 2008.
34. See Gómez-Peña n.d.
35. See http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/atGlance/pubMainFrames.html.
36. See De Queriroz 2008.
37. See La Fura dels Baus n.d.
38. Working from Laban’s conception of the kinesphere as a cube around the body with twenty-
seven points emerging from the body’s center of gravity, Forsythe exploded and decentered this
earlier model, suggesting not one but multiple centers out of which movement might emerge and
thus, throwing the body out of its normal state of balletic alignment by disrupting verticality and
emphasizing gravity. See Gilpin 1994 for further description of Forsythe’s revision of Laban.
39. See Caspersen 2004, 28.
40. All of the notes on Eidos: Telos derive from the author’s collaborative work on the dance’s
Frankfurt premiere in January 1995. For more detail on the concept of “sensitive dependence on
initial conditions,” see Prigogine and Stengers 1985.

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41. See Salter 2009b for more detail.
42. Described on the Dance-Technology Zone (DTZ) list server founded in 1994. See http://art
.net/~dtz.
43. European Union–funded research projects like MEGA (Multisensory Expressive Gesture Appli-
cations) and scientific conferences like the first KANSEI (the Japanese concept for the translation
of a person’s emotional or psychological experience of a product or event and the subsequent transla-
tion of such feelings into the design of such a product or event) conference in Genoa in 1997 resulted
in the publication and dissemination of both traditional academic papers and computer software
tools and environments aimed at or designed for working artists. See Hashimoto 1997.
44. During his tenure as founder and director of the Ohio State University Dance and Technology
department from 1999–2003, academic and artist Birringer sought to legitimize dance practice
with new computationally augmented technologies within both the larger dance world as well as
within academia. Aiming to create a studio-lab context in which choreographers in training would
be exposed to the cutting edge of software, camera-based motion capture, sensors and all other
things digital, Birringer’s organization of numerous think tanks, workshops and symposia under
the title IPS (Interactive Performance Series) also attempted to generate an platform for knowledge
sharing and work among multiple constituencies in the dance technology world, shifting between
choreographers like Troika Ranch (Dawn Stoppielo and Mark Coniglio), Robbie Shaw and Bebe
Miller, visual artists like Paul Kaiser, arts researchers/writers like Scott deLahunta, composers/
performers like Curtis Bahn, Tomie Hahn, and Todd Winkler, and numerous technologists as
well as with students. See http://www.dance.osu.edu/%7Ejbirringer/Dance_and_Technology/
workshops/ips2.html.
45. For example, in the first public displays of the choreographer’s engagement with Life Forms,
Polarity (1990), and the subsequent Trackers (1991), Copeland noted that Cunningham’s choreog-
raphy had become increasingly obsessed with a dislocation of the various limbs from the rest of the
body—a kind of autonomy that may have arisen as the result of working with animated bodies
and continually playing with different parameters assigned to different limbs. See Copeland
1999.
46. See Noll 1967.
47. See Atari archives, Software & Info n.d.
48. See Naugle 1999.
49. See OpenEndedGroup n.d.
50. See Mesh Performance n.d.
51. See Obermaier n.d.

7 Machines/Mechanicals

1. See Hultén 1987, 29.

2. See McCulloch and Pitts 1943.

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3. For another take on the issue of what constitutes “living” from the point of view of autopoiesis,
see Maturana and Varela 1992.
4. See Nadajaran 2007 for further discussion of Al-Jazari’s devices.
5. See Bell 1996 and 1999.
6. See Pauline 1996, 401–404.
7. The spectacle included the pigeon’s dressed in Arabic garb while the Cure’s “Killing an Arab”
(a song inspired by Camus’ The Stranger) played at high volume.
8. Later SRL machines included ones such as Flame Whistle/Boeing (a 200-pound modified Boeing
turbo jet engine with a fuel afterburner), Little Arm (a 12-foot-long mechanical arm controlled by
a gesture-based human arm controller), and Shockwave Cannon (a stationary device that shot pro-
pulsive air blasts). See SRL Machines n.d.
9. Flynn’s Peoplehater group, in particular, articulated a post-SRL landscape by declaring that its
objective would be the creation of “environments where the distinction between machines, carnivals
and monsters breaks down.” See http://www.timesup.org/rearview/flynn.html.
10. Thorpe’s initial concept involved a boxing ring–like arena where cheering fans, sitting behind
bulletproof glass, could watch a variety of home-cooked machines battle to the death in a remote-
controlled melee accompanied by rock concert–styled lighting and pounding techno beats. Built
by hobby inventors who, similar to some SRL alumni, worked day jobs as designers, engineers, and
computer scientists in Bay Area/Hollywood special effects and entertainment companies, Robot
Wars’ mechanical players were classed by weight (heavy- to lightweight) and constructed from used
parts lethally refashioned with circular saw blades, metal pinchers, and other potentially lethal
mechanical elements to achieve maximum damage to their fellow machine foils. Generating endless
numbers of both live and television-licensed spin-offs in the United States and abroad (particularly
in the United Kingdom) such as Robotica, Battle Bots, and BotBash, Robot Wars was a kind of SRL
for the Hollywood-bred, nerdy masses. See Thorpe n.d.
11. Heckert’s machines were actuated by servo motor control through MIDI continuous controller
information. See De Stefano 1996.
12. See Hobijn 1988. Machine-generated fire instruments also played a large role in the work of
Berlin-based Belgian machine artist and “chemo-acoustician” Bastiaan Maris who developed a
similar sound-producing machine as that of Hobijn, but based on propane gas, called the Large Hot
Pipe Organ (LHPO) in 1993. Stating that “machines become interesting when they don’t seem to
have a function apart from just being, that’s when you can only step back and watch.” Maris’s
LHPO consisted of twenty pentatonically tuned, 10-meter-high steel pipes, each with a diameter
of 10 inches, that produced intense percussive tones by way of MIDI-controlled explosions of a
propane gas mixture inside the pipes (conversation with Maris, 1998).
13. Like [The User’s] Symphony, I-Beam music aimed to exploit not only the sonic potential of an
industrial, kinetically driven system but also provided an endoscopic, camera-based “machine
vision” perspective from inside the machine through the installation of miniature video cameras in
the moving structure. See Baginsky and Schwartz 1995.

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14. Later, Burnham further articulated such cybernetic notions in a September 1968 text published
in Artforum entitled System Aesthetics:

We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates,
not from things, but from the way things are done. . . . The priorities of the present age revolve around
the problems of organization. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, on-going relation-
ships between organic and non-organic systems, be these neighborhoods, industrial complexes, farms,
transportation systems, information centers, recreation centers, or any of the other matrices of human
activity. All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively,
many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions and if their “environments” are on
the unsophisticated side, this will change with time and experience. (Burnham 1968b)

15. See Schöffer n.d. and Schöffer 1985.

16. Schöffer’s definition of luminodynamism included “the exploitation of a surface or fraction of
space involving the development of plastic and dynamic elements—whether colored or not—
through real movement or artificial movement.” See Schöffer 1996, 397–400.
17. See Wendland 1973 for a review of the performance.
18. See Kac 1997.
19. Although mainly exhibiting sculptures, Cybernetic Serendipity also featured other robotic and
machine artworks such as Paik’s K-456 and Tinguely’s work.
20. Using a mainframe Philips P9201 (a clone of a Honeywell-16 (with 8 kilobits of memory)
computer to analyze the input signals and coordinate the independent movement of the different
servo-controlled motors in the Senster’s joints, Ihnatowicz’s sculpture could achieve extremely
lifelike movement behavior through motor-controlled acceleration and deceleration. See
Senster.com n.d. and Zivanovic 2005.
21. MacMurtrie’s Inflatable Bodies projects (2005–2006) mark a move away from his previously
well-tested industrial, scrap-metal aesthetic and toward a softer, more malleable one, involving
computer-controlled, servo-driven air bladders that enable fabric birdlike structures to breathe and
flap. See MacMurtrie n.d.
22. See Demers 2004.
23. As seen in the examples, the implicitly designed tension in the battle of presence between
humans and articulated mechanical systems underlies much of machine performance. Yet the locus
of presence is not just shifted to machines, but, as articulated in Pickering’s notion of the “dance
of agencies,” equally shared among the spectator/interloper and the machines. This entire “bundle”
of presences constitutes a total performance environment where the distinctions between watching,
interacting, and reacting are continually blurred in real-time action; Demers and Vorn predicted
that “the transformation of an inert site into reactive locus will force the viewer not only to consider
a society of machines but a habitat made for machines where their sole presence will disrupt the
system and engender reactions” (Vorn and Demers 1995, 4).
24. See Kac 1997 for a full description of robotic art’s origins and practitioners.

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25. Derived from The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, a
1996 work by scholar Paul N. Edwards, the phrase “closed world” refers to the discourse and
practice of surveillance and control through high-technology military power during the period
following World War II. See Edwards 1996.
26. In The Brotherhood work Translocations, for example, was a construction built around a U.S.
Navy plotting table used in war game bombing simulations and involving a moving XY plotter
that would respond in audiovisual terms to visitors’ hand movements over the table. Stealth con-
sisted of a helicopter gun sighting apparatus with attached laser in which the visitor, like in video
game arcade, could aim at light-sensitive targets while the Scribe machine acted to read the pages
of books and, translating such reading through OCR (optical character recognition) into computer
code, could rewrite the book on an opposite table solely utilizing the techniques of machine inscrip-
tion. See Dunn and Vasulka 1998b for further description.

8 Interaction

1. See Morse 2003 for a further discussion of interactivity in relationship to the cultural milieu of
the 1960s.
2. Schechner’s reference to Michael Kirby’s terminology of “nonmatrixed” suggested performances
that are closer to events in real life rather than theater on a stage. See Kirby 1965.
3. Among the many existing media art histories that discuss similar backgrounds for interactivity,
see Dinkla 1997, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2002, Huhtamo 1998, Shanken 2003, Grau 2007,
Popper 2007, and Paul 2003.
4. Allan Kaprow sums these convergences up himself by stating, “The Japanese Gutai, Environ-
ments, Happenings, Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, events, noise music, chance, poetry, life theater,
found actions, bodyworks, earthworks, concept art, information art—the list could go on—con-
fronted publics and arts professionals with strange occurrences bearing little resemblance to the
known arts.” See Kaprow 1995.
5. See Saltz 1997 for the similarities between traditional stage performance and computer-
augmented interactive works.
6. Architecture critic Lucy Bullivant’s 2006 book Responsive Environments is one of the few texts
written by an architecture critic that attempts to mix projects that have common goals between
architects, designers, and new media artists, claiming that they are all participating in the creation
of new kinds of responsive architectures. See Bullivant 2006.
7. See Shanken 2003.
8. Institutional support included such centers as MIT’s Center for Audio Visual Studies founded
by Bauhaus student György Kepes, Philips’ Electronics’ support of Varèse, Le Corbusier, and
Xenakis’s Brussels pavilion, Schöffer’s work on CYSP 1, and Ihnatowicz’s Senster project. See
Broeckmann and Nadarajan 2009.
9. On his edge.org website, impressario John Brockman details one of the few meetings that
took place between artists and scientists. “These activities led to an invitation in 1965 from

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the Harvard biophysicist A. K. Soloman to bring a group of New York artists, film-makers, and
musicians to spend several days interacting with leading Harvard and MIT scientists in biophysics,
sensory communication, computation, and cybernetics, all of whom had been colleagues with
Norbert Wiener, who had died the previous year. The science contingent included Walter
Rosenblith, Anthony Oettinger, Harold Edgerton, and Solomon. Among the arts group were
Kenneth Dewey of Theatre X, Musician Terry Riley, Carolee Schneemann, and the USCO group.
See Brockman n.d.
10. Turrell’s and Irwin’s fascinating but ultimately aborted attempt to develop sensory spaces that
“could sense back” is detailed in Adcock 1990.
11. A number of exhibitions during the early 2000s have focused on gruppo T’s collective as well
as individual members’ work, among them “2 Ambienti e opere del gruppo T” at B&B Italia’s
New York showroom (2004) as well as the large-scale exhibitions “LichtKunst aus KunstLicht” at
the ZKM (2006) and “Ambiente del Gruppo T—Alle origini dell’interattivivita” at the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderne, Rome (2005). See Boriani n.d.
12. See Matthews 2005.
13. I am indebted to architect Patrick Harrop for his observation that in comparison to Price,
Archigram’s work still remained caught at the level of visual representation of action and
performance.
14. See Matthews 2005, 80. Among the cybernetics subcommittee members were artists (such as
Roy Ascott), psychologist John Clark, sociologist Michael Young, members of parliament, and
others.
15. In a telling example of the all-too-close intersections between the military-industrial technolo-
gies of Bell Labs and the counter-cultural performance scene, Rauschenberg’s interest in using IR
technology for Open Score hit a wall, as all American-manufactured IR technology at the time was
classified by the U.S. Department of Defense. Bell Labs ‘engineers came up with a solution by using
a Japanese IR camera that was affixed to an American Norelco-manufactured normal-light video
camera. See the 9 Evenings archive at http://www.fondation-langlois.org.
16. See Bardiot’s extensive analysis of 9 Evenings at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/
9evenings/.
17. See Salter 2009a for more detailed analysis.
18. See Rose 1972 for more detail.
19. Indeed, technical and organizational problems—in particular, the improvisational and “live
programming” aspects pushed by Klüver—eventually lead to Pepsi pulling out of sponsorship of
the pavilion, leaving E.A.T. to pick up the financial tab of the project.
20. See Laurel 1991 for the discussion of the screen as a new kind of stage.
21. See Cruz-Neira et al. 1992.
22. Numerous other artists also explored alternative forms of interfaces. For example, the celebrated
duo of Austrian artist Christa Sommerer and French artist Laurent Mignonneau, who were known
primarily for their work in the simulation of Artificial Life (A-Life) models, also attempted to break

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381
out of the keyboard-mouse mode by creating interfaces (plant leaves armed with sensors) that, when
stroked, would yield computational models of growth equations.
23. Land Design Studio, founded by Peter Higgins, James Dibble, and Shirley Walker, was another
key European design firm working on the development of performative and responsive environ-
ments for the general public. A clear case in point was the studio’s work on the now-closed Play
Zone in the Millennium Dome on the outskirts of London, a large-scale environment of interactive
digital artworks designed especially for children. See Land Design Studio n.d.
24. See Benford et al. 1999 as well as Blast Theory n.d.
25. Many works from leading media artists dealt with this tension between screen and data, body
and data, among them projects from Knowbotic Research (Anonymous Muttering, 1996), Scott Snibbe
(Boundary Functions, 1998), and Camile Utterback’s and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (2000).
26. Both txOOm and trg utilized variations of the software dynamics engine developed for Sponge’s
and FoAM’s TGarden.
27. See Varela et al. 1991 and Thompson 2007 for a further discussion of the connectionist
approach to cognition.
28. See Davies n.d. for more extensive details of both the technical system as well as Davies’s
numerous writings on the work.
29. See Hall 1966.
30. See Rubin 2006.
31. See Bullivant 2006 and http://www.arup.com/netherlands/newsitem.cfm?pageid=6679.
32. Several attempts at realizing Nuage Vert in the Parisian suburb of Saint Ouen in 2003 failed.
See HeHe 2008.
33. Examples include Miriam Struppek’s interactionfield.de archive, available at http://www
.interactivearchitecture.org, plus numerous international festivals including Champ Libre
(Montréal) and the series of roving Urban Screens conferences in Amsterdam (2005),
Manchester (2007), and Melbourne (2008).
34. On the Media n.d.
35. See McGonigal 2005.
36. Improv Everywhere n.d.
37. A case in point was the fact that Can You See Me Now? was adapted to multiple urban sites
for performance, ranging from Tokyo to London to Rotterdam.

Conclusion: The Everyday

1. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter refer to online, web-based social networking services that enable
users to maintain online profiles and to continually update these profiles and send messages to other
users. The services were started in the mid-2000s.

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382
 Glossary

Compiled by Harry Smoak

Accelerometer An electromechanical device that measures non-gravitational changes in velocity

over time. As a sensor it is used to detect vibrations, shock, and orientation.
Actuator A device used in engineering to introduce or regulate movement in a system. The elec-
tronic equivalent is a device that can transduce an electrical input signal into motion.
Additive synthesis General term for a class of related sound synthesis techniques based on the idea
that complex tones (timbre) can be emulated by adding together multiple, simpler ones (partials).
An example of this technique used in computer music is Fourier synthesis.
Algorithm A process or set of rules to be followed, especially by a computer, in calculations or
problem solving. The concept has been abstracted by contemporary dance choreographers—notably
William Forsythe and Trisha Brown—for the (non-metaphorical) structuring of choreographic
sequences.
Alternate reality game (ARG) A genre of interactive narratives distinguished by the use of everyday
life as a platform. A form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), ARGs often involve
multiple online and media elements to tell a story that may or may not be affected by participants’
actions.
Anamorphic lens A lens that optically distorts a projected image which appears normal again when
observed from a particular viewpoint.
Arc lamp A light source produced by an electrical discharge between two points.
Artificial neural networks (ANN) A mathematical model or computation system based on a biologi-
cal correlate—such as the human brain and nervous system.
Artificial Life (A-Life) Computational systems that simulate characteristics of biological
organisms.
ASCII (American standard code for information interchange) A set of discrete character codes
used for the interchange of information, especially if the information can be expressed mainly by
the written form of English words. It is a widely used format for transferring text between
computers.
Azimuth In sound spatialization, the direction of a localized sound source expressed as the angle
between the perceived location of the source and an imaginary line extending from between the
ears of the listener.
Background subtraction Any number of computer vision methods for detecting the foreground
objects in a video frame sequence as the difference between the current frame and an image of the
scene’s static background. More sophisticated approaches incorporating this technique adapt to
changes such as those caused by illumination, motion, and background geometry.
Benday dots A printing process combining two or more different colored dots to create a third
color. It is named after the American illustrator and printer Benjamin Day.
Brise soleil In architecture, this refers to a variety of permanent sun-shading techniques.

