Live Ends: Performance in the Information Age

Abstract

For the last decade or more media technologies and live performance have become increasingly interrelated and interdependent. Debates about this critical nexus have resulted in a diversity of views. While there is broad acknowledgement that this interpenetration has resulted in widespread innovation, there is also evidence of a certain anxiety about the status of live performance. Questions have often focused on the resultant status of the live body, the changing nature of the performance experience and of technology itself. The experience of the ‘live’ based on notions of presence is often promised and reinforced by the effect of a mass audience, but it is increasingly susceptible to digital subversion by the temporal disintegration and restructuring of audio and visual data.

This is the landscape in which we are staging this inaugural issue of Performance Paradigm. The articles and interviews we have assembled here ask questions as to how we can best use the heightened audio-visual experience offered by media technologies to best effect and what might such performance experiences communicate? Does the performance come to be about the media interface alone or are other possibilities suggested?