 different environments, we come from very different kinds of institutions, we are all as a group at very different points in our career trajectories and may have very different relationships to digital culture, digital technologies, the digital humanities. If you were like me, you may have changed institutions a few times and seeing those unwritten rules shift significantly. When I worked at a large public state institution, this whole press to do something digital was very immediate, right? But often the people saying do something digital had very little idea of what that might be. Use a computer in it, surely that will be better. So we thought that this would be really, this opening would be a nice opportunity to kind of articulate some of the ideas that we've been working on for the past several years, both individually and together. David of course has a long career as a leader in this field and so to kind of orient ourselves around some kind of key ideas and vocabulary and readings. One other kind of idea about the readings, like any educational institution, I think the readings are ambitious in their amount and density and in our expectations of the thoroughness with which you will absorb, retain and process all of those readings. And we cut them down significantly. True that. So what I want to, I'll tell you what I often used to tell my graduate students, which is, you know, read for what's useful to you, you know, learn what not to read and our expectations will kind of ebb and flow as we go. These are in large part about kind of orienting you to different aspects of the field and the concepts and are really there as resources and references that hopefully will go far beyond the institute. Some of them may also be familiar to you. Some of them you may vigorously disagree with, I certainly do. And so we really welcome that. So, you know, my hope is that everybody's read part of everything as a community, as a collective, and we can kind of base our conversations on that. Let's pick up on that too. In general, the readings are most important for seminars, because that's a real discussion. So as a bunch of lectures, which are lectures. Yes. And believe me, the irony of the lecture format for you watching along, right, as being profoundly non-interactive, non-immersive, and, you know, following a method that is, you know, roughly 2000 years old, is not lost on us. Okay. So the kind of areas of the institute that we're thinking about really circulate or circulate around a few core concepts which you of course understand and know, right. One is this concept of the digital and we'll talk about the kind of valences with that word in a number of different ways to them or, right, what we could have written was like simply studies. I should also say that all of these slides and their references will be made available to you, right. So don't feel like you have to write, like my undergraph, right. Don't feel like you have to write down what is on every slide. We will make all that available to you. And then, of course, performance is a large category. Often in the institute, we tend to focus more on things that we would talk about specifically as theater or theatrical, but in which personally I include dance, but using a kind of broad spectrum of performance studies as well to think about how does digital culture often perform? How does the digital intersect with notions of performativity and how that plays out? And so really, I mean, I think all of us right now, no matter kind of where you come from, can probably point to a pretty rich, comprehensive body of literature at the intersection of any two of these circles, right. I mean, I think many of us have trained in kind of history theory criticism of performance in one form or another. Some of us may also have investigated the digital humanities kind of at the level of digital criticism, scholarship and theory. And another group of us is particularly invested in digital performance, right. How technologies manifest in different ways on stage, how they change our relationship to spectatorial perspectives, for example, things like that. What we're really aiming for in this institute is to kind of, like, really focus our attention at the center of these, right, to talk about these three domains as a kind of nexus for each other and how they, in different kinds of work and in different kinds of moments, press and change and bend each of these respective concepts to each other. You want to jump in here, I believe this is you. Okay, yes. So at this particular moment in 2018, technology has become, has permeated every aspect of our culture and it's become quite commonplace in all different types of performance settings. And people who don't have access to various different kinds of media technologies now desperately want it. They're hiring people to start adding it. Many of you were around not that long ago and that was not the case. So I think it's useful to see, to historicize a lot of the issues that we're dealing with and point to some basic intuitions that have recently been shifting and identify where those intuitions came from. A lot of the readings and discussions are engaged in these debates that are constantly, the premise of which is constantly shifting. So really, the period in the 1990s was really key as Steve Dixon's book on digital performance and