Capacitance A measurable electrical property existing between any two conductive surfaces, in
which changes in the distance between the surfaces change the potential to store an electric charge.
It can be used to identify changes in the proximity of one object in relation to a second object, the
sensor, usually within a limited range.
CCTV (closed-circuit television) The use of video cameras connected together where the signal is
distributed to a limited number of monitors on a closed path. It differs from broadcast television
in that the signal is not transmitted in the open. It is often used for monitoring or surveillance.
Closed-loop system In classical control theory, systems that utilize feedback to control the outputs,
called states, of a dynamical system. By contrast, an open-loop control system does not have or use
feedback.
Color inversion A televisual or computer graphics technique for changing the position of a given
color within its respective color space to its logical opposite.
Control theory Also called control systems theory, this is an interdisciplinary branch of engineer-
ing and applied mathematics concerned with the behavior of dynamical systems. The desired value
of the variable under control is called a reference. A sensor is used to measure the controlled vari-
able. A controller manipulates actuators or effectors in order to modulate the system input in the
direction of the desired effect on the system output.
CRT (cathode ray tube) The cathode ray tube (CRT) is an important component in many
computer monitors and television sets still in use today. The main component consists of a vacuum
tube containing a negatively charged filament (the cathode) at one end and a phosphor coated screen
on the other end. A controlled stream of electrons emitted from the heated cathode is accelerated
to a high rate toward the opposing screen. When struck, the phosphors fluoresce red, blue, and
green light, resulting in the image we see.
CU-SeeME An early, inexpensive point-to-point Internet videoconferencing software client. It
was first developed for the Apple Macintosh computer in 1992 by Tim Dorcey at Cornell
University.

Glossary

384
Cybernetics The science of action oriented communications and control in machines, living organ-
isms, and organizations.
Cyclorama A large piece of scenery positioned around the back of the stage set. Normally used as
a sky or a scenic backdrop. It may be rigid or flexible, and it is occasionally painted.
Degrees of freedom The set of independent ways in which a system of moving bodies can
change.
Dichroic glass A material composite consisting of metal oxides deposited in thin films onto a glass
substrate. By precisely varying the type of metal and the thickness of the layers, the wavelengths
of light and color reflected or passing through can be controlled. Artistic applications of dichroic
glass are derived from aerospace optical research into thin layer physics.
DLA (digital light array) A reflective variant of LCD display technology and an alternative to DLP.
Instead of individual mirrors, however, liquid crystals are used. JVC’s commercial implementation
is known as D-ILA.
DLP (digital light processing) The technology used in video projectors in which the image is
created by microscopically small mirrors integrated onto a specialized semiconductor chip known
as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). Each mirror represents one or more pixels in the projected
image. The technology was originally developed in 1987 by Dr. Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instru-
ments, owner of the trademark.
DMX or DMX512 (Digital Multiplex) A communications protocol first introduced in 1986
for use with lighting control equipment. Now a standard, it was developed by the Engineering
Commission of USITT and is commonly used to control stage and entertainment lighting and
effects.
Doppler effect The change in frequency and wavelength caused by a moving source of
waves, as of sound or light, as it approaches or moves away from an observer. Doppler radar systems
make use of this effect to measure the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed
objects. Christian Doppler, an Austrian physicist, first described the effect in 1842.
DSP (digital signal processing) An engineering domain concerned with signals that have been
represented digitally as a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. In
order to use an analog signal on a computer it must first be digitized with an analog to digital
converter (ADC).
DV (digital video) A digital video format introduced in the mid-1990s by commercial video
camera producers. The DV specification defines the codec and tape format. It uses a digital rather
than an analog video signal.
Dynamical system In applied mathematics, a means of describing how one independent state
develops into another independent state over the course of time, forming an integrated whole. Also
called a state space, a phase space, a manifold, or an ambient space.
Edge detection Any of a number of computer vision or digital image processing techniques for
identifying the boundaries of objects in a scene, where a beginning or ending edge is indicated by
a change in intensity.

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Eidophor A television projector developed in Switzerland used to create theater-sized images. The
name Eidophor is derived from the Greek root signifying “image bearer.” Its basic technology used
electrostatic charges to deform an oil surface (called the Eidophor liquid), which allowed for
significantly brighter images compared to the CRT projectors of the time. The Eidophor was in
use extensively from the early 1950s until the 1980s.
Electric field (EF) sensing A non-contact method of proximity sensing that allows electronic
systems to detect, evaluate, and respond to objects in their vicinity. The technology is similar to
that used in capacitive proximity sensing. The first well-known use of EF sensing for human-
machine interface is Leon Theremin’s musical instrument.
Electrochromic glass A material used in some window systems that can alter its opacity—between
a colored, translucent state and a transparent state—in response to changes in applied voltage.
Electromyogram (EMG) sensor A sensing device used to measure the electrical signals of muscles
at rest and during contraction.
Fly space The area above the stage where scenery, lighting, and other onstage elements can be
shifted by a technical crew by “flying” it vertically by rope-line rigging or a counterweight system.
Force sensitive resistor (FSR) A thin polymer measuring device which changes its electrical
resistance when there is a change in force, such as pressure, applied to its surface.
Formant filters In sound synthesis, a band pass filter shaped like any of several prominent bands
of frequency that determines the phonetic quality of a vowel (peak, with a sharp band pass) in
human speech.
Fortuny dome An early 20th century stage lighting innovation created by Venetian designer
Mariano Fortuny that can be used to create upstage lighting effects (similar to a cyclorama) using
indirect, reflected, and diffused light. Early versions were covered in fabric, but later plaster surfaces
were used.
Fresnel lens A type of lens, originally developed for use in lighthouses, made of a number of con-
centric rings called Fresnel “zones.” It is noted for its thin, light construction compared with con-
ventional, spherical lenses with a similar aperture and focal length. French physicist Augustin-Jean
Fresnel invented it in the early 19th century.
Gantry crane A specialized crane that travels on a structure consisting of two or more fixed rails,
raising and lowering objects by means of a hoist.
GUI and command-line Any of a variety of human-computer interfaces for inputting commands
to a computer operating system or software program. A command-line interface is text-based and
relies on typed commands, contrasted with the use of visual icons and a mouse pointer to click on
options in a graphical user interface (GUI).
Hall-effect transducers A type of short-range sensor that detects a changing magnetic field and
converts it to a variable electrical signal.
Heterodyning oscillator Heterodyning is a process in which two different ultrasonic oscillators
produce interference patterns (also known as beat frequencies) between the two frequencies at an
audible range.

Glossary

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Hi8 An analog video format that uses an 8 mm videotape and helical scan read/write mechanism.
It was developed by Sony in the late 1990s as a higher-quality successor to the original Video8
format.
High-definition (HD) video Any digital video system with a higher image resolution than a
standard-definition (SD) video system. Image resolution refers to the amount of detail, usually
expressed as a quantity of pixels, an image contains.
HMD (head mounted display) A display device worn directly on the head or as part of a helmet,
often part of a wearable computer system. It has a small optical display in front of one or both eyes.
Stereoscopic versions can be used to simulate three-dimensional virtual environments.
HMI (hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide) A lighting source that uses an arc lamp instead of an
incandescent bulb to produce light. The lamp is operated by a ballast that creates an electrical
arc between two electrodes within the bulb, exciting a pressurized mercury vapor. Commonly
found in film and broadcast industries due to its high output, color rendering index, and color
temperature—approximately equal to noon sunlight.
HQI (hydrargyrum quartz iodide) A type of high-intensity discharge (HID), ballasted lighting
source. Like HMIs, they are compact, powerful, and efficient light sources.
Hydraulics Fluid power technology that uses the force of liquids to do work without the need for
mechanical gears or levers.
Information theory A mathematical theory of communication involving the quantification of
information founded and developed by American Claude Shannon in the mid-20th century. It has
since been extended from its original applications in applied mathematics and electrical engineering
to other disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, and game theory.
Infrared (IR) camera This uses infrared radiation instead of visible light to form an image. Infrared
light has a wavelength longer than visible light.
Interlace A method for rendering a video image for raster-scanned displays, where every other
line is first scanned to form one sequence, or field, and then the remaining lines are scanned to
form a second field. Each field contains half of the information content of the complete video frame.
The reduced bandwidth, especially for analog signals, is beneficial for transporting each frame
through a video system.
Isadora A graphic programming environment developed by composer and media-artist Mark
Coniglio that provides interactive control of video, sound, and light in real-time for performance
contexts.
Java applet A very small computer program written in the Java programming language that can
be included in an HTML page. While browsing, the program can be downloaded from the server
and run from the user’s computer using a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
JumboTron A large-screen television using a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) technology
developed by Sony, and available from the 1980s until the early 2000s.
Latency In engineering, latency is a measure of time delay between the moment a process is
initiated and the moment one of its effects becomes perceivable.

Glossary

387
LCD (liquid crystal display) A thin, flat display device consisting of any number of pixels
filled with liquid crystals and arrayed in front of a reflector or other source of light. Liquid crystals
are aligned by modulating an electrical field to achieve the desired electo-optical effect, such as an
image.
LED (light-emitting diode) An electronic light source discovered in the early 20th century. With
the introduction of widely available high brightness blue LEDs in the late 1990s, red, green and
blue (RGB) color mixing became possible.
Magnetizer The force of attraction of a magnet can interfere with the cathode rays that normally
fill the screens rectangular surface. Moving a magnet on or near a CRT can alter, or distort, the
otherwise normal rectangle form. The process of eliminating magnetization on a CRT is called
degaussing.
Mapping The process of creating associations between two or more distinct data modalities.

Markov chain A stochastic process named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov in
which future states depend only on the present or immediately preceding state. An example is a
simple random walk algorithm.
Mashrabiyah Derived from the Arabic root signifying “the place of drinking,” it is the name given
to a type of projecting oriel window enclosed with carved wood latticework located on the second
story of a building or higher, often lined with stained glass.
Mawari butai A revolving stage device featured in traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, allowing
for rapid changes of scene without interruption of the action onstage.
Max/MSP-Jitter A graphical software platform and development environment for interactive and
real-time performance of music, video, and other computer controlled media. Miller Puckette
originally created Max while he was at IRCAM in the 1980s. It is named after Max Matthews, an
electrical engineer and early pioneer in computer music. Jitter was introduced in 2003 as a set of
extensions for real-time video. Today the software suite is maintained and distributed by San
Francisco–based software company Cycling ’74.
Microcontroller A simple computer incorporated onto a single integrated circuit (IC). Like other
computers, it has a central processing unit (CPU), memory, and input/outport (I/O) ports, and a
clock. Due to its small size and simple architecture, it can be embedded in many kinds of special-
ized devices.
Mixed reality Interdisciplinary research area examining the hybrid interaction of physical and
virtual elements (e.g., computer generated graphics) together in the same space. In computer
science, it often combines image processing, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and
digital media research.
MoCap (motion capture) A process for recording and analyzing information generated by move-
ment and translating it into a digital computer model, also called motion tracking.
Multimodal A style of human-computer interaction characterized by several different
sense-based paths of communication between the human and the computer, such as touch and
sound.

Glossary

388
Nonlinear editing (NLE) A digital editing system that can arbitrarily access a sequence
of edits selected from source audio and video media stored in a randomly accessible digital
format.
Nonlinear processing amplifier A device that changes the amplitude of a signal in such a way that
results in a disproportionality between the input and output signals.
Optical flow In computer vision, a technique for describing motion in a sequence of images.
Technically, it is the computed vector field (motion vector) that describes how the image is chang-
ing over time, from one frame to the next.
Oscillator A device for generating electrical oscillations, or regular movements of energy, back
and forth from one form to another. A simple electronic oscillator circuit consists of a capacitor
and an inductor.
Paik/Abe synthesizer An early analog video synthesizer built as a collaboration between Nam June
Paik and video engineer Shuya Abe during an artist-in-residence program at WGBH-TV in Boston,
between 1969 and 1971. It combined a number of analog video distortion techniques in combina-
tion with multiple real-time video camera inputs and nonlinear editing control.
PANI A large format scenic projection system with a high intensity lighting source, manufactured
by Ludwig Pani of Vienna, Austria.
Parabolic mirror A parabola-shaped reflective device used to collect light and focus it to a single
point. Because the principles of reflection are reversible, it can be used to distribute the energy
from the focus point outwards.
Parallel port An interface for an electronic device such as a computer, for connecting external
devices that send or receive several bits of data simultaneously across multiple wires. In contrast,
a serial port sends or receives only one bit at a time.
Particle system In computer graphics, this refers to a technique for modeling dynamic pheno-
mena such as fire, clouds, and water, which are otherwise difficult to simulate using conventional
surface-based rendering methods.
Photocell or photoelectric sensor A digital switch device used to detect the presence of an object
between a light source and target receiver. The switch is activated if the beam of light is
interrupted.
Planon lamp A trademarked flat-panel fluorescent lighting system produced by OSRAM, a
leading lighting manufacturing company. Unlike other fluorescent lamp systems, it uses a
mercury-free technology based on a xenon excimer discharge to produce a soft, diffuse light.
Pneumatic Uses the power of an easily compressed gas, usually air, to operate mechanical motion.
Can also refer to anything containing air under pressure.
Point source (audio) In acoustics, this is described as an ideal sound source, constituted by a
free-floating sphere infinitely small in dimension from which sound radiates in all directions.
Polhemus (magnetic) A magnetic tracking device that allows the capture of motion data in six
degrees of freedom. Together these represent the relative position and orientation of a sensor within
a magnetic field created by a radio frequency emitter (the source). The sensors themselves are small

Glossary

389
and can be worn on a human body, along with a wearable body pack containing the emitter and
a wireless transmitter to share data with a dedicated computer for capture and analysis.
Polymer and liquid crystal films Alternative technologies sometimes used in “smart glass” in which
light transmission properties can be changed when voltage is applied. These include polymer
dispersed liquid crystal devices (PDLCs) and suspended particle devices (SPDs).
Potentiometer A simple device (usually a knob or slider) that produces a variable resistance when
moved.
Portapak Introduced to the United States by Sony in 1967, this was the first portable video
recording device available to the general public. Initially it recorded in black and white only, having
a maximum recording time of twenty minutes.
Predictive modeling A process by which a framework is created or chosen in order to make predic-
tions about future events based on the analysis of current or historical data.
Procedural animation A type of real-time computer animation consisting of automatically gener-
ated digital images computed according to a predetermined function, or set of functions.
Projector bombing A form of architectural light graffiti, this is a descriptive term for outdoor
digital projection situated in urban environments.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) A small, wireless electronic device consisting simply of a
circuit and an antenna that can transmit a unique identifier in response to certain radio waves.
Active versions may contain a power supply and may emit a signal.
Real-time In computing, systems in which the production and analysis of data is done in the actual
time during which a process or event occurs. Also signifies something at the moment of its
constitution.
Rectifier A one-way electrical device that converts an alternating current (AC) into a direct current
(DC). A device that performs the opposite function is known as an inverter.
Reflective lighting Lighting technique that applies the property of a propagated wave being
thrown back from a surface, such as a mirror.
Relay control Relays are switches controlled by an electromagnet that open or close the circuit in
response to a control signal. There are two common types of relays: electromechanical relays and
solid state relays.
Resonator A device that oscillates at specific frequencies, called resonance frequencies, with greater
amplitude than others.
Ring modulator A technique that takes two signals (each with some frequency) and produces one
signal containing the sum and differences of those frequencies. The analog circuit of diodes that
was originally used to implement the technique was in the shape of a ring.
Rutt/Etra scan processor An early video synthesizer consisting of an analog computer for manipu-
lating the scanning of the raster of a cathode ray tube (CRT). It was co-invented by Steve Rutt and
Bill Etra in the 1970s as a tool for image processing and real-time video.
Sawtooth oscillator A device for generating a type of non-sinusoidal waveform characterized by
an upward ramp followed by a sharp drop-off, sometimes called a cliff.

