Identity, Performance and Technology

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology

Series Editors: Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon

Books included in this cutting-edge series centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focusing on digital performance and art, they also include the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. The series offers fresh artistic and theoretical perspec-tives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, and includes contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. Titles in the series will include edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture design and performance; performance, gender and tech-nology; and space and performance.

Titles include:

Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (editors)IDENTITY, PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGYPractices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity

Forthcoming titles:

Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel ZerihanINTIMACY ACROSS VISCERAL AND DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Palgrave Studies in Performance and TechnologySeries Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–29362–5 Hardback 978–0–230–29363–2 Paperback(outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

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Identity, Performance and TechnologyPractices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity

Edited by

Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon 2012 All chapters © contributors 2012Foreword © Thecla Schiphorst 2012

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v

Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

Series Editors’ Preface x

Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst xi

Notes on Contributors xvii

Introduction 1Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon

Part I Identities – New Epistemologies and Ontologies

1 Improvising Artists, Embodied Technology and Emergent Techniques 7

Andrew Bucksbarg and Selene Carter

2 Shifting Listening Identities – Towards a Fluidity of Form in Digital Music 24

Franziska Schroeder

3 Art as Eudaimonia: Embodied Identities and the Return Beat 44

Olu Taiwo

4 Graeae: An Aesthetic of Access – (De)Cluttering the Clutter 60

Jenny Sealey and Carissa Hope Lynch

Part II (Ex)Posing Identity – Embodied Art Practices

5 Woven Bodies, Woven Cultures 77 Ghislaine Boddington

6 Pina 91 Susan Broadhurst

7 Experiential Identities in the Work of Marisa Carnesky 111

Josephine Machon

8 Lynn Hershman and the Creation of Multiple Robertas 126

Roberta Mock

Part III Empowerment/Disempowerment in Digital Performance

9 (be)longing: A Case Study of Recording and Representation 145

Leslie Hill

10 Pluralistic Presence: Practising Embodiment with My Avatar 160

Sita Popat and Kelly Preece

11 The Silent Screen/Scream: A Sensual Exploration of the Interior/Exterior Screens of the (Dis)Closing Subject 175

Paul Woodward

Part IV Blurring the Boundaries: The Delimited Self

12 Below the Surface 195 Helen Paris

13 Stelarc’s Mystical Body 208 Charlie Gere

14 Borderless Bodies – The Cellulardata Body 220 Hellen Sky

Index 232

vi Contents

vii

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 Tuning Score Observatory, Brussels, Lisa Nelson with participants from Belgium, France, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom. Photo © Raymond Mallentjer 12

1.2 Tuning Score Observatory, Brussels, Lisa Nelson with participants from Belgium, France, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom. Photo © Raymond Mallentjer 13

1.3 Simone Forti, News Animation, 1990. Photographer: Lona Foote. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box, Los Angeles 19

2.1 Jason Freeman, Piano Etudes, Score Excerpt. Image courtesy of Jason Freeman 36

3.1 Olu Taiwo as Lock Weatherwax in An Avatar’s Broken Memory. Image by Sally Trussler 55

4.1 Amit Sharma, Pamela Mungroo and Simon Startin in Into the Mystic (2001). Image courtesy of Patrick Baldwin 63

4.2 Ali Briggs in Peeling (2002). Image courtesy of Patrick Baldwin 67

4.3 Jennifer-Jay Ellison, Gerard McDermott and Neil Fox in Blasted (2005). Image courtesy of Patrick Baldwin 70

5.1 Vesna Grandes dances with herself in DARE WE DO IT REAL-TIME?, a performance created as part of the Post Me_New ID project, process directed by Ghislaine Boddington and premiered at the Kinetica Art Fair, London, February 2009. From the author’s own collection 78

5.2 Ghislaine Boddington (as ‘Ghislaine Vella’) dancing in the Vitruvian World, a Second Life-based, mixed-reality installation by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele. Image courtesy of King’s Visualisation Lab, King’s College London 80

5.3 Digi-ID (Akademi, 2002), Boddington directed and moderated these telepresence ateliers based on identity and interculturalism for choreographers from India, the United Kingdom and the United States, using contemporary forms of Indian dance. Image © Vipul Sangoi, 2002 83

5.4 Orla Ray, the post-human avatar is obsessed with you and herself, she watches you – who is observing whom? An interactive installation by Ivor Diosi and the Post Me_New ID crew for the Virtual Physical Bodies exhibition at centre des arts, Engheins-les-Bains, Paris, October 2008 to January 2009. From the author’s own collection 87