the whole digital performance archive that he was involved in creating focused on that radical paradigm shift. And those of us that were around in the 90s might remember that there was a lot of experimentation with the use of media and specifically digital media in performance. There was a lot of excitement about it. It was also extremely controversial. And I was involved with it pretty early on. I was very lucky because I ended up in institutions, not coincidentally, that we're really interested in pursuing that. But I remember talking to a lot of people saying, wow, nobody at my institution wants to go anywhere near that. They think it's an awful thing to combine media with performance. And it's hard to even remember that mindset because it's really inverted. So it's interesting to think back, all right, well, why exactly did that a change occur in the 1990s? And it happens, you know, in general, that willingness to embrace different types of media with live performance, which is a broader issue came about with the rise of the digital. And it could simply be a coincidence, but I don't think so for a number of deep reasons. All right, so I'm going to go to the next slide. Yeah, next slide. All right. So I think to step back, you need to think, you know, why did the separation happen in the first place, right, between media and performance? For much of the 20th century, it was extremely rare to combine media with performance. There were some significant exceptions that I'll be pointing to later on. But for the most part, it was unusual. And in the 90s, there were two things that happened. I think that resulted in the shift. One specifically related to the digital, it was very, very pragmatic. It simply became a lot easier to integrate media and performance. So if you think back to the 70s, when Spoveda was one of the first to be using it, he was using film, right? And a lot of the earlier products were using actual celluloid, which is much, much harder to film and develop and then project. And it really wasn't until the 90s that we had, you could create the media, edit the media much, much more easily, and then project the media. And even I remember the first production that I did that use computer technology, when I was a grad student in the 80s, use this horrible limelight projector. Anybody remember those? And by the early 90s, you could really get access to the sort of decent projectors of the sort that we have now. So there's certainly that pragmatic explanation. But I think there's a more interesting conceptual one. So if you go to the next slide, all right, the cultural explanation. And this is something that many of you have been dealing with your own art forums and dealing with the rise and fall of modernism. And I'm really curious to get your thoughts about this, but it's somewhat reductive. But I think nonetheless, true, explanation has to do with the shift in fundamental modernist assumptions. So as we all know, around the end of the 19th century, we get the development of the strong, high modernist movement, where in all the art forms, whether it was individual arts, or in music, or in architecture, there is this drive to find the purity of the art form painting needed to be not about anything but painting, right? So you get rid of the figure, you get real representation, except they have paint on the canvas, you get the essence of each art form. Buildings needs to be about structure and form in the building itself. And the same thing, you know, of course, happens with theater and other art forms, they each try to define themselves, essentially, right? So, yeah, next slide. So, so each film and theater, when film develops at the end of the 19th century, just with the right this, you know, when this, this idea of modernist formal essentialism became entrenched, film had to define itself as a unique art form, not simply as a recording of theatrical events. And one of the narratives that have become particularly powerful in the letter half of the 20th century in both theater and in film studies, and it's a narrative that permeates a lot of the textbooks that we all use when we teach theater the brackets and that kind of thing, was Nicholas Vardick's really influential and now quite controversial argument. So I'm sure most of you are really familiar with this. Is anybody not familiar with Vardick? It's fine. Okay, so it's a real super nutshell. But Vardick, you're going to be familiar with the basic argument, though, I think, if you've taken any theater history, is that from the Renaissance on there was a growing again, this is Vardick, this is a quote, there is this growing movement towards scenic realism, towards creating an illusionistic stage behind a proscenium. So you look through the frame and you look and you get the Diderot's idea of the fourth wall and then the box set and bellow dramas and and at a very in Shakespearean production, all these things were moving together to create a picture frame that you look through into an alternate reality Wagner at the Great Divide and blackening the house. And in effect, what Vardick was saying is you theater was creating cinema, that it was creating that frame. And by the end of the 19th century, that was the aesthetic. And then cinema comes along at the perfect moment culturally to pick that up, and then take it to the next level. So you actually