Taught by Profs. Pia Kleber, Doug Eacho and David Rokeby
This interdisciplinary graduate-and-undergraduate course explores the collision between performing arts and recent developments in computational media. Students were introduced to the activity of BMO Lab, a home for collaborative creative research across the arts and sciences, through workshops emphasizing practical engagement with in-progress tools and ideas, as well as seminar discussions of theoretical and historical writing that inform the Lab’s work. Central themes of investigation included machine learning, machine vision, artificial intelligence, motion capture, and theatrical control.
The course consisted of two halves. In the first, activity focussed on the Lab’s core areas of research (AI, motion capture, and voxel cueing) through engaging with the Lab’s currently rehearsing workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Johanna Schall from berlin and produced in partnership with Canadian Stage. Students had the chance to see how experimental media are put to use in productions of classic plays, and connected Brecht’s aesthetic theories to the practice of new media performance. Classes mixed discussion, technical demonstration, presentations from the production team, and practical workshops.
The second half of the class turned to fostering student-devised performances. Classes introduced core concepts and techniques of contemporary performance, and tasked students with devising small-group performances using those techniques for the following week. Students then created original small-group performances as final projects.
We began on Zoom, and moved to the BMO Lab for physical classes when that became possible.
Undergraduate and graduate students, via their respective course codes, participated in the class together. Graduate students had additional reading and assignments, and their grades were calculated differently.
Final Performances
Schedule
Jan 11 – Course Introduction
No Readings
Jan 18 – Brecht’s Theatre & Technologies
Readings:
Bertolt Brecht. “The Verfremdung Effect in Chinese Acting.”
Bertolt Brecht. “A Short Organum for the Theatre.”
Walter Benjamin. “What is Epic Theatre?” [First Version]
Graduate Students:
Bertolt Brecht. “Against Georg Lukács.” Aesthetics and Politics.
Jan 25 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Readings:
Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Ekkehard Schall, “Vasa Semianr: Bergen 1974,” from The Craft of Theatre, trans. Jack Davis
Graduate Students:
Mladen Dolar, “Lifting the Veil.” South Atlantic Quarterly
Feb 1 – Exploring Motion Capture
Readings:
Oskar Schlemmer. “Man and Art-Figure.”
Danielle Goldman. “Ghostcatching: An Intersection of Technology, Labor, and Race.”
Graduate Students:
Matthew Wilson Smith. “Total Machine: The Bauhaus Theatre,” from The Total Work of Art
Feb 8 – AI
Readings:
Annie Dorsen. “On Algorithmic Theatre.” Theatre
Sofian Audry. “Introduction,” Art in the Age of Machine Learning.
Sarah T. Roberts, “Your AI is a Human,” Your Computer is On Fire.
Graduate Students:
Matthew Handelman. “Artificial Antisemitism: Critical Theory in the Age of Datafication.”
Critical Inquiry 48.2 (2022).
Feb 15 – Voxels
Readings:
Bertolt Brecht. “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre.”
Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”
Graduate Students:
Nick Hunt. “Lighting on the hyperbolic plane: Towards a new approach to controlling light
on the theatre stage.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 7.2 (2011)
Reading Week
Mar 1 – Workshop and Seminar – Chance
Readings:
John Cage. “Experimental Music.” Silence, ed. Kyle Gann.
Richard Schechner and Michael Kirby. “An Interview with John Cage.” TDR 10.2 (1965).
Graduate Students:
Roger Caillois. “Letter to André Breton.” “Pythian Heritage (On the Nature of Poetic Inpiration).” The Edge of Surrealism, ed. and trans. Claudine Frank.
Georges Bataille. “The Attraction of Gambling.” Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall.
Mar 8 – Presentations – Chance; Seminar – Headphones
Readings:
Karinne Kiethly. “Uncreative Writing: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet.”
Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. “Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet.”
Graduate Students:
Shuhei Hosokawa. “The Walkman Effect.”
Mar 15 – Presentations – Headphones; Seminar – Video
Readings:
Chris Salter. “The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen,” Entangled.
Graduate Students:
Elise Morrison. “Screens,” Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance.
Mar 22 – Presentations – Video; Seminar – Socializing Technology, Socializing Performance
Readings:
Leo Marx. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.”
Mar 29 – Final Performances: Rehearsal
Apr 5 – Final Performances
Final Reflections due April 12.