5.5 Orla Ray is used as a performance avatar in DARE WE DO IT REALTIME? – a performance created as part of the Post Me_New ID project, process directed by Ghislaine Boddington and premiered at the Kinetica Art Fair, London, February 2009. From the author’s own collection 88

6.1 Pina Bausch. Photo © Wilfried Krüger 92

7.1 Marisa Carnesky in Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2008). Image credit: Marcus Ahmad. Image courtesy of Marisa Carnesky 113

7.2 Marisa Carnesky, Jewess Tattooess, publicity image. © Courtesy of Marisa Carnesky 116

8.1 Roberta Ware in the Roberta Breitmore Gallery, Second Life. Image by Jeff Aldrich 130

8.2 Roberta Multiples, 1977. Courtesy of the Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester 131

8.3 CybeRoberta. Photo courtesy of Lynn Hershman Leeson 137

viii List of Figures and Tables

9.1 Film still, (be)longing. © Leslie Hill 146

9.2 Emmy Minton and Helen Paris on location with the group. © Leslie Hill 157

9.3 Film still, (be)longing. © Leslie Hill 157

10.1 Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon. © Paul Sermon 162

10.2 Projecting Performance, dancers and digital sprite. © Popat and Palmer 163

12.1 Still from the moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Claudia Barton and Leslie Hill. Photo courtesy of Hugo Glendinning 196

12.2 Helen Paris, ‘Sea-Legs’. Photo courtesy of Hugo Glendinning 200

14.1 Hellen Sky – I feel the future present passing through me. Credits T. J. Bateson, Bruno Verguawen and Tetsu Tabata 228

Tables

3.1 A matrix of Olu Taiwo’s Mobile studio practice 52

List of Figures and Tables ix

x

Series Editors’ Preface

Susan Broadhurst was invited to be Series Editor of Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology in 2009 and she invited Josephine Machon to be co-editor soon afterwards. Performance and techno-logical resources, combined in various forms, constitute an increasingly popular area of artistic practice. In a relatively short time a prolifera-tion of new technological applications have infiltrated and irrevocably altered everyday life. The consequences of this might not be unprob-lematic, but the ambitions of performance practitioners have been extended by the availability of such resources. The remit of this impor-tant series is to acknowledge the progressive and diverse approaches to various performances and artworks employing technology in their practices. The series was launched in 2010 at the Digital Resources Arts and Humanities Conference, hosted by Broadhurst and held at Brunel University, London. Books included in this cutting-edge series centre on embodied approaches to performance and technology globally. As well as focusing on digital performance and art, books in the series also include the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. The series offers fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this excit-ing and growing area of contemporary performance and arts practice, and includes contributors working within this varied discipline from a wide range of international locations. Titles in the series will include edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture design and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance.

Susan BroadhurstJosephine Machon

xi

Foreword

The body in performance continuously reinvents technology and extends itself outward as an experiential, social, theatrical, intentional and influential source of technicity. The body invents technology as it absorbs it, absolves technology as it critiques it, and reduces technology as it claims it.

This collection of writings invited and edited by Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon are a rich and compelling collection of personal histories, humane stances, critiques, theoretical framings, and practice-based descriptions that explore Identity, Performance and Technology and the Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity.

These writings offer a common ground of human endeavour that recants rationalist notions of technology by (re)claiming our (multiple) technical relationships to ourselves, inviting the political agency of self-(re)production. It proposes that we seek ourselves through the very technologies that we imagine and produce; and we recognize ourselves as a process of technological production and agency.

This book brings together a set of voices that is complex, multi- layered, politically engaged, methodologically expansive, and rooted in social critiques of disenfranchised aspects of our experience. It points toward the global choreography and multiple sensing of our digitally engaged world, from ‘Choreography of interconnectivity’ that includes our collective cellular breathing and circular listening suggested by Hellen Sky, to Franziska Schroeder’s constructs of ‘Shifting Listening Identities’ in which the adaptable nature of our sensory mappings are supported through listening identities, where ‘listening implies reflexive action, a constant straining towards self, a constructing and consolidat-ing the self.’ These viewpoints illustrate the importance of developing our own technical sensory and attentional skills, ones that enhance our ability to discern, experience, create and transform our digital world.