have the screen and you can have mountains and, and, you know, all sorts of, you know, battles and in battlefields. So it took over that game. And in fact, the, you know, cultural deterministic, as well as the technological deterministic argument would be, the technology didn't give rise to that aesthetic, but the aesthetic gave rise to technology, right? People needed cinema. But in the 19th century, they developed it. And so then theater is left. Well, it doesn't, you know, want to just be a second rate cinema, right? At that game, it's not as good at it. So it had to do 180 degree and say none of those scenic realism is not at all what we're interested in. And so the innovators of theater started pursuing something else. So we have on the film side next slide. So on the film side, you have a deeply entrenched anti theatricality in film theory that begins from the very beginning. So people like Panofsky, you know, argued the imitation of a theater performance with a set of stage fixed entries and exits and distinctively modern literary ambitions is the one thing film must avoid. So the worst thing to accuse a film of being was theatrical, right? Film was the anti theater. And and so film theory then elevated editing and directing over the pro the pro filmic elements, the things that are there before you start filming them, like mise-en-scène set design and acting. So those were theatrical things that in the focus and film was the construction of this visual text through editing. And of course, the Kuleshov effect, which I'm sure you've all seen, is the perfect back to the very beginnings of film theory. 1910s, he develops this idea. So you've got the one image so you don't need an actor at all. You just have the face. And if you juxtapose it with something else through the editing, then we infer different emotions. So in this case, the first image with dead body would be you get sadness. And then you've got the food. So we get he looks hungry. And you get this, of course, wonderfully erotic figure. And we have lusts. These are his arguments. And at the same time as theater, you have the same effort to separate theater from film, right? So theater isn't simply just a cheap poor person's film medium. It's doing something radically different has nothing to do with film. It's about the presence of the actor, right? And then so we have key figures like Kupo going back to Canada and forms of play and theatricality, of course, our toe, talking about the presence of the actor Grotowski, the total act, absolute presence, poor theater, stripping away any illusionism, stripping away anything, but the raw encounter between one human being on the stage and human beings in the audience. And then of course, performance art, which takes us even further and then rejects the theatricality of the theater events in the same ways that say painting was rejecting figure, we're not about representing or about the real body, my real body here with you. There's no fiction. There's no character. It's just here. It's now Alan K pro emphasizing that with his happenings, it can never be repeated. It's just raw absolute presence. So you get that cult. Alright, so actually go back there is the famous so within media theory, you know, very famous quote from Peggy Phelan, performances only life is in the present performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation. Once it does, it becomes something other than performance. As you write this in 1993, which is just at that critical moment, when these ideas are about to become radically challenged. And this, this of course, became the other side of the Philos Lander live and survey and by now, you know, actually many years ago already, Peggy said, I said that then I don't even believe it. Okay, next slide. So I would say that in the 90s, there were actually three paradigm shifts that dealt a pretty decisive blow, I think, to this divide, especially from the performance and theater side. The film studies is still there's some key wonderful exceptions, like people like Brewster and Gunning, but much film theory still is there's a certain anti theatricality to it. But within the theater side and the performance studies side, there's been a pretty wide embrace of media as performance. And I think there are three things that affected that one was in the 70s and 80s, semiotics and structuralism was of course all the rage. And you go there are some of the key texts in that field initially in the continent and then coming over to the United States and in England. And the argument there was that this idea of presence that runs through the history of the 20th century and was articulated by Peggy Kalin was totally naive. There were everything is a sign, everything is a text. Nothing else. So that's so and that's where we actually began with this huge rift between theory and practice and organizations like Athas suddenly started getting worried about how we bring theory together with practice. We shouldn't used to be such a big issue. But at that point, the theorists would all look at the practitioners who were still doing Stanislavski or maybe if they were experimental, you know, open theater or grotesque, all of that was so naive, you know, so he's speaking totally different languages. So that was one blowed out. And then the second shift with post structuralism is much more radical