Glossary

390
Scan lights A category of automated stage lighting fixtures utilizing a single, controllable moving-
mirror to reposition a spotlight. These are typically used in combination with a gobo to project a
shape or pattern.
Scan resolution The amount of detail obtained by an optical scanning device, converted and stored
in a digital image, often measured in pixels per inch.
Servomotor (servo) An electromechanical device in which an electrical input to a feedback control
mechanism determines the position of the motor armature.
Shape-memory alloys Class of stimuli-responsive materials whose physical qualities have been
altered to give them dynamic shape “memory.” They have the ability of changing their shape upon
application of an external stimulus, such as heat, and can return to their original shape once the
stimuli is removed.
Show control A type of device connecting separate entertainment control systems for more than
one production element together into a “meta-system.”
Solenoid actuator A linear motion electromechanical device with a moving rod that either pulls
in or pushes out when provided electric current. A coil of wire inside the housing generates a
magnetic field in response to current, causing the iron rod to pull in or push away. Solenoids have
only two positions, either on or off.
Sonification The use of nonspeech audio to convey information. Relies on an interdisciplinary
approach to transform data relations into perceived auditory representations.
Spectral analysis Generally, a procedure that decomposes a time series into its component parts—
such as frequency or energy—arranged in a progressive series between two extreme or opposite
points. It is sometimes called spectrum analysis or frequency domain analysis.
Standing wave A wave pattern within a medium that appears to remain in a constant position. It
can be formed from the interference of two waves that are moving in opposite direction to one
another, or when a medium is moving in opposite direction to another wave traveling through it.
It is sometimes called a stationary wave.
Svoboda ramp A low voltage lighting ramp invented by Josef Svoboda, allowing a narrow
beam of intense light to be aimed with precision in order to create spectacular atmospheric
effects.
Thermachromic ink These inks or dyes temporarily change color due to a change of temperature.
Thrust stage A stage that extends into the audience portion of the theater, usually with seating
on three sides. An arena stage, by contrast, is surrounded by audience area on all sides and does
not have ready access to a backstage area.
Time code (TC) SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) Time Code was
originally developed in the 1960s to facilitate videotape editing. Used in live entertainment
environments to synchronize media and to trigger event-based systems, each frame of TC breaks
down into hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. There are two types—Linear Time Code (LTC) and
Vertical Interval Time Code (VITC).

Glossary

391
Ubiquitous computing Phrase coined by the late computer scientist Mark Weiser during his tenure
as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to describe a post-desktop
model of computing, where computation is embedded in the fabric of everyday life. It was first
described in a landmark article for Scientific American entitled “The Computer for the 21st
Century.”
Variable capacitor Small electronic devices that can store electric charge. The capacitance value of
a variable capacitor, sometimes called a “tuning capacitor,” can be mechanically or electronically
changed as needed; a useful feature for radio tuning circuits, for example.
VARI*LITE A moving lighting system and the first with automated variable-color control. Early
systems included computerized control consoles, color mixing using dichroic filters, and moving
mirror systems for repositioning the light. It premiered in 1981 during the opening night of the
“Abacab” tour by the British band Genesis, an early investor.
Vicon A commercially available digital optical and video camera–based motion capture and analy-
sis system introduced in its first marketed form in the mid-1980s.
Virtual reality (VR) A technology that allows one or more users to interact with an immersive,
highly visual, three-dimensional, computer-simulated environment. The environment may
be a simulation of a real or imaginary world. The origin of the term has mistakenly been attributed
to computer scientist Jaron Lanier. However, the first known usage of the phrase (if not the
technological meaning) derives from the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin
Artaud.
Von Neumann architecture Also known as a “stored-program digital computer,” it uses a
sequential processing unit (digital computer) and a single storage structure (memory) to hold both
instructions (a program) and data. It is named after the early computer scientist and mathematician
John von Neumann.
VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) A standard file format co-developed by Mark
Pesce in 1993 to represent three-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics in Web
browsers.

Glossary

392
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 Name Index

Abdoh, Reza, 141, 255–256 Artaud, Antonin, xxvi, xxxvii, 45–47, 57,
Abe, Shuya, 119, 126, 293 243–244, 256, 354n10
Abram, David, xxxi Arup, Ove, 101, 343
Abramović, Marina, 243–244 Ascott, Roy, 307, 381n12
Acconci, Vito, 116, 123, 243 Ashley, Mary, 199
Adams, John, 77, 202, 212–213 Ashley, Robert, 141, 197, 199–200, 202–203,
Adams, Matt, 327 206, 212, 372n37
Addington, Michelle, 104 Athey, Ron, 244, 375–376n24
Adigard, Erik, 341, 349 Auer, Tina, 333
Akalaitis, JoAnne, 58, 132, 141 Auinger, Sam, 213
Akufen, 214 Austin, John L., xxv–xxvi
Albers, Josef, 167, 236 Austin, Larry, 201
Albert-Birot, Pierre, 10 Avenstroup, Tone, 71
Al-Jazari, 279
Allen, Rebecca, 265 Babbitt, Milton, 191–192
Allio, René, 55–56 Babiole, Cécile, 341
Anceschi, Giovanni, 308 Bablet, Denis, 151, 166
Anderson, Laurie, xxiv, 141, 156–158, 211, Bacon, Francis, 164, 175
242 Baginsky, Nicolas Anatol, 287, 290–292
Andre, Carl, 216 Bähr, Hugo, 143, 147
Andriessen, Louis, 204 Bainbridge, Benton, 178
Antheil, George, 183 Baldessari, John, 123
Antunes, Jorge, 200 Ball, Hugo, 28
Appia, Adolphe, 5–7, 52, 149, 228–229 Balla, Giacomo, 9–10, 356n9
Arakawa, Shusaku, 226 Banes, Sally, 240, 242
Arford, Scott, 178 Banham, Reyner, 1, 8, 93, 363n13
Aristotle, xxvi, xxxvi, 373n7 Barad, Karen, xxvii, xxix–xxx, 354n19
Barba, Eugenio, 58 Boyle, Mark, 169
Bardiot, Clarisse, 314 Brakhage, Stan, 144
Barnes, Steve, 254 Brand, Stewart, 167
Barney, Matthew, 247–248 Brecht, Bertolt, xxxii, 36–37, 47, 49, 55–56,
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 58 58, 61–63, 65, 126, 128, 136, 147, 236,
Bartholl, Aram, 341 358n31, 361n15
Baudrillard, Jean, 287, 327 Brecht, Stefan, 58, 62
Bauermeister, Mary, 199 Breer, Robert, 314–315
Bausch, Pina, 255, 257–258 Brehms, Joan, 52–53
Beaman, Jeanne Hays, 265 Breitscheid, Andreas, 261
Beekman, Hans, 177 Breton, André, 44–45, 361n19
Behrman, David, 203, 206–207, 238, Bretschneider, Frank, 178
370n36 Breuer, Lee, 58, 132
Béjart, Maurice, 293 Brisley, Stuart, 243
Belson, Jordan, 168 Brittain, Donald, 172
Ben-Ary, Guy, 255 Brockman, John, 167–168, 307, 380n9
Bender, Olaf, 214 Broeckmann, Andreas, xxxiii, 305
Berg, Alban, 181 Bromberg, Ellen, 274
Berghaus, Günter, 9 Brook, Peter, 58, 70, 126, 141
Berghaus, Ruth, 63 Brown, Carol, 272
Berio, Luciano, 194, 198, 368n16 Brown, Chris, 207, 216
Betke, Stefan, 214 Brown, Trisha, 222, 227, 240–243, 245–246,
Betsky, Aaron, 349 248, 259, 268–269
Beuys, Joseph, 243 Bruce, Lenny, 136
Biggs, Simon, 272 Brucker-Cohen, Jonah, 346
Birdwhistell, Ray, xxv Bruges, Jason, 341
Birnbaum, Dara, 123, 140 Bruner, Jerome, xxvi
Birringer, Johannes, 263, 377n44 Brus, Günter, 243–244
Bischoff, John, 206–207, 216 Bryars, Gavin, 202
Bleeker, Julian, 346 Burden, Chris, 123, 243–244
Blossom, Robert, 154 Burian, E.F., 149–153, 159, 166
Boccioni, Umberto, 9 Burian, Jarka, 151, 153, 359n1
Boehmer, Konrad, 204 Burlyuk, David, 11
Boesche, John, 158–159 Burnham, Jack, xxxviii, 292, 304–305, 307,
Bohr, Niels, xxix–xxx 379n14
Bolaños, César, 200 Bury, Mark, 102
Bonačić, Vladimir, 107 Bush, Kate, 216
Bongers, Bert, 219 Butler, Judith, xxv–xxvii, xxix–xxx, 249
Bono, 142
Boriani, Davide, 308–309 Cacioppo, George, 197
Börlin, Jean, 44 Cage, John, 57, 117–118, 126, 154, 167–168,
Botschuijver, Theo, 97, 168 182, 191, 193–196, 198–199, 201,
Boulez, Pierre, 191–192, 194–195, 209–210 235–239, 241, 253, 264, 307, 313, 369n17,
Boykett, Tim, 333 369n18, 369n19, 375n19

Name Index

426
Cahill, Thaddeus, 183–185, 219 Clayton, Joshua Kit, 178, 214
Caillois, Roger, xxv Coates, George, 67, 69–70, 159
Calatrava, Santiago, 81, 101 Cohen, Milton, 154–156, 197
Calder, Alexander, 54 Collins, Susan, 297
Caldwell, Sarah, 126 Colombo, Gianni, 308–309
Callahan, Michael, 167 Coniglio, Mark, 210, 268–270
Callon, Michel, xxviii, xxix–xxx Conklin, John, 77
Calvert, Tom, 264 Connah, Roger, 84–85, 112
Campus, Peter, 123 Conquergood, Dwight, xxiv–xxv, xxx–xxxi
Camurri, Antonio, 262 Conrad, Erik, 346
Čapek, Karel, 30, 280 Cook, Peter, 92, 94, 110
Cardew, Cornelius, 198, 201, 203 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 193
Carpenter, Loren, 344 Copeland, Roger, 238, 264, 377n45
Carpenter, Rachel, 344 Corea, Chick, 202
Carter, Elliott, 191 Corra, Bruno, 8
Cascone, Kim, 214–216 Corsetti, Giorgio Barberio, 140
Caspersen, Dana, 259 Costible, Sue, 178
Cassen, Jackie, 168 Cowell, Henry, 187
Castellucci, Romeo, 71 Craig, Gordon, 52, 149, 234, 280
Castorf, Frank, 141 Cranko, John, 258
Catts, Oron, 255 Crary, Jonathan, 221
Censi, Giannina, 228 Crommelynck, Fernard, 18–19
Chadabe, Joel, 208–209, 217, 371n51, Crompton, Dennis, 92
371n55 Cross, Lowell, 315
Chafe, Chris, 216 Crowhurst, Donald, 163
Chaikin, Joseph, 126 Crumb, George, 198
Chalk, Warren, 92 Cubitt, Sean, 175
Chappe, Claude, 343 Čufer, Eda, 72
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 248 Cunningham, Merce, 126, 193, 196–197,
Chartier, Richard, 215 222, 235–239, 241, 264–265, 267, 375n17,
Chekhov, Anton, xiii, 135–136, 139 375n19, 375n20, 377n45
Chernetskaya, Inna, 232 Cutler, Chris, 216
Chernikov, Iakov, 88, 363n11
Childs, Lucinda, 77, 240–242 Dafoe, Willem, 135
Chion, Michel, 165 David, Michael, 128
Choinere, Isabelle, 273 Davies, Charlotte (Char), 336–337
Chong, Ping, 66, 141, 159 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 134, 198–199
Chouinard, Marie, 255 Davies, Siobhan, 266
Cifirino, Fabio, 139 Davis, Jim, 154
Claire, René, 44–45, 359n37 Davis, Miles, 202
Clark, Lygia, 245, 247 Dean, Max, 297–298
Clarke, Andy, 264 de Certeau, Michel, 344, 351
Claudel, Paul, 7 de Châtel, Krisztina, 273–274
Clayburgh, Jim, 135–136 Decker, Martina, 105

Name Index

427
de Costa, Beatriz, 254 Dunn, Robert, 239–240
Dehlholm, Kirsten, 71 Dupree, Taylor, 214–215
DeKam, Johnny, 178 Durkey, Steve, 167
de Keersmaker, Anna Teresa, 141
deLahunta, Scott, 263, 265–266 Eakins, Thomas, 224
De Landa, Manuel, 225 Eames brothers, 170
de Leeuw, Reinbert, 204 Eckert, Rinde, 213
Deleuze, Gilles, 164 Eco, Umberto, 303, 307–308
DeLillo, Don, 343 Edison, Thomas, 226
Delvoye, Wim, 298 Edler, Jan and Tim, 107, 110–111
de Maré, Rolf, 44 Ehlers, Ekkehard, 214
De Marinis, Paul, 341, 369n22, 370n41 Eimert, Herbert, 192
Demers, Louis-Philippe, 279, 295–297, Eisenman, Peter, 77
379n23 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17, 22–23, 114, 144
Depero, Fortunato, 10–11 Elsenaar, Arthur, 250
Derrida, Jacques, 77, 354n10 Eno, Brian, 202, 368n14
Dery, Mark, 104, 274, 284, 286 Erdman, Jerry, 316
Descartes, René, 221, 373n7 Erickson, Kristin, 214
De Vecchi, Gabriele, 308 Erickson, Robert, 213
Diaghilev, Sergei, 9 Eshkar, Shelly, 159, 267–268, 341
Dick, Philip K., 211 Etchells, Tim, 141
Diebner, Hans, xiii, xxx Etra, Bill, 121
Diebold, Bernhard, 41 Evans, Helen, 343
Diller, Elizabeth, 79–80, 104, 105–106, Evreinov, Nikolai, 17
141–142, 163, 258 Export, Valie, 123, 167, 243–244
Dilley, Barbara, 238
Dinkla, Söke, 321 Fabre, Jan, 255–256
Dipple, Kelli, 274 Fahlström, Oyvind, 242
Dmitriev, Vladimir, 18 Farabough, Laura, 67, 131, 330
Dohrn, Wolf, 6 Farr, Ju Row, 327
Dominguez, Ricardo, 254 Faulders, Thom, 104
Domnitch, Evelina, 178 Feenberg, Andrew, xxxv
Dove, Toni, 329–330 Fennesz, Christian, 214
Downie, Marc, 267–268 Fillion, Carl, 70
Dresher, Paul, 202, 213, 372n59 Finneran, Alan, 67
Druckery, Timothy, 175 Flamand, Frédéric, 80, 255, 258
Duchamp, Marcel, 44–45, 79, 234, 239, 267, Flanagan, Bob, 244–245
281–282, 359n37 Flanagan, Hallie, 148
Dufort, Louis, 178 Flaubert, Gustave, 136
Duncan, Isadora, 225–226, 228, 232, 235 Flavin, Dan, 216
Duncan, John, 287 Fleischmann, Monika, 324–325
Dunn, David, 301 Flusser, Villém, 56, 275
Dunn, Judith, 239–240 Flynn, Chip, 286–287, 378n9

Name Index

428
Foregger, Nikolai, 17, 22–24, 80, 233, Ginsberg, Allen, 128, 213
374n14 Ginsberg, Arthur, 128, 365n18
Foreman, Richard, 58, 60–62, 67, 158, Ginsberg, Marsha, 77
360n16 Ginzburg, Mosei, 87–88, 363n11
Forsythe, William, 102, 141, 222, 255, 258– Glass, Philip, 58–60, 159, 202–203,
261, 273, 339–340, 376n38 212–213, 370n39
Forti, Simone, 240, 242 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 7
Fortuny, Mariano, 26, 143 Goebbels, Heiner, 213
Foster, Sir Norman, 100 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 151
Foucault, Michel, 221 Goffman, Erving, xxiv–xxv
Fourier, Jean Baptiste, 183 Gold, Rich, 206, 370n41
Fournier, Colin, 110 Goldberg, Rose Lee, xxiv, 56–57, 80, 243,
Fox, Michael, 101 363n8
Freud, Sigmund, xxxi Goldman, Albert, 2
Freyer, Achim, 63 Goldstein, Malcolm, 237
Fried, Michael, xxiv, 364n7 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 253–254
Fuchs, Antje, 214 Gordon, Avery, 329
Fuchs, Georg, 17 Gordon, David, 240
Fuller, Loïe, 226–228, 246, 373n5, 373n6 Gordon, Mel, 233
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 99, 100–102, 167, Göring, Hermann, 287
135, 315, 363n16 Goulthorpe, Mark, 102–103
Furuhashi, Teiji, 74, 76 Graham, Bill, 169
Fusco, Coco, 253–254 Graham, Dan, 116, 125, 141
Graham, Martha, 235–236
Gabo, Naum, 15, 90, 281 Grainger, Percy, 187
Gabriel, Peter, 141, 216 Gray, Camilla, 16
Gaffney, Nik, 332 Gray, Spalding, 135
Galas, Diamanda, 175, 212 Greenaway, Peter, 159
Galasso, Michael, 202 Greenberg, Clement, xxiv
Gan, Alexei, 15, 87 Greene, David, 92, 363n12
Gance, Abel, 169 Greig, Edvard, 1
Ganson, Arthur, 297 Gresham-Lancaster, Scott, 216
Garin, Erast, 232 Griffiths, Paul, 194
Geertz, Clifford, xxiv Groeneveld, Dirk, 322
Gehry, Frank, 76–77, 81, 104 Gromala, Diane, 272
Gelfand, Dmitry, 178 Grooms, Red, 154
Gershwin, George, 187 Gropius, Walter, 35, 37–39, 42–44, 49, 84,
Gerz, Jochen, 123 359n34, 359n36
Gibson, Ruth, 272 Grosz, Georg, 29
Giedion, Sigfried, 280–281 Grotowski, Jerzy, 57–58, 126, 139, 360n10
Gilje, H.C., 178 Grüber, Klaus Michael, 63, 65
Gilpin, Heidi, 261 Guattari, Félix, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv, 85,
Gins, Madeline, 226 355n29

