Josephine Machon: (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (2009)

A timely book that identifies the practice of (syn)aesthetics in artistic style and audience response, which helps to articulate the power of experiential practice in the arts. This exciting new approach includes interviews with leading practitioners in of theatre, dance, site-specific work, live art and technological performance practice.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN 0230221270, 9780230221277
232 pages

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Matthew Goulish: 39 Microlectures. In Proximity of Performance (2000)

39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance is a collection of miniature stories, parables, musings and thinkpieces on the nature of reading, writing, art, collaboration, performance, life, death, the universe and everything. It is a unique and moving document for our times, full of curiosity and wonder, thoughtfulness and pain.

Matthew Goulish, founder member of performance group Goat Island, meditates on these and other diverse themes, proving, along the way, that the boundaries between poetry and criticism, and between creativity and theory, are a lot less fixed than they may seem. The book is revelatory, solemn yet at times hilarious, and genuinely written to inspire – or perhaps provoke – creativity and thought.

Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415213932, 9780415213936
Length 214 pages

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Joseph Henry Auner: A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (2003)

Arnold Schoenberg’s close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection of Schoenberg’s essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer’s life, work, and thought.

The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg’s activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg’s career from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to nineteen-fifties Los Angeles.

Publisher Yale University Press, 2003
ISBN 0300095406, 9780300095401
Length 428 pages

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Lizbeth Goodman, Jane De Gay (eds.): The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance (2000)

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides material on:
* post-coloniality and performance theory and practice
* critical theories and performance
* intercultural perspectives
* power, politics and the theatre
* sexuality in performance
* live arts and the media
* theatre games.

Series: Performance Studies
Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415174732, 9780415174732
Length 322 pages

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Ira Greenberg: Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (2007)

This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary. The book then goes through using Processing to code lines, curves, shapes, and motion, continuing to the point where you’ll have mastered Processing and can really start to unleash your creativity with realistic physics, interactivity, and 3D! In the final chapter, you’ll even learn how to extend your Processing skills by working directly with the powerful Java programming language, the language Processing itself is built with.

Foreword by Keith Peters
Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 159059617X, 9781590596173
Length 810 pages

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Casey Reas, Ben Fry: Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (2007)

It has been more than twenty years since desktop publishing reinvented design, and it’s clear that there is a growing need for designers and artists to learn programming skills to fill the widening gap between their ideas and the capability of their purchased software. This book is an introduction to the concepts of computer programming within the context of the visual arts. It offers a comprehensive reference and text for Processing (www.processing.org), an open-source programming language that can be used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and anyone who wants to program images, animation, and interactivity.

The ideas in Processing have been tested in classrooms, workshops, and arts institutions, including UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, New York University, and Harvard University. Tutorial units make up the bulk of the book and introduce the syntax and concepts of software (including variables, functions, and object-oriented programming), cover such topics as photography and drawing in relation to software, and feature many short, prototypical example programs with related images and explanations. More advanced professional projects from such domains as animation, performance, and typography are discussed in interviews with their creators. “Extensions” present concise introductions to further areas of investigation, including computer vision, sound, and electronics. Appendixes, references to other material, and a glossary contain additional technical details. Processing can be used by reading each unit in order, or by following each category from the beginning of the book to the end. The Processing software and all of the code presented can be downloaded and run for future exploration.

Essays by: Alexander R. Galloway, Golan Levin, R. Luke DuBois, Simon Greenwold, Francis Li, Hernando Barragán

Interviews with: Jared Tarbell, Martin Wattenberg, James Paterson, Erik van Blockland, Ed Burton, Josh On, Jürg Lehni, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Mathew Cullen and Grady Hall, Bob Sabiston, Jennifer Steinkamp, Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, Sue Costabile, Chris Csikszentmihályi, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Mark Hansen

Foreword by John Maeda
Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262182629, 9780262182621
Length 710 pages

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Coco Fusco (eds.): Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000)

The most comprehensive volume on performance art from the Americas to have appeared in English, Corpus Delecti is a unique collection of historical and critical studies of contemporary Latin performance. Drawing on live art from the 1960s to the present day, these fascinating essays explore the impact of Latin American politics, popular culture and syncretic religions on Latin performance.
Including contributions by artists as well as scholars, Fusco’s collection bridges the theory/practice divide and discusses a wide variety of genres. Among them are:
* body art
* carpa
* vaudeville
* staged political protest
* tropicalist musical comedies
* contemporary Venezuelan performance art
* the Chicano Art movement
* queer Latino performance

The essays demonstrate how specific social and historical contexts have shaped Latin American performance. They also show how those factors have affected the choices artists make, and how their work draw upon and respond to their environment.

Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415194547, 9780415194549
Length 307 pages

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Robert Rowe: Machine Musicianship (2004)

Musicians begin formal training by acquiring a body of musical concepts commonly known as musicianship. These concepts underlie the musical skills of listening, performance, and composition. Like humans, computer music programs can benefit from a systematic foundation of musical knowledge. This book explores the technology of implementing musical processes such as segmentation, pattern processing, and interactive improvisation in computer programs. It shows how the resulting applications can be used to accomplish tasks ranging from the solution of simple musical problems to the live performance of interactive compositions and the design of musically responsive installations and Web sites.