because it challenges the whole binary opposition. So it's not simply saying everything is text or everything is a sign or everything is live. It's saying that whole binary opposition between liveness and text is deeply problematic but unavoidable. That's sort of part of the structuralist thing. You can't simply say it's wrong, but it's deeply problematic. So with deconstruction, of course, Derrida was one of the key figures with deconstruction and his deconstruction of presence, of presence and absence and speech and writing, which was, of course, all the rage in the late 80s and 90s and fell very much out of favor of critical theory. We don't talk about it very much, but it remains the bedrock. Actually, I was just talking with fellow slender about this just to see because I've been saying this for years now, but I wonder if he would disagree. No, I don't disagree with that. It's true. Derrida, I don't think he cited once in liveness, but he is the underlying paradigm of the whole thing. This deconstruction of presence and absence. So with Phil, you know, who will be here later this week, it really formulated the current debate of liveness. And he started off back in 86 before he started talking, using that term, liveness, with the most, the one really explicit use of Derrida. Just be yourself, logo centrism and the difference in performance theory where he makes this exact argument about the naivete, the problematic nature of Peter Brooke and Stanislavski and Grotowski and even Brecht all have these naive ideas of presence. But he simply, it doesn't just invert them and say everything is a sign. It's not that simple. They have to have this idea. But everything in deconstructive practice, everything they say is unique to presence is already, always already present in media and vice versa. And that's the core idea, really, of liveness. It's not saying nothing is live. It's saying media is live and live performance is media ties. That there's no way to distinguish between the two. And then Matthew Cosi was another one who actually started out as his dissertation in the 90s, very much part of, you know, Baudrillard and Derrida, using that kind of critical theory and Heidegger in his case as well, to challenge this notion of liveness. And then the third, and there's overlap between these of course, is the paradigm shift with the post-humanism, moving beyond the idea of the human subject as this distinct and unique thing, which underlies this whole idea of the co-presidents of the body were authentic, you know, we're here, we're in and out. Technology is, you know, we're on a poor theater, so no role for technology, no role for media. Well, once you challenge the boundaries between the human self and technology, and there are a lot of theoretical apparatus, phenomenology was a big part of this model of Fonte talks about the, you know, Marshall McLuhan in terms of his media theory, talking about technologies, his extensions of the self, this idea that this, that the organic can't be separated from technology anymore. And so we get, you know, really key seminal figures, so of course, Haraway's cyber manifestos back in 84 was a text that was frequently cited, this manifesto really was a very, very effective, it was exactly that, it was a manifesto. Katherine Hales, who you'll be reading and I think Sarah will be talking about in a second too, how we became post-human, moving that into literary studies, and then within our field, of course, Jen Parker-Starbucks, Cyborg Theater, which was published in 2014, but she'd been working in that again throughout the 90s developing these ideas, challenging the boundaries between the human and technology, and in a very logical way, very quickly extending that now into animal studies, just, you know, defying that rigid box of the human. All right, next slide. Then we shift to digital scholars. Okay, all right, so now, on to Sarah. So if you sort of follow the kind of arc of this, of this history and evolution, this more or less brings us to what we might think of as a kind of, you know, critical moment of our own, right, this sort of evolution of the last few years of this emergence of digital scholarship. And digital scholarship, digital humanities, is a phrase that's been used quite extensively. It reminds me very much, the whole debate around digital humanities reminds me very much of the avant-garde and the constant need to keep redefining what that means. Right, so every time you bring that up in a context, it's like, and this is how it means, and this is what it means, and how I'm using it, and we see something very similar in the digital humanities. It's a kind of, and it has a lot of similarities to the way that performance studies formed as a discipline or anti-discipline, right. It's a kind of loose confederation of folks who come in and out from different aspects and highlight different concepts within it. I think it's helpful for our discussions to ground it in a few preliminary definitions, which we can then use as a motive to contest and resist if we want, but the most primary, of course, is this notion of it being grounded in the digital, which, as we can all sort of imagine, has something to do with computers, right, and binary language, that there is some kind of shift that happens in the way that we're approaching this. There's a very interesting in the theater