Name Index

429
Hadid, Zaha, 77, 81, 258 Hirsch, Nicole, 189
Haffner, Nik, 272 Hirsch, Shelly, 212
Hall, Edward T., 338 Hitchcock, Alfred, 186
Hall, Jeff, 273 Hoberman, Chuck, 101
Handke, Peter, 128–130 Hoberman, Perry, 324
Hansen, Al, 154 Hobijn, Eric, 287, 290–291
Hansen, Heiko, 343 Hobsbawm, Eric, v, 351
Hansen, Mark, 342 Hollein, Hans, 96–97
Hanslick, Eduard, 1 Holzer, Rainer Michael, 94
Haque, Usman, 341, 343 Horn, Rebecca, 222, 227, 245–247, 298–300
Harakami, Rei, 214 Horton, Jim, 206
Haraway, Donna, xxx, 222, 249, 354n19 Howes, David, xxxii
Hardman, Chris, 67–68, 131 Hrvatin, Emil, 72–73
Haring, Chris, 272 Hsuo-Hsei, Hsein, 243
Haring, Kristen, 371n48 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 28
Harrington, Wendall, 158 Hughes, Robert, 90
Hartley, Jan, 158 Huhtamo, Erkki, 305
Hašek, Gustav, 34 Huizinga, Johan, xxv, 339
Hattinger, Gottfried, 287 Hultén, Karl Pontus, 282
Hausmann, Raoul, 28 Hunt, Jerry, 212, 217
Hay, Alex, 240–241 Hwang, David Henry, 159
Hay, Deborah, 240–242 Hyde, Joseph, 266
Hayles, Katherine, 249
Hecker, Florian, 214 Iddon, Jamie, 327
Hecker, Tim, 214 Ihnatowicz, Edward, 294, 379n20
Heckert, Matt, 284, 287–290 Ikeda, Kazuo, 273
Hegedüs, Agnes, 323 Ikeda, Ryoji, 176–177, 214
Heidegger, Martin, xxxv Inoue, Tesuo, 214
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 183, 222 Irwin, Bill, 141
Hemment, Drew, 346 Irwin, Robert, 307, 381n10
Hendrix, Jimi, 169, 202 Isaacson, Leonard, 205
Henry, Pierre, 192, 293 Israel, Robert, 77
Hentschläger, Kurt, 165, 174–175 Ito, Toyo, 81, 106–109
Hermann, Karl-Ernst, 63–65 Itten, Johannes, 37
Heron of Alexandria, 279
Herron, Ron, 92–94, 101 Jacobs, Henry, 168
Herzog, Jacques, 81, 362n31 Jacques-Dalcroze, Emile, 5–7, 228–229
Higgins, Dick, 199 Jährling, Rolf, 117–118
Hill, Gary, 140, 158 Jameson, Fredric, 66
Hiller, Lejaren, 168, 205 Jaspers, Karl, xxxv
Hills, Joan, 169 Jencks, Charles, 100
Hilton, Guy, 266 Jesurun, John, 66, 132
Hindemith, Paul, 186 Jeyasingh, Shobana, 266

Name Index

430
Jobs, Steve, 69 Kolarevic, Branko, 84, 88
Johns, Jasper, 238–239 Kondek, Chris, 136, 138
Johnson, Philip, 76 Köner, Thomas, 214
Jonas, Joan, 116, 123–124 Koolhaas, Rem, 76, 81
Jones, Bill T., 267 Korot, Beryl, 141, 213
Jones, Inigo, 3 Kostelanetz, Richard, 57
Jones, Robert Edmond, 148–149, 151 Kouril, Miroslav, 151
Jones, Wes, 101 Kozel, Susan, 271, 274, 337–338
Judd, Donald, 242 Kramer, Gustav, 281
Kramm, Rüdiger, 108
Kac, Eduardo, 250, 297 Krammer, Michael, 174
Kafka, Franz, 296 Krasner, Sarah, 163
Kagel, Mauricio, 194, 198–199 Kresnik, Johann, 255
Kaiser, Paul, 159, 267–268, 341 Krinsky, Vladimir, 87
Kalfin, Robert, 128 Kroitor, Roman, 170–172
Kandinsky, Wassily, 9, 37, 63 Kruchenyk, Alexei, 11–12
Kantor, Istvan (Monty Cantsin), 289–290 Krueger, Myron, xxxix, 96, 316–321,
Kaplicky, Jan, 94 324–325, 328
Kaprow, Allan, 57, 154–155, 305, 307, 380n4 Krueger, Ted, 297
Karasic, Carmen, 254 Krutikov, Georgii, 88–90, 100
Karkowsky, Zbigniew, 217 Kuchelmeister, Volker, 259
Kaufman, Murray the K, 167 Kurokawa, Ryoichi, 178
Keller, Ed, 338 Kurtz, Steve, 254
Kelp, Günter Zamp, 96 Kusaite, Lina, 332
Kemeny, Alfred, 39–40 Kusch, Martin, 270–271
Kennedy, John F., 293 Kuzmanovic, Maja, 332
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 11, 13–14 Kwinter, Sanford, 85, 221
Kiesler, Frederick, 30–32, 44, 280, 357n23,
358n24, 358n26, 358n27 Laban, Rudolf von, 229–231, 233, 259,
King, Kenneth, 240 373n8, 374n9, 374n10
Kirby, Michael, 57–58, 139, 154, 156, 169, Ladovsky, Nikolai, 87, 363n10
380n2 Langheinrich, Ulf, 165, 174–175
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, xii–xiii Latour, Bruno, xxvii–xxix, xxxi–xxxii,
Kittler, Friedrich, 163 xxxv–xxxvi, 354n18, 355n29
Klee, Paul, 37–38 Laurel, Brenda, xxxv, 321, 355n31, 355n32
Klein, Yves, xxiv, 243 Lavinskii, Anton, 88, 90
Kleist, Heinrich von, 234, 280, 329 Law, John, xxviii–xxix
Klutsis, Gustav, 88 Leary, Timothy, 136
Klüver, Billy, 196, 237–238, 241, 282–283, Leatherbarrow, David, 83
312, 314–315, 381n19 LeCompte, Elizabeth, xiii, 135, 137–138
Knorr-Cetina, Karin, xxvii Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris),
Knowlton, Ken, 167 4, 87, 93, 99, 107, 189, 191, 205, 293,
Koch, Kenneth, 283 368n12

Name Index

431
Léger, Fernand, 183, 233–234, 281 Mahieu, Stefan, 214
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 71 Maleczech, Ruth, 58, 132–133
Lemieux, Michel, 273–274 Malevich, Kazimir, 11–13, 20, 63, 72,
Lenin, Vladimir, 15, 187, 357n15 356n11
Lepage, Robert, 70–71, 141, 159, 296, Malone, Kirby, 158
362n25, 362n26 Man Ray, 44–45
Lepka, Hubert, 255 Mansbach, Stephen, 25
Le Vasseur, Paul, 265 Manson, Caden, 161–162
Levin, Golan, 178 Manthey, Axel, 63
Levine, Les, 117 Manzoni, Piero, 243
Lewis, George, 207, 209–210, 368n17 Marclay, Christian, 216
Lewis, Jason, 346 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 222–225, 234, 266,
Libeskind, Daniel, 77, 81, 261 276, 373n2
Lichtenstein, Roy, 63, 111 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7–8, 11, 86,
Licklider, J. C. R., 306 227–228, 356n6
Lieberman, Frederick, 237 Maris, Bastiaan, 290, 378n12
Lieberman, Zachary, 178 Marker, Chris, 133
Lintermann, Bernd, 272, 323 Marranca, Bonnie, xxxvii, 58, 60, 361n18
Lippard, Lucy, 305, 354n9 Martelli, Bruno, 265, 272
Lissitzky, Lazar (El), 20–22, 38, 44, 50, Martenot, Maurice, 186, 219
83–84, 87–89, 296, 363n10 Martin, Andrée, 274
Littlewood, Joan, xvi, 310–312, 316 Martin, Tony, 169, 315
Livshits, Benedikt, 11–12 Marussich, Yann, 250–251
Lloyd, Christopher, 128–130 Massumi, Brian, 252
Lock, Édouard, 256 Matta, Roberto, 98
Loew, Heinz, 42–43, 61, 166, 359n35 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 98–99
Lopez, Francisco, 214 Matthews, Max, 205, 237–238, 370n43,
Lozano–Hemmer, Rafael, 339 371n45, 372n67
Lucier, Alvin, 201–202 Matthews, Stanley, 311
Ludwig II, 2 Matyushin, Mikhail, 11–12
Luening, Otto, 192 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 11, 134
Luhmann, Niklas, 105 Mayer H., Jürgen, 105
Lumière brothers, 114, 358n29 Mayne, Thom, 81, 258
Lüsebrink, Dirk, 325 McAnuff, Des, 141
Lynn, Greg, 349 McCall, Anthony, 167
Lysowski, Lukas, 178 McCarthy, Paul, 243
McCartney, James, 214
Maas, Winy, 343 McCormick, John, 274
Machover, Tod, 209, 211–212, 217 McCullough, Warren, 279, 306
Maciunas, George, 117 McGonigal, Jane, 345
MacMurtrie, Chico, 287, 295 McGregor, Wayne, 266, 272
Madan, Emmanuel, 289–290 McGuire, Matthew, 79
Maeda, John, 178 McIntosh, Thomas, 289–290

Name Index

432
McLuhan, Marshall, 58, 96, 128, 167, 307 Mumma, Gordon, 126, 194, 197, 199,
McManus, Thomas, 272 237–239
Mehring, Walter, 34 Munari, Bruno, 277, 280, 303
Mekas, Jonas, 156, 167, 241 Munkacsi, Kurt, 203
Méliès, Georges, 114 Musafar, Fakir, 244, 252
Melnikov, Konstantin, 87–89 Musgrave, Chris, 178
Mendelsohn, Erich, 65 Muthesius, Hermann, 25, 356n5
Mendieta, Ana, 123 Muybridge, Eadweard, 223–225, 234, 266
Mengelberg, Misha, 204 Myers, Forest, 314
Menicacci, Armando, 263
Menotti, Gian Carlo, 293 Nakaya, Fujiko, 105, 242, 315
Merrit, Just, 287, 333 Nameth, Ronald, 168
Messiaen, Olivier, 78, 134, 186, 191, 205 Naugle, Lisa, 266, 274–275
Metzger, Gustav, 284 Nauman, Bruce, 116, 123–125, 131, 133,
Meuron, Pierre de, 81, 362n31 238, 243
Meyer, Florian, 273 Neher, Caspar, 63, 147
Meyer, Hannes, 39 Neill, Ben, 217
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich, 16–22, 24, Nelson, Richard, xxxi
33–35, 44, 49, 73, 144–145, 147, 159, Newman, Barnett, 60, 63
232–233, 357n15, 358n30, 359n36 Nezvanova, Netochka, 177
Milhaud, Darius, 186 Nicolai, Carsten, 214
Miller, Arthur, 135–136, 154 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 338–339, 350, 352
Miller, Sean Wellesley, 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 284
Minks, Wilfried, 63 Nijinska, Bronislava, 233
Minsky, Marvin, 212 Nikolais, Alwin, 293
Miyake, Issey, 248 Nitsch, Hermann, 243–244
Moholy-Nagy, László, 31, 34, 37–41, 44, 50, Nixon, David, 94
53, 281, 296 Noll, A. Michael, 265
Möller, Christian, 108, 341 Nono, Luigi, 126, 369n24
Molnár, Farkas, 39, 41–42 Noordung, Herman Potocnik, 72
Monahan, Gordon, 288, 290 Nouvel, Jean, 102, 258
Monk, Meredith, 66, 240 Novak, Marcos, 272
Montano, Linda, 243 Nyman, Michael, 191, 193, 202
Moog, Robert, 237–238
Moorman, Charlotte, 119–120, 293, 369n27 Obama, Barack, x
Mori, Mariko, 249 Obarzanek, Gideon, 270
Moriwaki, Katherine, 346 Obermaier, Klaus, 272
Morris, Robert, 238, 375n20 Odenbach, Marcel, 123
Morse, Margaret, 124, 303 Odland, Bruce, 213
Muehl, Otto, 243–244 Offenbach, Jacques, 41
Müller, Heiner, 63–64, 141, 213 Oiticica, Hélio, 245, 247
Müller, Traugott, 34–35, 146, 151 Olinder, Laurie, 158
Mumford, Lewis, 228 Oliveros, Pauline, 201, 213, 370n41, 375n20

Name Index

433
O’Neill, Eugene, 135–136, 148 Pinter, Klaus, 96
Oosterhuis, Kas, 101–102 Pintile, Lucien, 141
Oppenheim, Dennis, 243 Piscator, Erwin, 32–26, 41–44, 49,
Orff, Carl, 154 55–56, 144, 146–148, 151–152, 154,
Orlan, 222, 244, 248–249, 376n30 159, 358n29, 358n30, 358n31, 359n32,
Ortner, Laurids, 96 366n34
Ortner, Manfred, 96 Pitts, Water, 279, 306
Ostertag, Bob, 216–217 Planchon, Roger, 55–56, 71
Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 23 Plant, Sadie, 249
Oswald, John, 216 Platel, Alain, 255
Otto, Frei, 99–100 Plessi, Fabrizio, 140
Oudin, Michel, 53 Poelzig, Max, 26–27, 33
Oursler, Tony, 158 Poletti, Manuel, 261
Polieri, Jacques, 53–56, 113, 159
Pagano, Scott, 178 Pollesch, René, 141
Page, Ashley, 266 Pollock, Jackson, 244
Paik, Nam June, 116, 117–120, 122–123, Popova, Lyubov, 16, 18–20, 22, 31, 145
126, 199, 237, 293–294, 307, 364n9, Popper, Frank, 281, 307
364n10, 379n19 Poulin, Marie-Claude, 270–271
Palazhy, Jayachandran, 273 Pousseur, Henri, 194
Pane, Gina, 243–244 Powderly, James, 341
Paquet, Alfons, 33 Prampolini, Enrico, 9–11, 31, 86, 356n8,
Paradiso, Joseph, 262 356n9
Pask, Gordon, 307, 310–312 Preston, Travis, 141
Pauline, Mark, 284–286 Price, Cedric, xvi, 310–312, 316
Paulos, Eric, 285, 346 Prix, Wolf D., 81, 94
Paxton, Steve, 240–243, 313–314 Puckette, Miller, 209, 214, 371n54
Penny, Simon, 279, 297–298
Perkis, Tim, 216 Quinz, Emanuel, 263
Perle, George, 191
Perloff, Marjorie, 13 Raaijmakers, Dick, 198, 204
Pevsner, Antoine, 15 Rabanne, Paco, 248
Peymann, Claus, 63 Radok, Alfred, 50, 152–154, 170
Philips, Frits, 189 Radok, Emil, 170, 172
Philips, Nick, 324 Rainer, Arnulf, 243
Philon of Byzantium, 279 Rainer, Yvonne, 222, 240–243
Piano, Renzo, 99, 104, 108 Ralske, Kurt, 178
Picabia, Francis, 44–45, 281 Rancière, Jacques, 306
Picasso, Pablo, 281 Rasch, Bodo, 100
Pickering, Andrew, xxix–xxx, 354n19, Rauschenberg, Robert, 196–197, 238,
379n23 241–242, 305, 307, 312–313, 381n15
Picon-Vallin, Béatrice, 131 Reagan, Ronald, 66, 203, 244
Pilon, Victor, 273–274 Reaney, Mark, 159

Name Index

434
Recalcati, Antonio, 65 Sacks, Oliver, 141
Reder, Bernard, 53 Sadao, Shoji, 100
Rehberg, Peter, 214 Saitowitz, Stanley, 104
Reich, Steve, 141, 202–203, 212–213, Sala, Oskar, 186
370n40 Salk, Jonas, xxviii
Reichardt, Jasia, xxxviii, 277, 279, 294–295, Salter, Chris, 330, 341
307 Salzman, Eric, 198, 369n28
Reinhardt, Max, 26–27, 52 Sandin, Dan, 316
Reynolds, Roger, 197 Sangiorgi, Leonardo, 139
Rheingold, Howard, 344 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 86, 89
Richter, Hans, 45 Satie, Erik, 44–45, 239
Richter, Otto, 36 Saup, Michael, 325–327
Riley, Terry, 201–203, 213, 381n9 Sauter, Joachim, 325–326
Rinaldo, Ken, 297–298 Savoie, Pierre-Paul, 273
Rinke, Klaus, 243 Scanner, 178, 215
Ristow, Christian, 286 Scavarda, Donald, 197
Roca, Marcel.lí Antúnez, 249–250 Scha, Remko, 250
Rockmore, Clara, 187 Schaeffer, Pierre, 189, 191–192, 368n14
Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 13, 15–16 Schall, Hans Dieter, 63
Rogala, Miroslaw, 324 Schat, Peter, 204
Rogers, Richard, 99, 104 Schechner, Richard, xxiv–xxvii, xxxiv, 58,
Rokeby, David, 177, 328–329 135–136, 304–305, 313
Ronell, Avital, 249 Scheerbart, Paul, 27
Rosa, Paolo, 139 Schiller, Gretchen, 338
Rosch, Eleanor, xxvi Schillinger, Joseph, 181, 187
Rose, Barbara, 315 Schiphorst, Thecla, 264, 337
Rose, Charles, 69 Schlee, Bev, 254
Rose, Jon, 217 Schlemmer, Oskar, 37, 39, 41, 44, 57, 80,
Rose, Jürgen, 63 233–234, 265, 374–375n15
Rose, Sherrie, 245 Schneemann, Carolee, 155–156
Rosenbach, Ulrike, 123 Schoenberg, Arnold, 181, 193
Rosler, Martha, 116, 123, 364n8 Schöffer, Nicolas, 107, 292–293, 307, 379n16
Ross, Charles, 240 Schottstaedt, Bill, 209
Roth, Evan, 341 Schwartz, Barry, 291
Rothko, Mark, 63 Schwartz, Hillel, 225
Rovan, Butch, 217 Schwarzkogler, Rudolf, 243–244
Rubin, Ben, 142, 341–343 Schwitters, Kurt, 29, 31, 57
Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 18 Scofidio, Ricardo, 79–80, 104, 105–106,
Rueb, Terri, 346 141–142, 163, 258
Russolo, Luigi, 182–183, 188, 192 Searle, John R., xxv
Rutt, Steve, 121 Sebök, Stefan, 39
Ryan, Joel, 206, 208, 261, 332 Sellars, Peter, 77–78, 133–135, 365n23,
Rzewski, Frederick, 201, 370n30 366n43