Accessing experience as a political tool of knowledge forms an integral part of our histories of subjectivity and in Michel Foucault’s terminology, our technologies of the self. Foucault traces subjective practices includ-ing self-observation to the ancient Hellenistic concept of the ‘care of the self’, illustrating how first-person practices such as ‘attending to the self’ were utilized as a foundation of knowledge. He refers to technologies of the self as a set of processes that operate on the self to effect change or

transform the self in order to attain a certain state (Martin 1988: 18–19). These concepts are echoed in Olu Taiwo’s concepts of ‘Art as Eudaimonia [which] focuses on a state of becoming that results from feelings con-cerning wholeness and internal flourishing which is a consequence of an active and constructive engagement with one’s personal struggle.’ Many of the contributing authors included in this collection highlight subjec-tive practices (either their own, or the artists’ that they describe).

Like Foucault, the authors Depraz, Varela and Vermersch draw atten-tion to the self-observational practices linking them to agency, and self-efficacy. As contributing author Franziska Schroeder points out, the adaption of agency is entwined with our construction of identity, which includes a constant reconstructing and reconsolidating of the self. In Greek Antiquity, the Delphic oracle know thyself was understood as a form of knowledge born from self-cultivation, self-observation in which the body was held ‘accountable’ for knowledge construction. This inter-connection of self, body and knowing differs from our contemporary Cartesian reading of the directive know thyself, which has shifted toward an objective third-person knowledge ‘about’ the self, without requiring an inward, experiential or sensory gaze and without directing our atten-tion to our own political agency or identity.

The first part of this book entitled: ‘Identities – New Epistemologies and Ontologies’, focuses on an ethical political stance in which relationship to digital technology can be born through self-knowledge, enabling: a form of ‘citizenship’ with our cellular nature and larger environmental inter-connection, our improvisational nature as artists working with embod-ied and emergent forms of technologies (Andrew Bucksbarg and Selene Carter); a redefinition of well-being that holds the body responsible for the construction of its experience (Olu Taiwo); and the democratization and reclaiming of frameworks of disability, replacing them with methodo-logical processes centred on a theatre of aesthetic access ( Jenny Sealey and Carissa Hope Lynch). Each of these contributions provides multi- faceted examples of new epistemologies and ontologies of Identity.

The threshold between self-knowledge and the role of the self as a social enactor of digital life locates performance-based practices of iden-tity within techniques (or technologies of self-change) that can effect and transform issues of social political and disciplinary power struc-tures. This corporeal transformative relationship between our self and our disciplinary, social and institutional role[s] is a vital political link in our ability to alter our world and our technologies through our self.

The second part of this book, entitled ‘(Ex)Posing identity – Embodied Art Practices’, focuses on the historical framing of Performative Art.

xii Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst

From Broadhurst’s compelling empathic explication of the work of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater with its references to Artaud, hyperreality and the ‘montage of tragicomic exaggeration’; to Machon’s critical exploration of the ‘experiential identities’ in the work of Marisa Carnesky, involving an embodied understanding of (re)presented histories, which include a sensual exploration of the fabric of Jewish superstition, religious rituals and symbols to interrogate the teachings of the Torah and the Jewish taboo against body art; to Roberta Mock’s enigmatic auto/biographic positioning within the narrative construction of Lynn Hershman’s Multiple Jewish Robertas; and, finally, to Boddington’s evolution of body representational communication tools, in relationship to emergent ges-tural and identity issues within ‘Woven Bodies, Woven Cultures’: these examples highlight the artist, choreographer and creative ensemble as social enactors of digital life in which identity is constructed to support technologies of self-transformation within the issues of social, political and disciplinary power structures.

In the third part of this book, entitled ‘Empowerment/Disem powerment in Digital Performance’, Leslie Hill explores the representations of long-ing and belonging from women in the sex trade, through the varied and empathic use of technology to enable representations of identity in very different ways. Sita Popat and Kelly Preece’s research is concerned with telematic performance, in which the performer’s body is represented in a remote location by a virtual image or avatar that acts as a con-duit for communication, yet which attends to the body as a system of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs, while Paul Woodward examines the possible utility of a variety of contemporary media forms in supporting disclosure of HIV status for both disclosee and discloser. He explores disclosure as a performative action that creates an immediate intimacy between the discloser and the disclosee.

