Techno Performance
Since the 1966 New York performance series, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, which partnered engineers with choreographers such as Lucinda Chiles and, later, the 1972Cornell performance of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik (featured at the exhibition entrance), the media arts have incorporated, if not also challenged, leading developments in engineering, information sciences, robotics, and corollary scientific experimentations. The transformation of the art gallery and museum into sites for live media performance engages audiences with the delights of technology and the body/machine interface. Projects by Toni Dove and Ken Feingold have celebrated the wonders of robotics and interactive technology, while the blendings of the body and technology are staged, from Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent genomic rabbits to Stelarc’s extra ear grown into his arm, to talk back to passersby via Bluetooth technology. In contrast, the activist collective, Preemptive Media, invites users to hack technologies as their way of speaking back to the pervasive tracking systems of digital culture.
Alan Rath, Robotics, 1998. Catalog from exhibit at SITE Santa Fe, 1999. Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships Collection.
Ken Feingold, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, 2003. Installation diagram for proposed artwork. Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships Collection.
Norman White, Low Life, 2003; Machine Life. Catalog for exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 2004.
Brooke Singer and Preemptive Media, Stop the Creep: How to Become a Zapped! RFID Scout, 2005. Workbook for public arts intervention. Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships Collection.
Toni Dove, Artificial Changelings, flyer from screening at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival.
Groundbreaking interactive film whose narrative flow is controlled by spectators’ movements on floor sensors. New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Electronic Media and Film Program Collection.
Toni Dove, Artificial Changelings, still from installation version of artwork. Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships Collection.
Eduardo Kac, exhibition catalog, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2006.
Stelarc, poster for Rose Goldsen Lecture at Cornell University, 2008.
9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, program, New York City, October 1966.
A series of performances from October 13–23, 1966, in the Armory, New York City, where artists and engineers from Bell Laboratories collaborated on the first event in the series E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. Staged by Robert Rauschenberg and 10 artists and 30 engineers created a blend of avant-garde theatre, dance and new technologies. Artists included Rauschenberg, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, and Yvonne Rainer. Experimental Television Center Collection.