Name Index

435
Semper, Gottfried, 3 Stelarc (Steladiou Arcadiou), 222, 243–244,
Sender, Ramon, 192, 201 251–252, 255
Senttimelli, Emilio, 8 Stepanova, Varvara, 15
Serlin, Jerome, 158–159 Stern, Gerd, 167, 367n44
Serlio, Sebastiano, 3 Stern, Rudi, 168
Sermon, Paul, 274 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 117, 191–192,
Serres, Michel, 119 194–195, 198–199, 201, 369n25
Sessions, Roger, 191–192 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy), 249
Sha, Xin Wei, 330 Stone, Carl, 216
Shakespeare, William, 65, 134, 139 Stone, Phil, 216
Shank, Ted, 66 Stoppiello, Dawn, 268
Shanken, Edward, 307 Strauss, Richard, 186
Shannon, Claude, 306 Strauss, Wolfgang, 324–325
Sharir, Yacov, 272 Stravinsky, Igor, 9, 77, 182–183
Shaw, Jeffrey, 97–98, 139, 168, 321–324 Strindberg, August, 143
Shawn, Ted, 225 Stuart, Meg, 141
Siegel, Marcia, 238 Subotnick, Morton, 192, 201, 209–210, 212
Sifuentes, Roberto, 253 Suchman, Lucy, xxxiv
Simon, Herbert, 296 Summers, Elaine, 240–241
Simon, Michael, 261 Sun Ra, 202
Singer, Brooke, 346 Sutherland, Ivan, 306, 316
Skryiabin, Aleksandr, 4 Suzuki, D.T., 193
Sky, Helen, 274 Svoboda, Josef, xxxvii, 49–53, 69, 126–127,
Smith, Peyton, 135 130, 152–154, 159, 170–172, 359n1,
Smith, Roberta, 248 359–360n3
Snelson, Kenneth, 100 Sweeney, Skip, 128, 365n18
Snow, Michael, 144, 167 Swiczinsky, Helmut, 81, 94
Soane, John, 83
Sokolov, Ippolit, 233 Tairov, Aleksandr, 17, 22
Solnit, Rebecca, 223 Takatani, Shiro, 176
Sonami, Laetitia, 217–219 Takeya, Akemi, 164, 175
Sontag, Susan, 47 Tambelini, Aldo, 168
Sparacino, Flavia, 262 Tanaka, Atau, 217–218
Spector, Nancy, 298 Tandavanitj, Nic, 327
Speer, Albert, 107 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 85
Spelletich, Kal, 286 Tatlin, Vladimir, 13–15, 30, 72, 84, 88–91,
Spiller, Neil, 85 107
Spoerri, Daniel, 282 Taut, Bruno, 27–28
St. Denis, Ruth, 225 Taylor, Frederick W., 230, 232–233, 374n11
Stalbaum, Brett, 254 Taylor, Mark C., 106–107
Stalin, Josef, 24, 34, 153, 187 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 1
Stanford, Leland, 224 Tenney, James, 237, 371n45
Stein, Peter, 63, 65 Terran, Michelle, 346

Name Index

436
Teshigawara, Saburo, 255, 258 Van Hove, Ivo, 141
Tessenow, Heinrich, 6 van Overmeier, Mark, 255
TeZ, 178 van Vlijmen, Jan, 204
Tharp, Twyla, 265 Varela, Francisco, xxvi, 352, 378n3, 382n27
Theremin, Léon, 186–187, 319, 368n9 Varèse, Edgard, 4, 186, 188–192, 194, 205,
Thomas, Dave, 314 219, 368n11
Thompson, D’Arcy, 99 Varisco, Grazia, 308
Thompson, Emily, 182 Vasarely, Victor, 111
Thompson, Evan, xxvi Vasulka, Steina, 116, 120–121, 123, 341,
Thompson, Francis, 170–171 365n20
Thomsen, Mette Ramsgard, 101 Vasulka, Woody, 120–122, 300–302, 364n13,
Thorpe, Marc, 286, 387n10 380n26.
Tinguely, Jean, 241, 277, 281–284 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 279
Toller, Ernst, 34 Vawter, Ron, 135, 139
Tolstoy, Alexei, 34 Venezsky, Richard, 316
Tone, Yasunao, 215 Vercoe, Barry, 214
Trautwein, Friedrich, 186, 219 Verdi, Giuseppe, 52
Trayle, Mark, 216 Vertov, Dziga, 144
Tretyakov, Sergei, 19–21, 23, 145 Vesnin, Aleksandr, 22, 84, 87–89
Tschumi, Bernard, xxxvii, 77, 85, 107, 141, Vesnin, Leonid, 87–89
363n8, 364n19 Vesnin, Viktor, 87–89
Tsypin, George, 77–78, 134 Viebrock, Anne, 77
Tuchman, Maurice, 307 Viola, Bill, 123, 133, 142, 160–161, 163,
Tudor, David, 126, 194–197, 199, 201, 365n16, 369n22
237–239, 242, 314–315 Virilio, Paul, 8, 163
Turner, Victor, xxiv–xxv Vitruvius, 84
Turrell, James, 307, 381n10 von Hausswolff, Carl Michael, 214
Tuters, Marc, 346 von Neumann, John, 279
Twain, Mark, 1 von Salzmann, Alexander, 6–7
Tzara, Tristan, 28–29, 44 Vorn, Bill, 295–296, 379n23
Vostell, Wolf, 117, 122–123
Ulay, 243
Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 192 Wagner, Richard, xxxvi, 1–7, 9, 26, 29,
36–37, 39, 43, 47, 52, 58, 62, 143, 149,
Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 17 160, 284, 355–356n2, 356n3, 360n5
Valk, Kate, 135–137 Waisvisz, Michel, 204–205, 217
Van Belle, Guy, 216 Ward, Adrian, 266
van de Akker, Ruud, 136 Warhol, Andy, 63, 117, 168, 238
Vandekybus, Wim, 255–256 Wasik, Bill, 344–345
VanDerBeek, Stan, 126, 167–168, 174, 237 Waters, Muddy, 169
van der Heide, Edwin, 217 Watt, James, 222
van der Heide, Rogier, 343 Webb, Mike, 92, 94
van Hoogstraten, Samuel, 339 Weber, Carl, 128–130

Name Index

437
Webern, Anton, 181 Yoshihide, Otomo, 216
Wechsler, Robert, 270 Young, La Monte, 201–203
Wedekind, Frank, 151 Youngblood, Gene, 156, 167
Weems, Marianne, 162 Yutkevich, Sergei, 22–23, 80
Wegman, William, 243
Weibel, Peter, 123, 167, 243–244, 287, 308 Z, Pamela, 212, 217
Weill, Kurt, 147 Zadek, Peter, 63
Weininger, Andreas, 42–43, 53 Zambello, Francesca, 78
Weiss, Frieder, 270 Zappa, Frank, 202
Wen-Chung, Chou, 188 Zicarelli, David, 214
Werner, Eric, 284 Ziegler, Christian, 259, 266, 273–274
White, Norman, 297–298 Zivadinov, Dragan, 71–73
Whiting, Jim, 187 Zuk, William, 99
Whitman, Robert, 154–156, 242, 314 Zurr, Ionat, 255
Whitney, John, Jr., 169
Whitney, John, Sr., 169
Whitney, Michael, 169
Wiener, Norbert, 292, 306–307
Wigman, Mary, 225, 229
Wilder, Thornton, 135–136
Willems, Thom, 261
Williams, Heathcoat, 128
Williams, Tennessee, 154
Wilson, Robert, 58–63, 67, 70–71, 158, 267,
360n12, 361n19
Winkler, Todd, 341
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 339
Wolofsky, Zella, 264
Wonder, Erich, 63–64, 66, 361n20
Woodruff, Robert, 141
Woods, Lebbeus, 94
Woolford, Kirk, 80, 271–272
Woolgar, Steve, xxviii
Wortzel, Adrianne, 297
Wray, Stefan, 254
Wright, Wilbur, 225
Wynne-Wilson, Peter, 169

Xenakis, Iannis, 4, 189, 191–192, 205, 214,

372n61

Yakult, Jud, 167–168

Yalter, Nil, 123

Name Index

438
 Subject Index

Absolute Threshold, The, 290 Aegis Hyposurface (Goulthorpe), 102–103

Accumulation (T. Brown), 242, 375n21 Aerodanze (Censi), 228
Acousmatic, 192, 293, 368n15 Aesthetic experience, xxi, 241, 351
Acoustics Krueger’s definition, 317–318
relation with electronic sound, 195, 201 Aesthetics and Computation Group. See
Wagner’s use of, 3 (see also Point source) MIT Media Lab
Actant, 82, 85 “Aesthetics of failure” (Cascone), 215–216
defined, xxviii Affect
human performance and, xxix, 115, 289 in Francis Bacon’s work, 164
relationship to actor-networks and, xxviii production of, through technology, xxi, 125,
Active Ingredient, 346 173, 227
Actor and the Über-marionette (Craig), 280 Ag4 Mediatechture, 108
Actor Network Theory (ANT) Agency
Latour’s definition of, xxviii–xxix nonhuman and, xxx, xxxii, 103, 379n23
misunderstanding of, 354n18 political framing of, xxv, xxviii, xxix, 251
Actors Video Workshop, 122. See also technological enunciation of, 103, 329,
The Kitchen 331–332, 338, 355n21
Actuator Agential realism (Barad), xxix–xxx
in body-based performance, 249–250 Agitprop, 33–34, 147, 311
defined, 383 Aleatoric, 194, 283. See also Chance
to generate machine movement, 288, 291, procedures; Indeterminacy
295 Algorithm, xxxiii, 101, 330, 352
use in architecture, 101, 352 control of machines through, 288, 300,
use in Tudor’s Rainforest, 139 (see also Motor; 309
Sensing technologies) defined, 383
AdaPT (Association for Dance and music composition and, 178, 205, 217
Performance Telematics), 274 use in dance, 222, 242, 267, 330, 342
A-Life (Artificial Life), 296, 298, 381, 383 technical, 3, 11, 26, 34, 41, 44, 57, 90, 114,
Alles ist Architektur (Hollein), 96 130–131, 136, 166, 172, 181, 197, 221,
Allman Brothers Band, 202 228, 254, 319–320, 324, 334, 337, 352,
Alloplastic, 103, 249 359n32, 359n35, 368n14
Ambienti Interattivi (Gruppo T), 308 Apparition (Obermaier), 272
American Music Theater Festival, 211 Apple Computer, 69, 173, 177, 206, 214, 322
Amériques (Varèse), 188–189 Archigram, 92–95, 98–99, 101, 310, 363n12,
AMM, 201, 203, 370n31 363n13
Amorphic Robot Works (MacMurtrie), 295 Architectural body, 226
Ampex Corporation, 115 Architecture
Analytic postmodern (dance), 242 event and, 84–85, 92–99
Anamorphic lens, 152, 383 movement and, 86–92, 99–102
Anarchitecture, 98 relationship to performance and, 82–84
Animatronics, 286 responsiveness and materiality, 103–106
Animism screen versus scene and, 106–112
and inanimate, xxiii, xxxi–xxxiii, 30, 238, surface and, 83–84, 106–107
242 Architectures of Disappearance, 261
machines and, 279, 302 Archizoom, 92
matter as, xxxi, 100 Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies
the nonhuman and, xxvii, xxxi in the Arts, 263
Ann Arbor, Michigan, as experimental Ars Electronica Festival, 64, 111, 174, 176,
performance center, 155, 197, 199–200, 178, 287, 331, 344
370n36 Art and Technology Program at LACMA,
Anomos, 263 307
Antenna Theater, 67–69 ART COM, 325–326, 341
Ant Farm, 123 Arte Programatta (Eco), 303, 308
Anthropology Artificial Neural Network (ANN), 291, 383
animism and, xxxi–xxxii Artificial Reality I and II (Krueger), 320
performative turn in, xxiv Art of Noise (band), 216
symmetrical, xxxii Art of Noises, The (Russolo), 182
Apparatus. See also Machine; Projection Arts de la scène, 306
Brecht’s notion of, 36 Art Zoyd, 296
image media and, 107, 123, 221, 223, 252, ASCII, 279, 289
257, 276, 340, 373n2, 380n26 defined, 383
mechanical forms of, 277, 282, 295, 298, as visual aesthetic, 178, 272
318, 336 ASNOVA (Association of New Architects),
political machinery of, 304 87, 363n10
projection technology as, 25, 34, 39, 43, Association Creation, 341
143, 153, 175–176 Asymptote Architecture, 349
in science, 35, 60, 234 Audio-Visual Environmental Suite (Levin), 178
sound making and, 183–184, 187, 290 Ausdruckstanz, 229
stage as, xxii, xxxii, xxxvi, 8–9, 17, 30, 41, Autechre, 214
50, 53, 56, 150 Auteur, stage director as, 56, 61–62

Subject Index

440
Auto destructive art, 284 Biotechnology
Automata. See also Robots; Puppets and biochemical choreography, 250–251
mechanical types of, 277, 281, 298, 300–301 in body based performance, 376n33
von Neumann’s concept of, 279 Critical Art Ensemble’s critique of, 254
Autonomous digital creatures, 268 Tissue Art and Culture and, 255
Autoplastic, 103 Birth of the World (Svoboda/Radok), 170
Autopoiesis, 354n12, 378n3 BIX façade, 110–111
Avouer le théâter, 56 Black Mountain College, 167, 236
Blast Theory, 327, 346–347
Background subtraction, 319, 384. See also Bleu Remix (Marussich), 250–251
Computer vision techniques Blob architecture, 101, 110,
Bähr disk, 143, 147 Body
Baktruppen, 71 conditioning through techniques, 228–229,
Ballet Méchanique (Antheil/Léger), 183, 258–261
233–234 cyborg and, 249
Ballets Russes, 9 ethnic identity and, 253
Ballets Suédois, 44–45 extension, prosthesics and, 221, 245, 252,
Bardo, 85 272
Bauhaus hybridity and, 253–255
Kunst und Technik—eine neue Einheit, 37 implants and, 221–222, 248–249
move to Dessau, 37–38 machine and, 227–234
origins of, 37 marking of, 223–224
total theaters of, 41–44 Muybridge’s gridding of, 224
Bauhaus Dances (Schlemmer), 234 reaching physical limits through
Bayreuther Festspielhaus, 1, 3, 355n2 performance, 247, 255–258
Beatles, 202 self-mutilation of, 243–245
Bell Labs, 167, 189, 196, 241, 265, 282. technological manipulation of, 245–252
See also E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Body-centric interfaces, 324
Technology) Bodymaps: artifacts of touch (Schiphorst), 337
involvement in computer sound, 205–206, Body suspension pieces, 252
371n45 Bolshevik (October) revolution, 15, 24
support of artists, 167, 307 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical
Benday dots, 111, 384 Devices, The (Al-Jazari), 279
Berliner Ensemble, 128 Brain Opera (Machover), 212
Berlin Free Zone and Zagreb Free Zone (Woods), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 156
94 Next Wave Festival, 66, 366n42
Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science Brotherhood, The (W. Vasulka), 300–302
and Technology (Burnham), 292 Brotherhood of Light, 169
Big Art Group, 141, 161–163 Brussels World’s Fair (1958), 4, 152, 189.
Biomechanics, 333 See also Philips Corporation
as body training system, 18, 228, 374n12 Buddhism, 57, 85, 118, 193
Meyerhold’s notion of, 232 Bühnenraum, 63
Biomimetic, 332 Builder’s Association, 141, 159, 161–163