The final and fourth part of this collection, aptly named ‘Blurring the Boundaries: The Delimited Self’, returns full circle to the smudg-ing of the lines between poetics and knowledge, self and world, social and political, and audience and performer. In Helen Paris’s ‘Below the Surface’, her poetic description of the theatrical work the moment I saw you I knew I could love you considers the gut as brain and shares the intimate nature of peering into ourselves in moments of closeness, dis-comfort, alienation and vulnerability. Charlie Gere’s chapter, ‘Stelarc’s Mystical Body’, provides a provocative missive, suggesting that Stelarc’s performances involve a kind of transubstantiation of the body that becomes a ‘mystical body’ of the networks. The closing and refram-ing final work of the collection is Hellen Sky’s ‘Borderless Bodies – The

Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst xiii

Cellulardata Body’. Her writing draws us into the experience and inner state of her performer’s self-poetic linkage with the inner cellular body. She describes a perceptual agency created through the listening sensing self. Her connection between self- knowledge and ethical relationship with the world, reminds us that ‘you are presence in your absence and I can reach the memory of you.’

The necessary connection between self-knowledge and ethical action in the world shared by the contributors of this book, is echoed in a number of contemporary practitioners and theorists, including the pragmatist view of John Dewey, the political view of Foucault, the social-activist view of Augusto Boal and the somatic-philosophical view of Thomas Hanna, Sondra Fraleigh, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, Elsa Gindler, Trigant Burrow and Richard Shusterman (in addition to countless performance practitioners). These positions share the view that habitual structures limit human agency and include the concept of defamiliarization noted by a number of the contributing authors. These limitations are evidenced by habitual thought, feeling and physi-cal bodily postures, combining to create a narrowing of the human faculty of perception, reducing access to knowledge of the surrounding environment and the world. Hanna, the somatics-educator, refers to this as ‘sensory-motor amnesia’,1 a bodily state that reduces our ability to act and respond with agency in the world. Boal, the Brazilian theatre director and cultural activist, founded the Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used to effect social change by enabling the impetus for change to come from within the spect-actors, who acted simultaneously as participants and audience members. He evolved the performative practices commonly associated with the Theatre of the Oppressed for the purpose of ameliorating social conflict, creating harmony within society (Boal, 1995). These forums enabled habitual and often unseen social and political situations to ‘come to light’, high-lighting the underlying or embedded emotion and thought. Within this political and ethical stance, Boal and Foucault can be compared in their political strategies and goals of social transformation. Both Boal and Foucault enact their goals by constructing skills (of thinking and acting) that support self-agency and self-knowledge. While the example below compares habituated feeling with habituated thinking, the goals are ethically similar. Boal’s early theatrical exercises, outlined in Games For Actors and Non-Actors (1992), were concerned with de-habituating the performers’ loss of ability to express a greater range of feeling:

Our first principle at that time was that emotion … should be given free rein to shape the final form of the actor’s interpretation of a

xiv Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst

role. But how can emotions ‘freely’ manifest themselves … if that very instrument (the body) is mechanized, automated in its muscle structures and insensible to 90 per cent of its possibilities? … How does this mechanization of the actor’s body come about? By repeti-tion. The senses have an enormous capacity for registering, selecting and then hierarchising sensations.

(Boal, 1992: 40)

This can be compared with Foucault’s notion of the habituation of thought. Foucault focuses on the history of thought and how social thinking patterns are created through political constructs, ideologies and institutions. His primary goal was to analyze these formal social structures ‘related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves’ (Martin, 1988: 18):

My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories … The political and social processes by which Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are a part of our familiar landscape, and we don’t perceive them anymore.

(Martin, 1988: 10)

Just as Boal and Foucault identify the form of habit as a precursor to limiting agency and knowledge, they suggest the practices of self- ameliorative process, which lie in the somatic form of bodily retrain-ing, or what Foucault refers to as technologies of the self. Boal suggests exercises of ‘de-mechanization’:

Like all human beings, the actor acts and reacts according to mecha-nisms. For this reason, we must start with ‘de-mechanisation’, the re-tuning (or de-tuning) of the actor … He must relearn to perceive emotions and sensations he has lost the habit of recognizing.

(1992: 41)

Foucault notes his goal of creating greater discernment with regard to the habits of thought that he claims are created by historical social forms that have become habitual and therefore unconscious:

It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are a part of their landscape – that people think are universal – are the

Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst xv

result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of free-dom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

(Martin, 1988: 11)

This wonderful collection of writings reminds us of the ethical attitude of the attentional practice of epoché which is a continually emerging practice. We can use these writings and the works illustrated within this book to apply the notion of de-mechanization (as described by Boal and others) and Foucault’s concept of personal political transformation as outlined in the technologies of the self to the design and develop-ment of our social digital identities and technologies of production. By positioning the concept of an ethical citizenship born of a ‘care of the self’ within the landscape of performance and technology, we develop multiple stances toward creating access to qualities of perceiving, know-ing and being: techniques to support our many faceted, liminal, social, and performative identities and selves.