and series, the Theater in the Digital by Bill Blake, really avoids defining the digital, right, which is sort of ironic, I think, for a book that uses that in half its title, but it's precisely because this is a kind of, right, what the Dutch theorist Michael Ball called a traveling concept, right, it's something that moves and is rather fluid in its evolution. We can also kind of anchor it in particular kinds of aspects of popular culture, social media, or the so-called Web 2.0, this notion of digital documentation that goes a lot, it's kind of the flip side of the use of projections and robots and digital technologies in performance, right, and then that becomes this kind of key marker of how we are assessing, recording, and understanding the field going forward. And I think the most important thing here is this quote from Charlie Geer in 2002, which is this idea of the digital not just being about technology, but also being about a kind of shift in cultural mindset, right, that it has something to do with a kind of collective zeitgeist in the way in which we are engaging and we're seeing the digital pop up in increasingly relevant ways in social theory. So for example, there's a book from 2017 by Nick Cauldry and Andreas Hepp called The Mediated Construction of Reality. And this is a fairly extensive work of social theory that really, in following with everything that David was just talking about, and sort of moved from structuralism to post-structuralism and then post-humanism, makes the argument that there's no longer any such thing as face-to-face interactions, right, that when we talk about social theory we can't talk about people in social communities or social relationships as being completely unmediated, right, that now because the context in which we all operate and that is, you know, is regardless of what our actual access to technology is because we are working within structures and systems that are themselves formulated by and shaped by and responding to various kinds of medial pressures, right, both resistant and capitalistic. And in that context none of us can kind of get a kind of intellectual outside, right, so everything is kind of permeated by this. And I think this is where a lot of theater performance theory has been really interesting in terms of negotiating, okay, so what is happening in that social interaction, right, how do, you know, when we think of theater as perhaps the world's first social media, right, this kind of social gathering that also has layers of artifice and representation and is an interactive community that also follows certain rules and those rules are dynamic and change, how do we understand these kinds of parallels and similarities to one another. So this is, these are kind of pointing out the history of the ways in which theorists and thinkers have been approaching the digital humanities. There's a, if you are interested at all, there's Matthew Gold's debates in the digital humanities, which is an excellent kind of edited collection. I believe it was just published in its second or third edition from 2014 or even 2016 maybe. But there's also an online website in which the sort of debates continue, right, so there was this combined and Matthew Gold is the head of digital humanities at the CUNY Center doing a lot of really interesting work at the intersection of computer technologies and in fact there's an overlapping digital humanities conference last week and this week there. So I've been tweeting back and forth with with folks like Kali Beserling and other folks there. But sort of highlighting that this is not necessarily a brand new form of scholarship that in some ways, right, digital technologies and computers almost from their inception have been used in service of the humanities and even in works of theater history like the London Stage, history of the London Stage database. Derek refers to that and is really excellent at was it Average Broadway, am I remembering that correctly? Essay from from Theatre Journal in 2016 and other folks have pointed to this as well. One of the other leading figures of digital humanities that I found really interesting is Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who really came to the digital humanities when she was working on on a book that she had a tremendous difficult time publishing. And everybody agreed, you know, that it was really they were very enthusiastic about her work, but she kept running it into this whole question of, well, but there's no market for it. Right. So it was really hard to get it to come out in print. She's told the story in a number of different ways. So she moved to an online format. Right. She basically published the book and she opened it up for comments and then eventually she did publish it in a print version, but it moved her towards this idea of what would then become the comments. Right. So she was then in charge of the MLA Commons for a number of years. I believe she's moved back into an academic teaching position now. But in that book, she laid out the thinking sort of used sort of in in the in its evolution from say, like the late nineties is and the early 2000s where where David kinds of leaves off to its thinking as we move into the the 20 teens and beyond. And if you look at this, she's right now she's describing literary scholarship. Right. She's talking about the