Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (review)

It’s hard to imagine a bolder or more in-depth book on digital performance than Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation.

Exhaustive without being exhausting, Digital Performance includes 800 pages that outline histories as well as theories surrounding digital performance, with large sections of the book paying detailed attention to such topics as “the body,” “space,” “time” and “interactivity.” Along with providing a history of digital performance, Dixon addresses assumptions and critiques views taken by some at face value. Little escapes Dixon’s lens, for it is a book with roots in a long-running research project undertaken from 1999 to 2001 by Dixon and Barry Smith that “document[ed] developments in the creative use of computer technologies in performance.” Called the Digital Performance Archive (DPA), the web-based archive included “live theater and dance productions that incorporate[d] digital media to cyberspace interactive dramas and webcasts . . . [and] collate[d] examples of the use of computer technologies to document, discuss, or analyze performance, including specialist websites, e-zines, and academic CD-ROMs” (p. ix).

The book begins with a revised perspective of the postmodern take on art, challenging Lev Manovich’s stance on new media art, which Dixon says “fetishizes the technology without regard for artistic vision and content” (p. 5) and views that ignore the importance of Italian Futurism’s (and those movements connected to it) influence on digital performance (p. 47). Section one of the book traces this influence as well as the development of digital performance in three periods, looking first at the avant-garde in the early 20th century, then to multimedia theater from 1911 to 1959, and finally to technology-infused performance work from 1960 on.

Section two concerns itself with the “Theories and Contexts” surrounding digital performance, starting with the “liveness problem” (p. 115), then “Post-modernism and Posthumanism,” “The Digital Revolution” and “Digital Dancing and Software Developments.” Here Dixon critiques postmodern theories that he says “can . . . operate doctrinally to impose specific and sometimes inappropriate ideas onto cultural and artistic works” (p. 135)— and takes on the theorists who propose them. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s “remediation,” Dixon says, though not a new idea (i.e. it is itself repurposed from the “disposal and recycling industries”), does shed light on “inherent dialectical tensions at play within computer representations and simulations” (p. 136). George Landow, Dixon tells us, possesses “evangelical zeal typical of the writers at the time” (p. 137). Dixon points to Diane Gromala’s utilization of Lyotard’s language game to talk about new technologies, then of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories to explain her views of virtual reality; and, next, to Gregory Ulmer’s focus on Derrida, Lacan and Wittgenstein for theories of hypertextuality. A whole section is devoted to Jean Baudrillard, whose nihilistic and cynical view of technology, while “seductive and compelling,” is “over the top” and in the end offers a view that is for the most part one-sided and incomplete pp. (140–143). There is a section, also, on Derrida, whose theory of deconstruction (particularly that the “world [is] constant flux”) does not really fit “the liveness of theater,” which “conspires to fix time and space” (author’s emphasis, p. 145).

It would be easy to react to Dixon’s critique of theory as simply one of a Monday-morning quarterback able to make better claims in hindsight than those living in the moment of action, so easily does he pick apart past ideas, showing them to be hyperbolic or faulty. When he writes, for example, that “an inescapable fact about the progression of software is that after the initial miracle of new computer ‘life,’ a certain sameness and staleness creeps in through the repetition that replaced the initial awe and wonderment” (p. 208), we have to ask, isn’t this problem...