Thecla Schiphorst

Note

1. Hanna refers to sensory-motor amnesia as a habituated state of forgetfulness, a memory loss situated in our central nervous system affecting the image of who we are, what we can experience, and what we are able to act upon (Hanna, 1980: xiii).

References

Boal, A. 1995. Games For Actors and Non-Actors. London: Routledge.——. 1992. The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy.

London: Routledge.Hanna, T. 1980. Somatics: Reawakening The Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility,

and Health. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.Martin, L. H., H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton. 1988. Technologies of the Self:

A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock.

xvi Foreword by Thecla Schiphorst

xvii

Notes on Contributors

Ghislaine Boddington is an artist, dramaturge, curator and thought leader specializing, since the mid-1990s, on the body’s integration into responsive technologies and interactive interfaces. Her personal passion is telepresence and she has pioneered exploration of identity through tele-intuitive interauthorship. She is Creative Director of body>data>space, an East London design collective creating connec-tions between performance, architecture, virtual worlds and new media. body>data>space works internationally to share and extend future scenarios of virtual/physical blended space. Her present work includes ‘Robots and Avatars’ (EU Culture/NESTA) exploring (self-)representation within future work/play scenarios. Ghislaine holds an Artist Research Associateship at ResCen, Middlesex University.

Andrew Bucksbarg is an artist, videomaker, experimental interaction designer and audio-visual performer who has presented and published work internationally. Bucksbarg’s work and interests reverberate in a space of technology and social theory and practice. Recent projects investigate performance improvisation and performance installation using hand-held, mobile micro-instruments and audio-visual devices from a sonological perspective of visual art. In his work, Bucksbarg concerns himself with technologies and systems that support tactics of social-environmental creativity and exchange. He is currently thinking about freedom, consciousness and the post-human.

Selene Carter is a Lecturer in Contemporary Dance for the Department of Kinesiology at Indiana University. As co-director of Links Hall she cre-ated a forum for experimental and improvisational dance in Chicago. She attended the final performance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2011. Her work in teaching and performance focuses on perceptual movement scores for improvisation and collaboration.

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002), Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006), Community without Community in Digital Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (MIT Press, 2009), and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (Ashgate, 2010), as well as many

papers on questions of technology, media and art. In 2007 he co-curated Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to instructions, input or its environment, in Gijon, Northern Spain.

Leslie Hill is Associate Professor of Performance Making at Stanford University and co-director, with Helen Paris, of Curious theatre com-pany. Her interests include Live Art, social engagement, activism, phe-nomenology, autoethnography, film and video in performance, and science-art collaborations. Her performance work with Curious has been commissioned and shown widely internationally (see: www.placeless-ness.com). She is co-editor, with Helen Paris, of Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Carissa Hope Lynch is a theatre director, dramaturge and facilita-tor engaging with new work and writing. In 2009 Carissa completed an MA in Applied Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her interests range across site-responsive performance, heritage/ preservation, intermedia, physical theatre and immersive-narrative environments. Carissa is the Associate Director of Border Crossings and Literary Officer with Graeae Theatre Company.

Roberta Mock is a performance theorist, historian and practitioner. She is Professor of Performance Studies and Director of the Arts & Humanities Doctoral Training Centre at Plymouth University. Her books include Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and, as editor (with Colin Counsell), Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and Walking, Writing and Performance by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith (Intellect, 2009). She is currently writing a book entitled Doing Performance Research with Baz Kershaw and Gillian Hadley for Palgrave Macmillan. Roberta’s most recent performance work revolves around the creation of an alter ego who lives in a Detroit suburb in the 1980s.

Helen Paris is co-artistic director of Curious (www.placelessness.com). Established in 1996 Curious has produced over 40 projects in a range of media including live performance, installation and film. The company’s work has been presented and supported by such institutions as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Arts Council, England, Sydney Opera House, British Council Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival; interna-tional conferences including IETM, PSi and ATHE; and film festivals including: Winterthur, London Short Film Festival and Hors Pistes at the Pompidou Centre. Curious is produced and managed by Artsadmin,

xviii Notes on Contributors

London. Paris is Associate Professor of Performance Making at Stanford University, USA.

Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds. Her research interests centre on performance in digital and new media contexts. She has choreographed for humans, robots and digital ‘sprites’, and she is fascinated by the interrelationships between performers, operators and computers. She is author of Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities (Routledge, 2006), co-editor with Jonathan Pitches of Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. She sits on the Board of Trustees for DV8 Physical Theatre.

Kelly Preece is a Research Associate in Dance in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. She lectures on movement in performance, the body and experimental choreographic processes across undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. She is currently undertaking a part-time PhD, research-ing bodily experiences of selfhood in telematic performance. This is a philosophical investigation exploring the impact of a technologically extended body on self and self-experience.

Thecla Schiphorst is a media artist and Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her background in dance and computing forms the basis for her research, which focuses on body practices and their efficacy in technological design, including embodied interaction, sense-making, and the aesthetics of interaction. She is a member of the original design team that developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography and worked with Merce Cunningham for over a decade in support of his creation of new dance with the computer. She is the recipient of the 1998 PetroCanada award in New Media, awarded bien-nially to a Canadian artist by the Canada Council for the Arts. She has an MA in Dance and Computing Science from SFU and a PhD from the School of Computing at Plymouth (CAiiA) in Interactive Arts.

Franziska Schroeder is a saxophonist and theorist. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, and has since written for many international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound and Performance Research. She is the author of Re-Situating Performance Within The Threshold: Performance Practice Understood Through Theories Of Embodiment (2009) and editor of Performing Technology: User Content

Notes on Contributors xix

and the New Digital Media (2009). Franziska has performed with many international musicians including Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, Stelarc, the Avatar Orchestra and Evan Parker. She has also released two CDs on the Creative Source label, and a recent CD with Slam records. Franziska was an AHRC Research Fellow between 2007 and 2009, where she investigated network performance environments, and is currently a Lecturer/RCUK Fellow at the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast, www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~fschroeder.

Jenny Sealey joined Graeae as Artistic Director in 1997. Jenny is fuelled by her passion to find a new theatrical voice across the ‘aesthetics of access’ from the very beginning of the artistic process. Co-productions include Flower Girls by Richard Cameron with New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, and Static by Dan Rebellato with Suspect Culture. Recent pro-ductions include Signs of a Diva by Nona Shepphard and a new musical Reasons to be Cheerful (inspired by Ian Dury songs) by Paul Sirett, both with Theatre Royal Stratford East. Jenny has an MBE for services to disability arts.

Hellen Sky is an Australian digital choreographer/performer/director/writer and postgraduate candidate at SIAL RMIT. Her projects bridge dance, performance and installation extended through new technolo-gies, and often use real-time data generated by the body as the fluid interface between movement, multiple media, virtual-electronic and physical architectures. Working collaboratively with performers, com-posers, academics, designers, writers, architects, interface designers and scientists, she develops concepts and systems influenced by her choreographic sensibilities. Her writing is informed from embodying them – thinking in and through them to articulate their potential for new forms and modes of experience, while poetically questioning the affects of our coevolution with technology, www.hellensky.com http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/People/hsky.php.

Olu Taiwo is Senior Lecturer at the University of Winchester. He graduated from the Laban Centre with an MA and wrote his PhD on Performance Philosophy. He has performed in international contexts concerned with the interaction between body and technology. His publications include: ‘The Return Beat’, in John Wood (ed.), The Virtual Embodied (Routledge, 1998); ‘Music, Art and Movement among the Yoruba’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions (Cassell, 2000); ‘The Orishas: The Influence of the Yoruba Cultural Diaspora’, in Graham Harvey and Charles D.Thompson (eds), Indigenous Diasporas

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and Dislocations (Ashgate, 2005); ‘The Physical Journal: The Living Body that Writes and Rewrites itself’, in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds), Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Paul Woodward has worked as a director/performer/writer for physical/experimental theatre companies since the late 1980s. Graduating with an MA (distinction) in Theatre at Royal Holloway, he consolidated his research into body/sign systems in Theatres of Asia and its application to Sign Language Theatres of the Deaf. Paul remains active as a profes-sional director/dramaturge and has collaborated with Maxine Doyle (First Person dance/theatre) and Josephine Machon investigating the interface between the body, popular cultures and technology. He has delivered physical theatre workshops nationally and internationally, including the international festival of therapy and theatre, Lodz, Poland and in Knysner, South Africa, working with HIV positive children in the townships. Paul was a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Physical Theatre at St. Mary’s University College for 15 years and is now currently work-ing on a practice-as-research PhD investigating the performativity of HIV (dis)closure, having won a scholarship from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

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