Releases
BOOK RELEASE 2010
Johannes
Birringer, “Corpo, Carne e Espírito: Musical Visuality of the Body”
in Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research
through Practice in Performance, ed John Freeman. Middlesex Univ. Press.
BOOK RELEASE 2008
Performance, Technology, and Science by Johannes Birringer
Paperback: 338 pages
Publisher: PAJ Publications/New York (December 2008)
ISBN: 978-1-55554-079-1 . List Price $ 24.95
see
announcement on dance tech net
for ordering go to the distributor:
This ground-breaking work of scholarship explores convergences
between performance and science through an investigation of new
technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. In tracing the evolution
of digital performance within a particular
history of engineering and theatre that now expands to a wide range of practices
in dance, design, architecture, fashion, games, music,
robotics, telematic performance, and "post-production"-theatre, the
author focuses on interactive performance, installation and Internet art.
Internationally known practitioners and their works are introduced to formulate
provocative ideas on computation, complexity, emergence
and self-organizing systems in contemporary peformance which are inspired by
biology and biotechnology. Wide-ranging and richly
illustrated essays uncover shifts that have occurred globally in the aesthetic
understanding of performance within computer-augmented
virtual and networked environments.
The work of key artists, theatre/dance companies, and laboratories demonstrates
how scientific concepts have influenced digital performance, and how performance
relates to neuroscience, biology and the life sciences. Challenging common assumptions
about embodiment and the digital, this study addresses how artists use
artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensing technologies not only
to enhance the range of expression and visualization, but to bridge the gap
between the work and its user.
BOOK RELEASE 2005
Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition.
Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger (eds), Jahrbuch 15 der Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung. Hamburg: LIT Verlag.
ISBN 3-8258-8712-x
Tanz im Kopf / Dance and Cognition (Yearbook No. 15) is a bilingual anthology of new dance studies reflecting the annual research focus proposed for 2004 by the German Association for Dance Research. The title refers to tendencies both in contemporary dance practices and in dance scholarship. The discursive thread of the eighteen essays collected in the book runs from a historical understanding of dance which tended largely to separate dancing from thinking to the current proposition that dancing is thinking. Theoretical considerations regarding contemporary concept dance are examined along with sociological dimensions of dance culture and pedagogical concepts. Intercultural projects are included and analyzed along with approaches to dance improvisation and dance experiments with media technologies.
The discussion forum "Dance and Science" offers a special focus on various new research approaches in the cognitive neurosciences and experimental psychology and their impact on dance research and aesthetics. The essays in this forum present innovative models for the analysis of cognition and movement, and provide a critical framework for examining the influence of media and visualization technologies in dance production and research. Observational analyses of sensorimotoric behavior yield new findings that are relevant both for composition and performance practice as well as for dance pedagogical and therapeutic methods and improvisational techniques. This yearbook breaks new ground in international dance research advocating a strong cross-disciplinary emphasis on aesthetic and scientific investigations of performance and cognition.
BOOK RELEASE 2000
PERFORMANCE ON THE EDGE
Transformations of Culture
by Johannes Birringer
Performance on the Edge takes the reader on a journey across geographical
borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of
contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social,
cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both
process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction
of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological
structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiments of erotic
fantasies.
Performance on the Edge addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive
artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization,
warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from
North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges
our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological
imperatives and social processes, and bodily identities and virtual communities.
(London/New Brunswick: Athlone, 2000). ISBN 0 485 00418 6
US ORDER: hardback: $ 69.95
New paperpack edition, 285 pages (1st and 2nd impression)
Publisher: Continuum; ISBN: 0826457797, Price: $ 29.95
CONTINUUM: The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
