Day Eleven: Performing with Media & Technology

Chris Salter, Entangled Preface, and Sarah Kember & Joanna Zylinska, Culture Machine Letter from the Editors

"[T]echnology is comprehended as an originary condition of our being in the world....It is in this sense that we have always been media(ted)" (Kember & Zylinska, p. 4-5).

"[T]echnological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of subjectivity” through memory and intelligence, sensibilities and affects (Salter, p, xxxiii)

• Is technology a part of what it means to be human?

"...technology’s transcendent embodiment of the gods..." (Salter)

Media is anything that alters the human body's relationship with time and space - Marshall McLuhan

• In a sense, the "superhuman" capacities that human's use of tools of technology delivers is what makes us human.
• Humans as worshippers of the divine

"Mediation, we suggest, is all-encompassing and indivisible. This is why ‘we’ have never been separate from ‘it'...our relationality and our entanglement with other human and non-human entities continues to intensify with the ever more corporeal, ever more intimate dispersal of media and technologies into our biological and social lives." (Kember & Zylinska, p. 2)

• In this way, what is the traditional approach to media studies and Kember and Zylinska are trying to challenge? (p. 1 second paragraph)

Board Exercise: How do the following objects expand our bodies' relationships to time and space?

If performance describes our experience being in and interacting with the world, and technology/media plays an integral role in this experience, then media must be an integral aspect of performativity.

Intermedia Assignment (200) - The objective of this assignment is to begin to utilize the synthesis of multiple senses to create a more immersive experience for your audience. Remember that "media" is anything that "expands the body's relationship to time and space" (McLuhan) - so when we talk about media, we're not just talking about videos, music, technology, etc. We might be talking about setting or physical artifacts that the audience can perhaps feel if they are passed around or interacted with, or hear as it encounters other objects within the environment.

For this project, please choose an event from your life or an event that was told to you that you feel is significant in shaping your personal/cultural/spiritual/political/etc. perspective. This can also be a story that was told to you by someone you know, if it had an impact on how you saw the world. Create an aesthetic text about this experience (it can be poetry or prose, narrative or persuasive, you can use cut n mix, but please have the end product be original). Gather at least two materials that add another "sense" to your text. For example:

• Tactile - you can find a physical artifact (object) to pass around to your audience
• Acoustic - you can use an audio clip or allow the sounds of a physical artifact to add to your performance
• Kinesthetic - you can integrate movement or you can invite your audience to move
• Olfactory - please no burning objects! But anything else that adds a scent to your performance :)
• Taste - you can bring treats that might be relevant to the issue you are talking about (for example, if you are talking about a specific culture, the audience can further connect by tasting some food from that culture)
• Visual - Pictures, physical artifacts and/or video

Timeline

• This weekend - I highly recommend writing your aesthetic text this weekend, as well as planning the conceptual framework for your performance
• Monday, Feb 22 - Please fill out this Media Techniques Request survey
• Tuesday, Feb 23 - Meet in the Digital Media Center in the Anderson Academic Commons (i.e., the library) for a media techniques workshop
• Thursday, Feb 25 - Intermedia Performances