Approaching an Analog–Digital Dialectic: The Case of the Blue Man Group

Reflecting the current interest in techno-performance, virtual performance, online performance, and all of their derivations, scholars have been attempting to analyze, theorize, taxonomize, and historicize the use of digital media in performance. In computational terms, “digital” is understood in relation and/or contrast to its “analog” complement, and together the two terms function as a foundational dialectic in computing. However, using digital and analog rhetorically and metaphorically, rather than solely according to its technical definition, allows for analyses of technology-as-experienced within a performance event, especially when the use of computers is obscured, undetectable, or made to seem entirely analog. The work of the Blue Man Group functions as an especially vivid example of digital performance in this expanded, metaphorical sense, since many of the Blue Man Group’s performance strategies can be read as playfully but effectively interrogating the complex, dialectic relationship between the digital and the analog.