Subject Index

441
Building skins, xxxiv Chunky Move, 270
electronics in architecture and, 107–108, Cinefication, 143–144, 149
110–111 Cinema. See also Cinefication; Cinemazation
Fuller’s U.S. Pavilion in Montréal, 99–102 Constructivism and, 144–145
Bunraku, 279 early origins in relationship to theater and,
Burning Man festival, 286 114
Butoh, 258 Piscator’s work and, 146–147
Byetone, 178 Cinematic bunraku, 329
CINEMATRIX Audience Participation System
C3I, 300 (Carpenter), 344
Capacitance sensor. See Sensing technologies Cinemazation, 23
Carbone, 14, 159, 255 Circle Vision 360, 172
Cartridge Music (Cage), 194–195 Circuit bending, 195, 204–205
Catherine Wheel, The (Tharp), 265 Circus, 8, 26, 148, 237, 351. See also “Theater,
CAVE (Cave Audio-Visual Experience Circus, Variety”
Automatic Virtual Environment), 323 influence on Constructivist stage, 17, 22–23,
CCRMA (Stanford), 206, 209, 216 233
CCTV CIRMMT (McGill University), 217
defined, 384 Cirque du Soleil, 4, 274
in live performance contexts, 124, 128–129, City of Abstracts (Forsythe), 340–341
132 City of the Future (Lavinskii), 88
Svoboda’s use of, 126–127 CIVIL wars, The (Wilson), 60
Cena 11, 255 CLAEM (Latin American Higher Studies
CGI (Computer Graphic Image), 161, 163 Musical Centre), 200
Chance procedures, 306 Cloaca (Delvoye), 298
Cage’s use of, 193–194 Closed loop system, 384
Cunningham and, 236 CNMAT (Berkeley), 217
Chang in a Void Moon (Jesurun), 132 CNN, 134–135, 142
Chaos Computer Club, 111 Cognitive science, xxvi, 262, 306.
Charleroi Dances/Plan K, 80 See also Representation
Chelsea Theater Center, 127 Cold War, 277 (see also Military)
AC/DC, 128 cultural climate of, 304
Kaddish, 128 and military technology, 294, 300, 306,
Kaspar, 128–129 380n25
Choreographic objects, 340 Coldcut, 178
Choreography. See also Chance procedures Color inversion, 127, 384
external systems and, 230–235 Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center,
in relationship to computers, 236–239, 192
261–273 Command line, 209, 387
Choreology, 228–229. See also Choreutics; Compagnie C de la B, 255
Effort Company in Space, 274
Choreutics, 228–229, 231 Composers Inside Electronics, 197, 201,
Chronophotography, 223 369n22s

Subject Index

442
Computation Correalism, 32
body and, 221, 252, 260–263 Cosmokinetical Cabinet Noordung Theater,
control and, xxxviii, 292, 302, 332–333 72–73
image manipulation and, 115, 152, 161, 324 Coup de théâter, 7, 12, 361n20
materials and, 103–104 Cracklebox, 204–205
mechanical and, xiii, xv Creation Production Company, 79
performativity and, xxx “Credo: The Future of Music” (Cage), 182
spatial environments and, 306, 320 Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), 253–255
technologies of, xvi, 173, 179, 214–215, Flesh Machines, 254
219, 279, 296–297, 306, 312, 316, 318 GenTerra, 254
Computer-generated sound. See Real-time Cross Media, 162, 266
Computers as Theater (Laurel), xxxv–xxxvi, Cubism, 25, 38, 122, 356n11
355n32 Cubo-futurist, 11
Computer vision techniques, 261–262, 270, Cyberculture, 284
272, 319, 328. See also Background Cybernetic art, 107, 292, 305
subtraction; Edge detection Cybernetics, 300
Concert de bruits (Schaeffer), 192 defined, 385
Concert for Anarchy (Horn), 299 influence on artists, 96, 292, 304, 306–308,
Concert hall, xxxviii, 115, 181–182, 184 381n9
Music-theater and, 198–199, 211 (see also Cybernetic Serendipity (exhibition), 279, 294,
Music-theater) 307, 379n19
Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the
(Chernikov), 88 Animal and Machine (Wiener), 306
Constructivism, xxxvi, 12–13, 44–45, 47, 281 Cybernetics Subcommittee, 311, 381n14.
architecture and, 86, 88–90, 92, 99, 107, See also Fun Palace
363n11 Cyber performance, xxxiv
biology and, 232 Cybersonics, 197
end of, 24 Cyborg, xxx, 222, 249, 251, 253, 354n19
influence on later scenography, 63, 73, 78, “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
261 Socialist-Feminism, The” (Haraway), 249
origin and approaches of, 15–16 CYSP 1 (Schöffer), 293
relationship to technology, 144, 357n16
stage and, 16–23, 30–32, 38, 144, 148, D.A.V.E. (Digital Adaptive Video Engine), 272
232–233, 357n15 Dada, 28–29
“Contained” (Merrit), 287 Dadaism, 38, 44–45, 50, 154
Control theory, 307, 384 “Dadaism and the Theater” (Tzara), 29
Coop Himmelb(l)au, 77, 81–82, 92, 94–96, Dance of the Machines (Foregger), 233
320, 349, 362n31 Dance Space (Sparacino), 262
Hard Space, 95–96 Dance technology (dance tech), 262–264
Herzstadt, 95 networks and, 263
Oedipus Rex, 77 origin of, 261–263
Soft Space, 96 research directions, 262
Villa Rosa, 95 software and, 264–266

Subject Index

443
Dante Orgel (Hobijn), 291 DJ culture, 115, 173, 273, 372n63. See also
Darmstadt New Music Course, 117, 191, 194, VJ culture
197 DLP (digital light processing), 160, 352, 385
Data bodies, 325, 328 DMX (Digital Multiplex), 70, 385
Dead Chickens, 287 Docu-drama, 254
Deafman Glance (Wilson), 58. See also Documentary, 126–127
Surrealism Living Newspaper and, 148
Décollage (Vostell), 122 Piscator’s use with film and, 147–148
Deconstructivist Architecture (exhibition), 76 Docu-opera, 213
Defasten, 178 Dodecaphonic, 181, 191, 367n2
Degrees of freedom, 52, 385 Dolores 10h to 22h (Fusco), 254
Dematerialization, 98, 305, 354n9 Dramatic Imagination, The (Jones), 148
Der Auftrag (Müller), 64, 354n20 Dramaturge, 147, 162, 261
Dérive, 345 Dramaturgy, xiv, xxii, 34, 72, 130, 140
Der Weltbaumeister (Taut), 27–28 Droog Design, 349
Desert Rain (Blast Theory), 327–328 DSP (digital signal processing), 211, 214,
De Stijl, 25 261, 352, 385
Deus ex machina, xxii, 2 Dumb Type, 73–76, 159, 176, 255, 362n29,
Deutscher Werkbund, 25, 356n5 362n30
D-Fuse, 179 Memorandum, 76
Dianissino architecttura, 86, 182 Or, 76
Diapolyekran (Svoboda), 154, 170, 171. See also S/N, 76
Polyekran 036 Pleasure Life, 74–75
Dichroic glass, 111, 385 DV (digital video), 160, 176, 385
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 69 DVD (Digital video disk), 160, 176–177
Diller Scofidio, 79–80, 104, 105–106, DV8 Physical Theater, 141, 255
141–142, 163, 258 Dymaxion House, 99–100
Blur Building, 105–106 Dynamical System, xxx, 384
concept of interscenium and, 80 defined, 385
Facsimile, 142 use in responsive environments and, 382n26
Jump Cuts, 142 Dynamics, xxx
Disneyland, 53, 65, 172, 360n5 body and, 232, 265
Disorder, 137 “constructive”, 88
contrast to order, 302–303 of interaction, 32, 104
Display (computer graphics), 70. See also DLA; movement and, 281
DLP; HMD; LCD; JumboTron music and, 191, 208
auditory, 321 relation to space, 10, 39, 95
Krueger’s definition of, 318–319 spectator/event and, 155
media and technologies of, 16, 83, 105–108, Dynamosphere, 229–230
110, 112, 134, 142, 160, 163, 250, 271,
317, 336, 342 E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology),
DLA (Digital light array), 160, 385 196, 241, 282, 312. See also Bell Labs;
DIY aesthetic, 111, 122, 173, 179, 352 Expo ’70; 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering

Subject Index

444
East Bloc, 72 Enaction, xxiii, xxvi–xxvii
East Village (New York) performance scene, Endless Theater (Kiesler), 32, 358n27
74, 132 Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man
Ecology, 100 (Tretyakov), 23, 144
Ecosophy, 320 Entanglement, xxvii, xxx, xxxiii–xxxv, 174,
Écrans sur la Scène, Les (Picon-Vallin), 131 234, 258, 319, 332
Écriture scénique, 55–56, 58, 71 between human bodies and technology, 319,
Edge detection, 319, 385. See also Computer 352
vision techniques defined, 355n22
Effort, 229–230, 240, 374n9, 374n10 Entr’acte (Claire), 45
Eidophor (video projector), 127, 367n44, 386 Enunciation, xxxiii, 103, 112, 316, 330, 351.
18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Kaprow), 154–155 See also Agency
Einstein on the Beach (Wilson/Glass), 59–60, 213 collective, xxxii
Einstürzende Neubauten, 64 machinic, 330
Ekkuklema, 353n3. See also Deus ex machina pedestrian, 344, 347
Electric Circus (collective), 201, 370n35 Environment and inhabitant. See Interaction
Electricity, 343 EPCOT, 53, 153, 360n5
impact on Futurism, 8, 10 Ephemeral, 116, 159, 283, 338, 352. See also
integration into Constructivist architecture, Dematerialization
88, 90 architecture and, 81, 92, 96, 98, 105–106,
in music, 181, 186, 291 108, 112, 310, 350, 363n7
Electro-acoustic, 200 Ephemeralization, 100
Electrocardiography (EKG), 270 Ephémère (Davies), 336–337
Electrochromic glass, 77, 104–105, 386 Epizoo (Roca), 250
Electroluminescent technology, 105 eRENA (Electronic Arenas for Culture,
Electromechanical Performance, Art, and Entertainment),
instruments for electronic sound and, 181 324, 327
machine art and, 277, 281, 292, 296, 298 Ethno-cyborg, 253
stage environments, 10, 20–22, 28, 39, 44, Ethnography, xiv, xxi, xxiv–xxv, xxxvi
50, 80, 280 Eukinetics, 228–229
Electronic Disturbance Theater Eurythmics, 228–229, 232
Incredible Disappearing Woman (Fusco and EVE (Extended Virtual Environment) (Shaw),
Dominguez), 254 323
Electronic TV Color TV Experiments (Paik Eventstructure Research Group (ERG), 97,
exhibition), 118 322–323
“Electrotecture” (Taylor), 106–107, 111 Ex Machina, 70
Elevation (in architecture), 72, 85 Exonemo, 215
Embodiment, 337–338. See also Materiality Expanded cinema (genre), 97, 115, 166–169,
human/machine and, 221, 277, 355n32 313, 244
relation to performance, xxi, xxiii, xxxiii relation to VJ culture, 173, 179
technology and, xxii, 174, 271, 355n31 Expanded Cinema (Youngblood), 156
eMUSE (Electronic Multi-User Stage Expanded Cinema Festival (New York), 156,
Environment), 324 167

Subject Index

445
Expo ’70 (Osaka), 55, 105, 154, 169–170, Flying City on the Aerial Paths of Communication
172, 314–315 (Krutikov), 88–89
Expo ’67 (Montréal), 100, 105, 170, 171 FoAM. See also Sponge
Exposition of Music-Electronic Television TGarden, 331–333
(Paik exhibition), 117 Trg, 333
Expo 2000 (Hannover), 325 txOom, 332–333
Expressionism, 25–26, 28 Forced Entertainment, 141, 159
in early Bauhaus, 37 Forkbeard Fantasy, 141
modern dance and, 228 Formant filter, 186, 386
Extension. See Body Formula (Ikeda), 176
EyesWeb (software), 262 Fortuny dome, 143, 386
4D Art
Facebook, 344, 351 Delirium, 274
Faktura (Constructivism), 13, 15, 87 Grand hotel des etrangers, 274
Falso Movimento, 71, 140, 159 Pôles—dance virtuel, 274
farmersmanual, 178, 214 4’33 (Cage), 193
Fascism, 47, 235 4X digital signal processor, 209, 211
Federal Theater Project, 147–148 Frankfurt Ballet, 258–259
Feedback, 114, 304. See also Control theory; Alie/n a(c)tion, 259–260
Interaction Eidos : Telos, 259–261, 376n40
computational responsiveness and, 314, Fresnel lens, 50, 386
317–318, 328 FSR. See Sensing technologies
cybernetic control systems and, 292–293, Fun Palace, xvi, 310–312, 316, 320
300, 307, 311, 334–335 Fusion versus separation (Trennung) of media,
in sound, 195, 200, 208 36–37, 236
video processes of, 118, 125, 128 Future Systems, 94
Feminism, 249 Futurism (Italian). See also Futurist
Festivals, 64, 74 scenography
Greek drama and, 2 in architecture, 86
media, 174 compared to Tinguely’s machines, 282
as subject for performance studies, xxiv, xxxiv dance and, 227–228
Feu d’artifice (Balla/Stravinsky), 9, 356n9 early performances, 8–9, 356n6
Film-Makers Cinematheque (New York), 156 incorporation of technology, 8–11
Film on stage. See Cinefication; Projection machine art and, 280, 288
First Working Group of Constructivists, 15 origins of, 7–8
Flash mobs, 344–345 and Russolo’s incorporation of noise, 182
Fluorescent lights Varèse’s critique of, 188
as display technology, 110–111 World War I and, 28
use in scenography, 74, 76, 78, 196 Futurism (Russian)
Fluorescent Sound (Tudor), 195–196 comparison with Italian movement, 11–12
Flüux:/Terminal (Skoltz–Kolgen), 175–176 influence on Constructivism, 90
Fluxus, xxiv, 57, 117–119, 122, 155, 199, Futurist Atmosphere-Structure, The (Prampolini),
235, 240, 305, 369n27, 380n4 86

Subject Index

446
Futurist scenography, 9–11 Group Ongaku, 199
Futurist Synthetic Theater, The (Marinetti), 8 Gruppo MID, 308
Gruppo N, 308, 317
Gaming Gruppo T, 308, 381n11
ARGs, 345 Spazio linee luce spettatori, 308
Go Game, 345 Guggenheim Foundation, 189
in public space, 344–348 GUI (Graphic User Interface), 209, 386
relation to stage performance and, 345 Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Guttai), xxiv, 74, 235,
as Situationist vision, 348 243–244, 375n23, 380n4
ubiquitous, 345
“Garment for Dancers” (L. Fuller), 227 Hacker culture, 111, 206
Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, 159 Half/angel, 272
Gesamtkunstwerk, 25, 29, 60, 64, 135, 198, Hall effect sensor. See Sensing technologies
200, 241 Happenings, 235–236, 244, 247, 292
Brecht’s critique, 36–37 connection to interactive arts, 320, 322
man/machine and, 281 Fluxus and, 199
in relation to Moholy-Nagy’s “theater of influence in architecture, 93, 96, 98
totality,” 38 Kaprow’s definition of, 154, 166, 305, 380n4
Wagner’s definition of, 2 in relation to performance, 57
Gestural-based controller (music), 186, 217, Haptics, 105, 324
219, 268, 372n67 Harvard University, 134, 136, 149, 209,
Glanzwelt (Taut), 27–28 380n9
Glass Video Gallery (Tschumi), 141 Haus-Rucker-Co, 92, 94, 96
Glowflow (Krueger), 316–320 HD (high definition), 142, 160–161, 387
Glumov’s Diary (Eisenstein), 23 HeHe, 341, 343
GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Hellerau, 6–7, 229
Datenverarbeitung Institute), 262, 324 Heterodyning oscillator, 186, 386
Gob Squad, 141 Hi8, 137–138, 387
Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), 341–342 HMD (head mounted display), 271, 316, 337,
Grand Union, 242–243 386
Granular Synthesis, 165–166, 174–175 Homage to New York (Tinguely), 277, 282–283
Motion Control Modell 5, 165, 175 Homebrew Computer Club, 206
Grateful Dead, 169 “Home Is Not a House, A” (Banham), 363n13
GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), Homo Ludens (Huzinga), 338–339
308, 317 Hotel Pro Forma, 71–72
Great Game to Come (Constant), 350 HPSCHD (Cage), 168
Greek stage, xxii, 2–3, 8, 147, 353n3 Hub, The, 216
Green-Screen, 161–162 Hydraulics, 294
Greyworld, 341 defined, 387
GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales), use of in scenographic design, 25, 52
217 Hyperbolic paraboloid
Grosses Schauspielhaus, 26–27, 33 Xenakis’ architecture with, 189–191,
Ground plan, 79, 98 372n61 (see also Philips Corporation)

