Editorial: A New PAJ Platform

In 2001, PAJ celebrated its twenty-fifth year of continuous publication with a day-long public dialogue in May on contemporary art and criticism at the SoHo gallery and performance/media space, Location One. A good-sized audience came to hear the two panels of artists and critics we had organized, prompting more than four hours of lively dialogue. One of the focal points of the day was the challenge to our understanding presented by the kinds of work artists are now creating, and the need to develop new forms of criticism, especially about the digital arts. Many audience members expressed a desire for more forums of public exchange in a culture that is becoming increasingly privatized and compartmentalized, allowing fewer opportunities for sociable meetings and serious talk about artworks, especially in SoHo, which has now become noted more for its fashion and shopping than artistic events. We hope to host more public gatherings in the future.

As if this desire for the coming together of artistic communities hadn't already been expressed throughout that day last May, the destruction of the World Trade Center—less than twenty blocks from our office—has made even more urgent the need for people to find meaning in expressions of self and communities. For artists and their audiences, it remains to be seen what new directions and responses the grief will take, not only in the language and look of art but in its capacity for the melody of worldliness graced by the personal voice. How will spectators and their own needs be transformed by the new awakening of pity and terror? In a culture devoted to the idea of spectacle we cannot fail to grasp the horror in finding that for the first time the idea of an "American theatre" of war has entered our consciousness, whereas even recent military doctrine and the writing of histories, used only to refer to the "European theatre" or "Pacific theatre," as if we would always be spectators of war. Inasmuch as we are actors in this world drama, we have the power to make meaningful our own individual acts and the enactments of art.

Over the last year we have been engaged in important new editorial initiatives. Beginning with this issue, PAJ will be published in association with The MIT Press (www.mitpress.mit.edu/PAJ). "Intelligent Stages"—our current theme issue—marks the start of what we look forward to as a fruitful relationship with MIT, a press celebrated for its cutting-edge publications and support of the new discourses on art, science, and technology. We have left The Johns Hopkins University Press after a decade, during which we published issue numbers 37-69 of the journal, and edited more than forty volumes in the "PAJ Books" series there, including the recent Art+Performance titles. All of these books will remain available from JHUP (www.jhupbooks.com/paj). However, our PAJ backlist, published independently by us (1979-1992), and with thirty-two volumes of plays and historical/critical editions still in print, is now distributed by Theatre Communications Group (www.tcg.org).

We are moving forward and devoting all our energies to the journal. As many of our readers may have been aware, in recent years we had changed our name from Performing Arts Journal to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, signaling our attempt to link performance and the visual arts in a broader view of performance history. Now, in our association with MIT, we have the means to reach a wider audience and an institutional framework already geared toward chronicling directions in contemporary critical thought and artistic process. This move also puts us in contact with a large community of writers knowledgeable about the kinds of media and cultural issues we hope to introduce to PAJ readers.

We have long planned this special issue in response to the growing attention that artists are giving to digital arts, interactivity, virtual reality, and to the...