This interdisciplinary graduate course explores the collision between the performing arts and recent developments in computational media. Students will be 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 will include machine learning, motion capture, and theatrical control.
The course is structured to include student-led discussions of readings, the introduction to and practical exploration of technologies in the context of performance, and student-devised performances utilizing these technologies.
The course does not presume extensive familiarity with the technologies introduced in the course, but is intended to encourage creative and critical curiosity about and exploration of these technologies in the context of performance, with an added focus on the broader cultural implications of these technologies as revealed through creative exploration.
Schedule
Tuesday Jan. 10: Course Introduction
Introduction to Computation
No Readings
Tuesday Jan. 17: Video and Projection
Workshop: experimenting with video and projectors
Reading:
Chris Salter. “The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen,” Entangled.
Tuesday Jan. 24: Interactivity, Sensors and Actuators
Workshop: experimenting with sensors and lights
Readings:
Saltz, David Z. “Sharing the Stage with Media: A Taxonomy of Performer-Media Interactions” in Performance and Media: taxonomies for a Changing Field, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer parker-Starbuck, and David Z Saltz. University of Michigan Press, 2015, pp. 93 – 125.
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.
Tuesday Jan. 31: Algorithms and Randomness
Readings:
Richard Schechner and Michael Kirby. “An Interview with John Cage.” The Drama Review 10.2, 1965.
Ulf Otto. “Theatres of Control: The Performance of Algorithms and the Question of Governance.” The Drama Review63:4 (T244), 2019.
Optional Reading:
Annie Dorsen, “On Algorithmic Theatre.” Theater, 42.2, 2012.
Tuesday Feb. 7: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
sensors / projection performances
Workshop: experimenting with AI systems
Reading:
Sofian Audry. “Introduction,” Art in the Age of Machine Learning.
Tuesday Feb. 14: Machine Learning (continued)
Workshop: experimenting with AI systems
Readings:
James Bridle. “Cognition.” New Dark Age.
Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite, “Making Kin with Machines”, Journal of Design and Science, 2018.
(Tuesday Feb. 21 Reading week)
Tuesday Feb. 28: Body, Technology, Motion Capture
AI performances
Workshop: experimenting with motion capture
Readings:
Marco Donnarumma: “Beyond the Cyborg: Performance, attunement and autonomous computation.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2017, VOL. 13, NO. 2, 1–15 (2017)
Sally Jane Norman. “Oskar Schlemmer’s Programmatic Gesture Research.” Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance. Ed. Nicolás Salazar Sutil & Sita Popat. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Tuesday March 7: Motion Capture (continued)
Readings:
Danielle Goldman. “Ghostcatching: An Intersection of Technology, Labor, and Race.” Dance Research Journal, 35.2, 2004.
Sally Jane Norman, “Grappling With Movement Models: Performing Arts And Slippery Contexts.” Presentation at MOCO’14, June 16-17 2014, Paris, France
Sally Jane Norman, “Acting Bodies: Apparitions, Blood and Guts.”
Tuesday March 14: Embodiment
Motion Capture performances
Readings:
Johannes Birringer, “Gestural materialities and the worn dispositif,” 2015
Chris Salter, “Words without Bodies”
Tuesday March 21: Robots and Automata
Reading:
Oriza Hirata. “I, Worker.” Trans. Joanna Kriese. “Sayonara.” Trans. Bryerly Long and Hiroko Matsuda. Citizens of Tokyo, ed. M. Cody Poulton. Seagull, 2019.
Tuesday March 28
Final Performance Rehearsals
Tuesday April 4 last class
Final Performances
Final Reflections due April 11.