Subject Index

447
Hyperinstruments (Machover), 211–212. computation-based, 107, 175, 267, 295,
See also Gestural-based controller 316–317, 319, 324–329, 331, 337, 342
hybrid with performance, 155, 245, 261,
IBM Corporation, 169, 205, 312 270–273, 297, 313, 340
I Ching, Cage and Cunningham’s use of, 194, scenography as, 18, 63–65, 144, 154, 258
236. See also Chance procedures sound, 196, 212–213, 216, 288–289
Ideal spectator, 330 in visual art, 74, 79, 120–121, 125, 158,
Igloo, 272 235, 247, 298–299, 305
ILLIAC (computer), 205 Instantanéisme (Dadaism). See Relâche
Illiac Suite (Hiller), 206 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London,
IMAX, 170 93, 279
Labyrinth, 171 Instrumental theater, 199
Tiger Child, 172 Inszenierte Räume (exhibition), 64–65
Imbroglio, xxvii, xxxii Interaction
Immanence and architecture, 82, 84, 104
philosophical definition of, 354n4 early histories of, 303
relation to performance, xxiii, xxiii, xxv, electronic images and, 119, 132, 155
352 embodied, 261
technology and, xxi Goffman’s understanding of, xxiv–xxv
Immersant, 336–337 human/machine/computer-based, xvi, xxxiv,
Immersion xxxvi, xxxvii, 69–70, 208, 211, 212, 217,
Artaud’s theory and, 47 262, 298, 302, 306–308
versus critical distance, 62 interdisciplinarity, x
Wagner’s strategy of, 2, 36–37 and interrelatedness, xi
Immersive environments, 321, 333, 336 between machines, 209, 268, 281, 294
Impossible Theater, 159 as medium, 305
Improv Everywhere, 345–346 between organism and environment, xxvii,
Frozen Grand Central, 346 20, 32, 301
Improvisation Technologies (Forsythe), 259, 273 relation between theater and plastic arts,
Indeterminacy, processes in composition, 191, 122, 304–306
194, 205, 238, 264 situatedness and, xxxiv
Inflatable architectures, 94, 96–97, 168, 310, between stage and public, 310
313, 322–323, 333 in stage performance with technology, 70,
Information theory (Shannon), 306, 387 198, 237–238, 293
Infrared (IR) camera technology, 70, 266, 271, Interactive choreography, 273
313, 328, 381n15, 387 Interface
Inscription devices, technologies and, 305, 324, 325, 336
machines/technologies of, 62, 66, 136, 222, human/machine, 233, 266, 316, 320–323,
248, 380n26 325
and representation, xxix, 244 performative, 323, 332
Installation. See also Reactive environments; between performer and audience, 120
Responsive environments screen-based, 101, 250, 264
architectural, 95–97, 111, 142, 343, 349 sculptural, 324

Subject Index

448
 skin as, 251 Kinesphere, 227, 229, 246, 375n22, 376n38
spatial, 316, 323–324, 334, 336 Kinesthetic and movement, 73, 225, 228,
technological appeal to artists and, x 232, 247, 256, 265, 267, 275, 292,
worn, 322 298, 338
Interlace (video), 165, 387 Kinetic
Intermedia, 199, 292. See also Fluxus architecture and, 83, 85–86, 89, 99–103
Intermedia theater, 156 in Constructivism, 88–89
International Exhibition of New Theater environments and, 297, 320
Techniques (Vienna 1924), 30 form, 38
International Style, 38 scenography and, 12, 30, 39, 49–55, 67, 69,
Internet, x, xxxiv, 69, 216, 351 82, 155
performances using, 252, 254, 257, sculpture and, 90, 168, 200, 277, 280–282,
274–275, 285, 326 292, 298, 308–309
Intolleranza (Nono), 126, 154. See also CCTV Kinetic Construction (Gabo), 53, 90, 281
Intonarumori, 182 Kinetic Light Sculpture (Möller/Kramm), 108
I/O (input/output), 267, 279, 335, 372n68, Kinetisches Konstructives System (Moholy-Nagy),
388 39
IRCAM (Paris) Kinetography, 229
development of Max software, 177, 209 Kitchen, The (New York), 120–122, 124,
founding of, 209 212
research infrastructure, 210–211, 217, 262, Kondition pluriel, 270–271
267 Konstruktsiia (Constructivism), 15, 87
IRS (Inverted Reality System). See Time’s Up Körperkultur, 6
Irwin, 72 Kugeltheater (Weininger), 42–43. See also
Isadora (software), 269–270, 387 Bauhaus, total theaters of
Isocahedral, 230
Lab, The (San Francisco), 331
Jefferson Airplane, 169, 202 Laboratory for Design-Correlation (Kiesler), 32
Joshua Light Show, 169 “On Correalism and Biotechnique,” 32
Judson Dance Theater, 239–241 Lady’s Glove (Sonami), 218–219
Judson Memorial Church, 239 La Fura dels Baus, 159, 255–257
Juilliard School, 32, 119, 203, 211 La Gaia Scienza, 71, 140
JumboTron (display system), 134, 365n23, 387 Laibach, 72
La La La Human Steps, 255–256
Kaaitheater (Brussels), 66 Land Design, 325, 382n23
Kabuki, 26, 136, 388 Laptop music, 115, 174, 177, 214, 216,
Kansei, 262, 377n43 372n64
Karas, 255, 258 Ostertag’s critique of, 217
Noiject, 258 Latency, 275
Kennedy Violich, 105 defined, 387
K-456 (Paik), 293–294, 379n19 problems with in computer–based
KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor), 206–207, interaction, 319
216 Laterna Magika, 50, 152–154

Subject Index

449
LCD (liquid crystal display), 106–107, 142, Living Theater, 58, 126, 304
160, 166, 271, 388. See also Display Living units (Coop Himmelb(l)au), 94
League of Automatic Composers, 206–207, L’object sonore, 192
216 Locative media, 344, 346–347, 351
Legible City, The (Shaw), 322 Locus (T. Brown), 242, 375n22
Lenguaje furero. See La Fura dels Baus Low resolution screen, 108
Leningradskaia Pravda (Vesnin Bros), 88 Luminodynamism (Schöffer), 179n16, 292–293
Lichtrequisit (Moholy-Nagy), 281
Life construction, 232 Mabou Mines, 58
Life Forms (software), 264–265, 267 Hajj, 132–133
LED (light-emitting diode), 74, 77. See also Machinae, xxii
Display Machine
in architecture facades, 106, 108 aesthetics, 96, 281
Lighting. See also Bähr disk; DMX; Hellerau; architecture, xxxvii, 86–87
LED body, 227–235
Appia’s use of, 6, 356n4 dance, 224, 233
architectural use of, 107–108 music, 288–291
Balla’s use of, 9 organism and, 249, 373n7
color temperatures in theater, 138 perception, 175, 318, 336
in Constructivist stage practices, 17, 19, stage, 9–10, 16–22, 24–28, 30–44
21–22 Machine à habiter, 87, 93, 99
early technologies of, 143 Machinic, xxxii–xxxiii, 85, 355n29
Fuller’s use of, 226–227 Magazzini Criminali, 71, 140
as integral to scenography, 50, 52, 55, Magnanimous Cuckold (Meyerhold/Popova),
151–152, 261, 315, 343, 359n3 18–19
reflective, 26 Magnetizer, 118, 388
strobe light, 76, 167, 176 “Manifesto of Machine Art” (Munari), 280
in Victory over the Sun, 12 Man-machine interaction. See Interaction
xenon, 339 Man-Machine Symbiosis (Licklider), 306
Wagner’s use of, 3, 355n2 Man Walking Down the Side of a Building
Light Surgeons, 179 (T. Brown), 245–246
Linguistics, 258 Man With the Movie Camera (Vertov), 144
Performativity and, xxv Mapping
L’Institut du Monde Arabe, 102 defined, 388
Live camera, 121, 124, 128–130, 132, 135, in gesture-based dance and music, 217,
140, 147, 248 262–263, 267, 320
Live cinema, 115, 165, 172–179 Lissitzky’s sense of, 22
Liveness, Reichardt’s notion of, xxxviii Marionettes. See Puppets
Live programming (Klüver), 315 Masque, xi, 3, 62
Live/Taped Video Corridor (Naumann), 124 Material agency, xxix
Living architectures, 94 Material enunciation, xxxiii
Laban’s conception of, 230, 373n8 Materiality, xi, xxiii, xxvi, 81–82, 85, 98,
Living Cities (Archigram), 93 103–106, 227, 258, 332, 337, 349

Subject Index

450
Max/MSP/Jitter, 177. See also IRCAM MIDIDancer (hardware), 268
MDMA (ecstasy), 173 Midnight Opera Company, 122
Mechanical art. See Machine Military, 294
Mechanical Sound Orchestra, 288 and industrial complex, 123, 277, 285,
Mechanical Stage. See Bauhaus, total theaters 302–303, 306
of surplus for machine performances, 284,
Mechanization, xv, 22–23, 25, 28, 36, 303, 300
374n12 use of technology, x, 312–313, 375n19,
Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion), 280 381n15
Mechanized Eccentric (Moholy–Nagy), 39 Mille Plateaux (recording label), 215
Media Art and Research Studies (MARS), Mills College Center for Contemporary Music,
324 203, 205–206, 216
Media Burn (Ant Farm), 123 Mimesis, xxvi, xxxi. See also Representation
Mediadanse, 263 Mini DV, 176
Mediatecture, 90, 107 Minimalism
MEGA, 262, 377n43 Fried’s critique of, 364n7
Mego (record label), 215 in music, 59, 202
Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 193 transfer into audio-visual art, 176
Suite by Chance, 236, 373n17 Mise en scène du drame Wagnérie, La (Appia),
TV Rerun, 239 5
Variations V, 126, 236–237, 238, 241 Missing Link, 94
Walkaround Time, 239 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Merchant of Venice, The, 134–135 collaboration with Svoboda, 126–127
Merzbau (Schwitters), 29 Kinetic Design Group, 101
Merzbühne (Schwitters), 29–31, 57 Lincoln Labs, 306
Mesh Performance Partnerships Media Lab, 69, 178, 212, 262, 267
Contours, 271 Mixed media, 155, 198–199
Figments, 271–272 Mixed reality, 325, 327, 333, 388
Immanence, 271 Mixed Reality Research Lab (Nottingham),
Mesomorphic, 102 346–347
Metabolists, 92 MoCap (motion capture)
Metamechanicals (Tinguely), 282 and dance technology, 262–263, 267–268,
MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), 201, 370n30 271
M Fuksas D, 349 defined, 388
Mickery Theater (Amsterdam), 66 links to chronophotography, 223–224
Microcomputer, early use in computer music, origin of, 266
205–207, 214, 216 Modern dance origins, 225, 235, 259
Microcontroller, 388 Montage of attractions, 23
Microstoria, 214 Monterey Pop Festival, 169
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), Monument to the Third International (Tatlin),
121, 175, 177, 279, 371n52 89–91
as control protocol, 209–211, 250, 288, 291 Morphogenesis, 85, 99
origin of, 208 Morphosis, 258

Subject Index

451
Motor Network. See also Actor Network Theory;
influence on modern dance, 225–226, 227, Artificial Neural Network
233, 239, 269 as connection system, 84, 184, 211, 230,
in kinetic architecture, 100 263, 268, 288, 306
in machine art, 277, 279, 288, 294–296, electronic, xxi, 179, 206, 216, 250, 263,
298, 378n11, 378n20 273, 289, 334–335, 338, 343, 351
servo-controlled, 101–102, 288, 295, in live performance, 222, 252, 254, 274–276
378n11, 391 social, 344–345, 347, 351
as technology, 309, 323–324 used in music performance, 206, 216
used in scenography, 36, 52–53, 70, 152, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), 71–72
169, 338 Neutral-density filter, 137
Mouse on Mars, 214 New Babylon, 338
Movie Drome (VanDerBeek), 167 New Formalism, 66
MP3, 351 New media art, xiii, xxi, 172, 297, 328
MTV (Music Television), 173 New Music America, 211
Multichannel sound, 152, 168, 170, 208, 238, New School for Social Research, 118, 123
291, 315, 332 Newsreels, 147–148
Multimedia New York Electric Music Company (Cahill),
environments, 167–168, 189, 349 184
in performance, 11, 44, 60, 212–213, New York Institute of Technology, 265
236 Nightfire Theater, 67, 131, 159
postproduction and, 173–174, 264, 266 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering. See also Bell
Multimodal, 262, 324 Labs
Multisensory environment, 2, 191, 314, 332 E.A.T. and, 312
MUSCLE (Oosterhuis), 101–102 Open Score (Rauschenberg), 313
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 277, 282 participants in, 241–242
Music Hall, 8, 17, 23, 233 Physical Things (Paxton), 313–314
Music-theater, 1, 4, 60, 198–200, 204, public expectation and reaction to, 314
211–214 relationship with theater, 307, 312
Musique concrète (Schaeffer), 191–192, 194 technical research and, 242, 304
Musique et la mise en scène, La (Appia), 5 Variations VII, 313
Mutoid Waste Company, 287 Nine Inch Nails, 142, 245
MVRDV, 341, 343, 349 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, 60,
MySpace, 344, 351, 382n1 131. See also CIVIL wars
Mysterium (Skryiabin), 4 1960s counterculture, 57, 92, 168
1960s light shows, 169
Napoleon (Gance), 169 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, influence on
NASA Ames Research Center, 69 Artaud, 46
nato.0 55, 177–178 Nondeterministic, 238. See also Chance
Nature/culture divide, xxvii–xxviii, xxxi procedures; Aleatoric
Natyasastra, xxii Nonhuman, 101, 103, 280–281, 297, 326, 329
Naumachias, 286 Latour’s understanding of, xxvii–xxxii, xxxvi
Negativeland, 216 relation to performance, xxiii, 242, 266, 294

Subject Index

452
Nonlinear editing (NLE), 130, 142, 173, Paik/Abe synthesizer, 119, 389
389 Palindrome Inter.Media Performance Group,
Nonmatrixed performance, 305, 380n2 268, 270
Noordung Theater, 71–72 Panasonic Corporation, 138
Nouvelle Tendance–Recherche Continuelle (NTrc), PANI projector, 158, 389
308 Pan Sonic, 214
NTT/ICC (Tokyo), 285, 300 Parabolic flight, 73
Nuovo Spettacolo, 139–140 Parangoles (Oiticica), 247
Participation TV (Paik), 118
Oberlin Conservatory, 183 Participatory environments, 304–307,
Objecthood (Fried), xxi, xxiv, 116 313–316, 321, 341
Ohio State University (dance department), Patcher, The (software), 209
263 Patterns
ONCE Group, 154, 197, 199–201, 369n23 in architecture/media, 102, 107–108,
Ondes Martenot, 183, 186, 189 339
1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (Hwang/Glass), learning of, 312, 335
159, 213 in machine systems, 288, 300, 302–303
Ontological Hysteric Theater (Foreman), 60 Paul Dresher Ensemble, 213
OpenEndedGroup, 267–269, 341 Performance. See also Agency; Materiality;
Biped, 267–268 Representation
how long does the subject linger on the edge of the architecture and, 81–84
volume . . . , 268–269 defined, xxiii
Loops, 268 linguistics and, xxv–xxvi
Open source, 177, 341–342 machinic, xxxiii
Open Theater, 58 media and, xxxiv–xxxv
Opera and new music, 198–200, 369n24 science and, xxvii–xxx
Opera Group of Boston, 126 visual arts concept of, xxiii–xxiv
Opere in divenire, 308 Performance cinema. See Live cinema
Optical flow. See Sensing technologies Performance Corridor (Naumann), 134
Organi-Tech, 99 Performance Group, 58, 135, 304
Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (Popper), Dionysus in ’69, 304
281 Marilyn Project, The, 135–136
Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck), Appia’s Performative turn. See Anthropology
production of, 7 Performativity, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, xxxii, 82,
OSA (the Union of Contemporary Architects), 104, 279, 320
87 Performing video (Vasulka), 120
Oscillator, 118, 186, 192, 204, 238, 389. Perspective (spatial)
See also Synthesis geometric in theater structures, xxii, 3–4, 26,
Osmose (Davies), 336–337 50, 79, 164, 270
Otolab, 178 in interactive environments, 270, 288, 322
Out There: Architecture Beyond Building (Venice politics and, xi, 361n22
Biennale 2008), 349–350 software and, 264–265
Oval, 214 Phenomenology, 120, 271, 330

Subject Index

453
Philips Corporation Postmodernism, 66, 85
Evolon (Philips Museum), 294 Potentiometer. See Sensing technologies
Philips Pavilion, 4, 189–190, 205, 307 PPS Dance. See 4D Art
support of Nicolas Schöffer, 292 Predictive modeling, 312, 390
Photoelectric cell. See Sensing technologies Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 230,
Pink Floyd, 100, 169, 202 232
Piscator Bühne, 34, 146 Procedural animation, 272, 390
Plastic Form of the Electro–Mechanical Peep Show Production space (Svoboda), 49–50
(Lissitzky), 21–22 Projection, 114–115, 124. See also Cinefication
Plastic–kinetic complex, 86 architecture and, 97, 107
Plato’s cave, 113 as commentary, 36
Play design, 158–160
improvisational in responsive environments, as dramatic supplement, 151
306, 331–333 early technologies of, 143, 366n31
urban interventions and, 338–340, 344–345, use in scenography, 25, 32, 33–34, 39, 43,
348 45, 50, 54, 68–71, 74, 80, 126, 128, 136,
Plunderphonia (Oswald), 216 355n26, 358n30, 359n36
Pneuma, 341 World’s Fairs and, 169
Pneumatics Projector bombing, 342, 390
in architectural environments, 94–96, 99, Proscenium
100–102, 310 critique of in scenography, 27, 29, 65–66,
defined, 389 356n8, 358n27
machine art and, 250, 279, 290–291, 295, as distancing device, 3
301 origin in Western theater, 113
use in scenography, 50, 100, 325 political force of, 80
Pneumecosms. See Haus-Rucker-Co removal in contemporary performance, 270
Poème électronique (Varèse), 189 screen and, 33, 113–114, 151, 160, 179,
Points of View (Shaw), 322 267
Point source, 315, 389 theater architecture and, 26, 43, 55, 126,
Polhemus, 266. See also Sensing technologies 129, 141, 156
Political Theater, The (Piscator), 146, 358n30, urban space as, 339
359n32 Prosumer video, 137–138
Polydimensional scenic space (Prampolini), 10 Proxemics (Hall), 338
Polyekran (Svoboda), 50, 154, 170, 172. Prune Flat (Whitman), 156
See also Diapolyekran Psychedelic music performance, 167, 169,
Polytope (Xenakis), 214, 272n61 173, 202. See also 1960s counterculture
Polyvision (Svoboda), 170 Psychogeography, 338, 344
Poor theater (Grotowski), 57, 126, 360n10 Public space, interaction in, 338–340.
Pop Art, 63 See also Gaming
Portapak (Sony), 114–115, 117, 124, 138, Punch-card/tape, 214, 312
390 Puppets, 61, 113–114, 279–280.
Post-humanism, 354n20 See also Automata
Postmodern dance, 239–240 PurForm, 178