Machine Musicianship is both a programming tutorial and an exploration of the foundational concepts of musical analysis, performance, and composition. The theoretical foundations are derived from the fields of music theory, computer music, music cognition, and artificial intelligence. The book will be of interest to practitioners of those fields, as well as to performers and composers.

The concepts are programmed using C++ and Max.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262681498, 9780262681490
Length 411 pages

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Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974/1999)

Michael Nyman’s book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4’ 33’’ consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman’s book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.

Second edition
Foreword by Brian Eno
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2002
ISBN 0521653835, 9780521653831
Length 196 pages

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Susan Kozel: Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007)

In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching.

Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this.

Kozel offers a timely reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology offered by Closer yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies.

After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, Kozel applies phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.

The transformative potential of the alchemy between bodies and technologies is the foundation of Closer. With careful design, future generations of responsive systems and mobile devices can expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 978–0–262–11310–6
Designer: Rebeca Méndez
Length 355 pages

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Judy Malloy (ed.): Women, Art, and Technology (2003)

Although women have been at the forefront of art and technology creation, no source has adequately documented their core contributions to the field. Women, Art, and Technology, which originated in a Leonardo journal project of the same name, is a compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practice. The book includes overviews of the history and foundations of the field by, among others, artists Sheila Pinkel and Kathy Brew; classic papers by women working in art and technology; papers written expressly for this book by women whose work is currently shaping and reshaping the field; and a series of critical essays that look to the future.

Artist contributors include computer graphics artists Rebecca Allen and Donna Cox; video artists Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Valerie Soe, and Steina Vasulka; composers Cecile Le Prado, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela Z; interactive artists Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen, Agnes Hegedus, Lynn Hershman, and Sonya Rapoport; virtual reality artists Char Davies and Brenda Laurel; net artists Anna Couey, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Nancy Paterson, and Sandy Stone; and choreographer Dawn Stoppiello. Critics include Margaret Morse, Jaishree Odin, Patric Prince, and Zoe Sofia.

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262134241, 9780262134248
Length 541 pages

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Site-specific art: performance, place and documentation

Site Specific Art brilliantly charts the development of an experimental art form in an experimental way. Nick Kaye traces the fascinating historical antecedents of today’s installation and performance art, while also assembling a unique documentation of contemporary practice around the world.

The book is divided into individual analyses of the themes of space, materials, site, and frames. These are interspersed by specially commissioned documentary artwork from some of the world’s foremost practitioners and artists working today. This interweaving of critique and creativity has never been achieved on this scale before.

Site Specific Art investigates the relationship of architectural theory to an understanding of contemporary site related art and performance, and rigorously questions how such works can be documented.

The artistic processes involved are demonstrated through entirely new primary articles from:
* Meredith Monk
* Station House Opera
* Brith Gof
* Forced Entertainment
* Michelangelo Pistoletto .

This volume is an astonishing contribution to debates around experimental cross-arts practice.

Site-specific art: performance, place and documentation
By Nick Kaye
Edition: illustrated, reprint
Published by Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415185599, 9780415185592
238 pages
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Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness

“Theatre, Performance and Technology “explores the research fields of performance and theatre studies, new media and digital culture studies, and art and aesthetics.
The book considers the history of the technological advances in the screened technologies of new media and computer environments, and the manners in which theatre and performance, culture and subjectivity, and material and metaphysical conditions have evolved within those systems. Matthew Causey argues that the era of virtuality (a problem of illusion and representation) has given way to a more troubling model of embeddedness (a problem of materiality and embodiment).
The wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness
By Matthew Causey
Edition: illustrated
Published by Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0415368405, 9780415368407
214 pages

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Happenings and Other Acts

The works of art and performance known as Happenings have often been considered to be the key to an understanding of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Happenings and Other Acts discusses what “Happenings” were, who made them and why, and the relationship they have to their origins in Dadaism and their antecedents in performance art. Articles, statements, interviews and essays by and about some of the most influential avant-garde artists and performers–Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Claes Oldenburg, Ann Halprin and George Maciunas–are presented here for the first time since they were originally published.

Happenings and Other Acts is a unique and important collection of original material, and concludes with a substantial, specially commissioned essay by Gunter Berghaus on European Happenings. The volume brings back into print the manifestos of some of the giants of experimental art and performance. It provides students and lovers of avant-garde art with a wealth of primary material which illuminates the history of performance art.

Happenings and Other Acts
By Mariellen R. Sandford
Contributor Mariellen R. Sandford
Edition: illustrated
Published by Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415099366, 9780415099363
397 pages
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Virtual theatres: An introduction

Welcome to theatre of the 21st century, in which everything -except for the viewer can be simulated.
Virtual Theatres is the first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre performance and digital arts. Through discussion of a variety of artists and performers – including Stelarc, Orlan, Forced Entertainment, Merce Cunningham and Blast Theory – Gabriella Giannachi analyses the aesthetic concerns of current computer arts practices and shows how they radically question our conventional uses and definitions of time, space, place, character, identity and realness. The book not only allows for a re-interpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice but also demonstrates how ‘virtuality’ has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

Virtual theatres: an introduction
By Gabriella Giannachi
Edition: illustrated, reprint
Published by Routledge, 2004
ISBN 0415283787, 9780415283786
174 pages
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