Subject Index

454
Quasi-object (Serres), 119 Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The, 248
QuickTime, 177 Relâche (Picabia), 44–45
Relational Architecture (Lozano-Hemmer),
R.S.F.S.R. No. 1 (Meyerhold), 17 339
R.U.R. (Čapek), 30, 280, 358n24 Body Movies, 339
Railway Theater (Kiesler), 31 Vectorial Elevation, 339
Rainforest (Tudor), 195–196, 201, 239 Voz Alta, 339
Randomness, 303 Representation
Raster-Noton (record label), 215 architectural, 98
Raum, 63 avant-garde’s critique of, xxxvi, 46, 247
Raumbühne (Kiesler), 30–31 body and, 248–249, 271
Raumgestaltung (Moholy-Nagy), 38 cognitive science and, xxvi
Raumharmonie. See Choreutics computing and, xxxvii, 217, 328, 347
Ray-XXXX, 178 dramatic, 3
RCA Corporation, 187, 189 illusionary pictorial stage and, 5, 10, 23,
Reactive environments, 305–306 63
Ready-made (Duchamp), 282 image and, xxv, 112, 117, 148, 155, 164,
Reagan-era America, politics and artist’s 166, 175, 224, 243, 273, 281, 307, 310,
reactions against, 66, 203, 244 320, 322–323, 328, 330
Realities : united, 110–111, 364n20 and materiality, 18, 314
Real-time and mimesis, xxxvi, 8, 22, 61, 179,
computational responsiveness and, 104, 347
318–319, 323–325 performance and, xxiii (see also Performance)
computer/electronic music and, xxxviii, 195, science and, xxix
197, 202, 204, 206–212, 214, 261, Representational knowledge (versus
371n53, 371n55 performative), xxvi–xxviii, 350
computer graphics and animation, 69–70, Resampling, 164
166, 178, 266, 269–271, 273, 316, 336, Resonator, 3, 390
341–342 Responsive environments, 306, 380n6
control of media in, 262, 331 in architecture, 96
defined, 390 interaction and, 320, 325, 330–336
electronics in live performance, 236–237, Krueger’s definition of, 317, 319
248, 250, 254 Responsive Environments (group), 178
non-real-time, 206, 371n47 Rhythmicon (Cowell), 187
temporal understanding of, xxi–xxiii, xxxii, Rhythmic space (Appia), 5–6
xxxiv, 193, 217 Ridge Theater, 159
video and, 116–119, 121, 123, 142, 160, Ring, The (Wagner), 1–3, 5, 51
172–173, 175, 177–179 Ritual
Real-time film, 161 and performance, xv, xxiv, 254, 256, 284,
Rear projection. See Projection 301
Rechenzentrum, 178 social interaction, 207, 243, 341
Rectifier, 118, 390 Robotic art, 277, 294–295, 298, 379n24
Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theater, 72 Robot Opera (Paik). See K-456

Subject Index

455
Robots, 30. See also Automata; Puppets camera-based, 297, 328
in architecture, 93–94, 101, 107 capacitance, 384
in machine art, 277, 280–281, 284–287, in early interactive spaces, 95, 318
291–296, 298, 300 electric field, 212, 337, 386
Robot Wars (Thorpe), 286, 378n10 electromyogram (EMG), 219, 252
Roxy Music, 202 fsr, 386
Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, 121 hall-effect, 219, 386
IR, 387
Sacre du Printemps, Le (Stravinsky), 182 in live performance, xxii, 238, 263,
Saint François d’Assise (Messiaen), 78, 134 268–272
Samson Box (digital synthesizer), 209 multimodal, 324
San Francisco Bay Area optical flow, 80, 389
experimental performance scene, 67, 200 photoelectric, 389
military-industrial culture and, 285–286 potentiometer, 390
new music technology and, 203, 206 use in architecture, 101–102, 338
San Francisco Tape Music Center, 192, 201 variable capacitor, 186, 392
Sankai Juku, 255, 258 vibration, 325
Scaenae frons, 113 Sensorband, 216
Scan resolution, 110, 391 Sensors Sounds Sights (SSS), 217
Scenographs (Svoboda), 50 Senster, The, 294, 379n20
Scenography. See Apparatus; Installation; Serate, 8, 28
Lighting; Machine; Projection Serialism (music composition), 117, 191, 194,
Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Berlin), 65 198
Schrifttanz, 374n15 Serpentine Dance (Fuller), 227, 373n5
Schrottkunst, 287 Shape-memory alloys (SMA), 104, 391
Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Brecht), 56 Show control, 158, 391
Science Meets the Arts (SMARTS), 69 Side-band frequencies, 186
Science Technology and Society (STS), SIGGRAPH, 69, 262, 331, 344
xxvii–xxviii, xxx, xxxiii Signal (collective), 178
Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater, 72 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), 69–70,
Scratch Orchestra, 201, 203 322
Screen. See Projection Silicon Valley, 69–70
Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD), 343 early hacker culture in, 206
Second Viennese School, 181 Simon Frasier University, 264, 338
SEEMEN, 286 Simulation, xxxiv, 272–273, 298, 300, 316,
Self-Destroying Construction No. 1—Homage to 321, 323, 333, 336–337
New York (Tinguely), 282 Siren, use in music, 183, 188–189
Self-organizing system, 292 Situated action, xxxiv, 330
Semiconductor, 178 Situationist, 338–339, 348, 350
Sensing technologies, 209, 212, 286, 292, 325 “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater”
accelerometer, 383 (Schechner), 304
body and, 222–223, 238, 261, 295, Skene, 113. See also Proscenium
332–333, 337 Sketchpad (Sutherland), 306

Subject Index

456
Skoltz–Kolgen, 175–177 Sponge, 330–332, 336, 341
Slide projection, 66, 155, 158, 366n31. Sauna, 332
See also Projection TGarden, 331–333, 336
Smart materials Spots façade, 111
characteristics of, 103–104 Squat Theater, 66–67, 132–133, 361n22
relationship to performativity, 103, 105 Staalplaat (record label), 215
Smart mobs, 344–345 Standing Wave, 3, 391
Snake Theater, 131 Station House Opera, 159
Socialism, 221 Stil’ I Epokha (Ginzburg), 87
influence on Constructivism, 15, 20, 24, Storming of The Winter Palace, 357n12
357n16 Studio Azzurro, 71, 139–140
Weimar Republic and, 25, 35 Studio for Electro–Instrumental Muziek
Socialist Realism, 24, 34, 49, 153 (STEIM), 177, 204–205, 209, 217, 372n68
Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 71, 159 Study for an End to the World I and II
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), (Tinguely), 283
xxviiii Stuttgart Ballet, 258
Soft Machine, 169, 202 Sub Rosa (record label), 215
Software agents, 267 SuperCollider (software), 214, 372n62
Software for Dancers, 265–266 Supergaming (McGonigal), 345. See also
Sonic Arts Union, 201, 370n34 Gaming
Sonification, 201, 391 Superstudio, 92
Sony Corporation, 132, 134, 137, 284, Suprematism (Malevich), 20, 86, 356n11
387–388. See also Portapak Supreme Particles, 325–327
Soon 3, 67–68 Plasma/architexture, 325
Sound R111, 326
and image, 115, 119, 155, 164–166, Surgery, use in body-based performance, 244,
168–169, 172–179 248, 376n30
and noise, 182–183 Surrealism, 38, 44, 361n19
poetry and, 28–29 Surveillance, 68, 80, 163, 187, 254
relationship to other media, 9, 22, 45, 47, use of video in, 130, 142
55, 58, 71, 124, 135, 159 Survival Research Labs (SRL), 281, 284–288,
technologies of, 139, 141, 152, 181, 291, 295, 300, 378n8, 378n10
183–184, 186, 188–192, 194–198, 201, Svoboda ramp, 52, 391
206–208, 208–210, 214 Symbolists, 9
use in performance, 76, 135, 198–200, 204, Synchresis (Chion), 165
211–213 Synesthesia, 169
Sound Activated Mobile (SAM), 294 Synesthetic, x, 4, 9–10, 28, 134
Sound design, 165, 203, 215 Synthesis (computer music)
Space Theater (Cohen), 155, 197 additive synthesis, 183, 192, 383
Spatio-lumino-chronodynamism (Schöffer), 292 granular synthesis, 174, 367n47
Spazio interattivo, 306 sawtooth oscillator, 186, 391
Spectator-performer relationships, 247, 305 sinusoidal, 183, 186, 367n5
Splitting (Matta-Clark), 98 System aesthetics, 304, 379n14

Subject Index

457
Tafiatrenage (Foregger), 374n14 Theatergraph (E.F. Burian), 149–151, 153, 166
Tala, xxii, 60 Theater Heute, 141
Tanagra device, 30 Theater in a Sphere, 53
Tangibility. See Materiality Theater of cruelty, 47, 57, 284
Tanztheater, 257 Theater of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate
Tape music, 200, 204, 217 (Young), 203
Tape recorder, 61, 238, 365n18 Theater of Hybrid Automata (Vasulka), 300
TDR (The Drama Review), 57–58, 67 Theater of images, xxxvii, 58, 62–63, 67,
Techne, xxii–xxiii, xxxvi, 160, 174, 234, 235 361n18
Technical image, 56–57 Theater of Mixed Means (Kostelanetz), 57
Technical Manifesto for Futurist Scenic Atmosphere Theater of visions, 58, 62
(Prampolini), 10 Theater Workshop, 310
Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 221 Theater X, 159
Technoculture, xxvii, xxxv, 76, 254 “Théâtre alchimique, Le” (Artaud), 46
Constructivism as laboratory for, 25 Théâtre de Complicité, 141
Technoscenographic. See Machine; Projection; Théâtre du mouvement total (Polieri), 54–55
Proscenium Théâtre et Son Double, Le (Artaud), 46–47
Technoscientific, xv, xxviii, xxix, 255, 307, 330 “Théâtre Kaleidoscope, Le” (Polieri), 55
Tektonika, 15, 87 Théâtre mobile (Polieri), 54–55
Telcosystems, 178 Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), 55
Telematics, 274–276 Théâtre Repère, 70
Tele-torture, 250 Theatricality, 235
Television Fried’s critique of, xxiv
architectural appropriation of, 107, 141–142 tension between visual arts, 116
cultural phenomena of, 53, 114 Theatron, xxii, 3, 175, 314, 330. See also
early history of broadcast, 115–116 Greek stage
as instrument, 117–119 Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
versus theater, 57–58, 360n10 (Banham), 8
use of, in performance, xiii, 67, 126–141, Theremin (instrument), xxxviii, 186–189,
248–249 200, 217, 368n9
visual art critique of, 116–118, 122–125 Third Hand (Stelarc), 252
Telharmonium (Cahill), 183–185 3D
Temporality, xxiv, 60, 161 animation, 263–267, 269, 309, 322–323,
architecture and, 83–84 336–337, 344
Temporary Distortion, 159 in contrast to 2D in performance, 9–10,
Ten Books of Architecture, The, (Virtruvius), 84 12–13
Tensegrity, 100, 105 modeling, 101, 261, 264–265, 316
Tensile structure, 100 physical space and, 105,
Terpsitone, 368n9 technology of stereography and, 158, 322
“Theater, Circus, Variety” (Moholy-Nagy), 39, Three Legged Dog, 159
41 Threepenny Opera (Brecht/Weill), 147
Theater am Turm, 66 Thresholding, 319. See also Computer vision
Theater der Welt festival, 66 techniques

Subject Index

458
Thrust stage, 26 Über das Marionettentheater (Kleist), 280
Time code, 76, 391 Ubiquitous computing, 347, 392
Time motion studies, 224, 232–233 Ubiquitous games. See Gaming
Time object, in relationship to Cage, 193 UC Berkeley, 203, 217, 292
Time scales, 336 Underlighting (L. Fuller), 227
Time share (computing), 206, 371n46 United States I–IV (Anderson), 156–157
Time’s Up, 333–336 United Visual Artists (UVA), 179
Body Spin, 334 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Hyperfitness Studio, 334 168, 205, 239, 323
Sensory Circus, 334–335, 336 Unobject (Burnham), 292
Tinkering, 206, 371n48 UN Studio, 349
Tissue Culture and Art, 253, 255 Untitled Sound Objects, 178
“Semi-Living,” 255 Urban Screens, 382n33
Tomato, 179 Urban Space. See Gaming; Public space
“Torque: The New Kinesthetic” (Schwartz), USCO, 167–168, 174, 381–382n9
225 User, 84, 108, 111, 272, 347
Total-Theater (Gropius), 42–43 participant defined as, 320–322, 332
Tour Lumière Cybernétique (Schöffer), 107, 293 and screen, 305
“Towards a New Theater” (Edmond Jones), [The User], 289–290
149 Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers, 289
Towards a Poor Theater (Grotowski), 57 Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, 290
Tower of Winds/Egg of Winds (Ito), 107–109 “Uses of Film in the New Theater, The”
Traffic (band), 169 (Kirby), 154
Transcendence, x–xi, xxii, 62, 244–245 U–Theater (Molnár), 41–42
Transports (Oosterhuis). See MUSCLE U2 (band), 141
Trautonium (Trautwein), 183, 186
Treaty of Rapallo, 357n19 Valis (Machover), 211–212
Trennung (Brecht), 36–37, 236 Variable capacitor. See Sensing technologies
Triadic Ballet (Schlemmer), 234, 265, 374n15 Vasulkas, The, 120–123, 140, 300–302,
Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), techno– 364–365n13
scenography for, 160–161, 360n3, 362n31 Velvet Underground, 168, 202
Troika Ranch, 268–270 Verfremdumgseffekte (Brecht), 61, 361n15
Trompe-l’oeil, 5 Vers une Architecture (Le Corbusier), 87
Turntablist, 216 Very Nervous System (VNS), 328–329
TV as a Creative Medium (exhibition), 119 Vicon, 267, 392
TV Bra for Living Sculpture (Paik/Moorman), Victory Over the Sun, 11–12, 21–22
119 Video. See also Projection
TV Burying (Vostell), 122 origin of, 115
Twitter, 351 relation between gallery and stage, 126–130
2D use in architecture, 141–142
Balla’s transformation of, 10 use in theater, 130–141
Malevich and Tatlin’s critique of, 12–13 Video ambients, 140
242.pilots, 178 Video Free America, 127–131, 365n18

Subject Index

459
Video mixer, 138 Widescreen film, 170
Videoplace (Krueger), 317, 319–320, 325. Wi-Fi, 345, 347
See also Responsive environments Wired, 312
Vienna Actionists, 243–244, 252 Wireframe (computer graphics), 176,
Vietnam War, 155, 203 264–265, 309, 334
Violin Power (Steina), 120 WJ-MX50, 138
Virtual environment, 323, 334, 336. Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage, 122
See also CAVE Wooster Group, The, xiii, 66, 134, 135–139,
Virtual physics, 332 141, 162
Virtual reality (VR) Brace Up!, 136–137, 138
Artaud’s original definition of, 46–47 Fish Story, 136
defined, 392 L.S.D., 136, 139
and simulation, 321, 323 Poor Theater, 139
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), Route 1 & 9, 136
274, 393 Work Projects Administration (WPA), 148
Visionary architecture, 32, 85, 94 World, The (USCO), 168, 367n44
Visiting Hours (Flanagan), 245 Wright Brothers, 225
Visual Kitchen, 178
VJ culture, 115, 172–173, 177, 179, 273 Xenon searchlight, 339
VKHUTEMAS, 87
Volksbühne, 33–34, 146 YAM Festival, 122
Von Material zu Architektur (Moholy-Nagy),
38, 41 Zangezi, 13–14, 30
Von Neumann architecture, 166, 393 Zaum (Khlebnikov), 12–14
Vortex concerts, 168 Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie
V2 Institute for Unstable Media, 287, 331 (ZKM), 259, 272–273
DEAF, 174 Institut für Bildmedien, 323–324
Zero gravity, 73
Walking Cities (Herron), 93–94, 101 Zero-th, 341
Walkmonology (Hardman), 68 Zines, 92
Warner Bros. records, 156, 211 ZiZi & YoYo, 343
Warsaw Bloc, 287 Zoo TV (U2), 142
Wayang kulit, 113–114
WDR (West Deutscher Rundfunk), 117, 192
Wearable architecture, 333
Wearables, 217, 245, 247, 263, 313, 336–338
Weathering (Leatherbarrow), 83
Weimar Republic, 24–26
West, 8, 341
Wet/dry biology, 255
WGBH, 119, 126
Whisper (Schiphorst), 337–338
Whitney Museum of Art, 124, 168, 245, 282

Subject Index

460