shift in literary scholarship. What's I think significant for us is that this shift makes scholarship start to look a lot like theater. Right. Product to process, individual to collaborative. Right. Text to something else, the idea of intellectual property to it. Right. And so and if you read more deeply, I'm sort of pulling out her kind of, you know, highlights, but if you read more deeply in that work, there's a real resonance between what's happening in the digital humanities and what theater performance studies have been doing for 100 years or more. Right. So much so that that without without irony, Tom Scheinfeldt in a blog post, I believe from like 2005, 2006, talked about the digital humanities as the performative humanities and said like, oh, yes, because we're no longer writing texts, we're making projects and works that are interactive and have audiences and speak in this way. So there's a sense of like, you know, everything old is new again as we kind of move into it. And then the other dimension that I think is really important. And this is this is one of my ideas. So I'll put this out here and then open it up for contestation, which is that I think these are the the impact of the digital humanities and theater performance studies really break down in the scholarship in kind of three broad categories. One is that it changes the way that we collect evidence. Right. So how we understand what we see, how much we can see. You know, we, you know, if you like me were taught like all theater is local, right, it's always an immediate experience. But you live, I don't know, in rural coastal Maine, for example, getting to see, you know, getting to see the local experience of a lot of theater is very difficult. Right. So I rely a lot on NT live. I rely a lot on, you know, Broadway HD. I use this a lot in my teaching. Right. All of a sudden, there's a whole avenue of theatrical viewership that is available through digital technologies. The second, and this is really, I think speaks is what, you know, Derek's work, I think is really at the cutting edge of this is how then it also changes the way we analyze these materials, right, that we can ask different questions. We can explore different domains. One of the the sort of sections of readings is from Franco Moretti and his highly influential book, Distant Reading, which made the argument that we should stop reading individual texts. And he's being, I think, I hope, slightly hyperbolic there. But the, but because we are missing so much, right. And this is a similar idea to what Derek argues in average Broadway, where he talks about all the, that the bulk of Broadway we ignore, right, that most of that history we pay absolutely no attention to because things close, they were bad, they became obscure, right, they sort of, and so how do we recover it? So it changes not only what we collect, but also that how we analyze this material. And the third major kind of critical area of this is, right, which is that digital technologies help us tell the stories of the history of theater, the theories that we're working through in different domains. So you see the rise of online courses like MOOCs, right, the massively online, what is the second OCM for? Open, thank you very much. Courses, we see, you know, I don't know, the use of PowerPoints in lecture slides, right, so there's a whole different domain in how we, in how we disseminate our work, how we share it. And I'll tell you a little story. When we were putting the slide together, I had tucked visualization and simulation in here with presentation and publication. And, and, and David then took that slide and like put it all in red. He's like, well, actually, you know, this, and he's absolutely right. Like when we start talking in sort of pure digital environments, right, when we start looking at digital, that the products and the process that comes out of this kind of scholarly project, like we actually get all three, right, that you can use digital simulations to become methods to that collect data, that analyze that data, and that represent that data, right. And so we see this kind of, you know, mixing together. So it might be artificial in some instances to separate them out and different techniques will fit into, into different domains. There are a few different examples of this, right. So if we think about sort of online archives and again, Phil Aslander's most recent work really touches on this notion of documentation, right. New resources in terms of what we can show and what we can do. One of my favorites is, is on the boards dot TV from the Seattle based company. If you're not familiar with this, it's a, it's a really wonderful database. It's beautifully shocked. It's one of the better, to my mind, documented performance. It's all contemporary performance that's playing it on the boards. So it's not as frequent as other, and it's not as, as, as varied. You don't get as much material, but it's all exquisitely done. And what's really interesting is in the, in the case of some performances, you will see things in the digital, in the digital recording that you won't see if you saw it live. So for example, when I was there for the Astor conference, I saw Ralph Lemons, How Can You Stay In The House To Not Go Out All Day. And, and there is a scene where Oakley, Oakley Facility is like, has this like 10 minute like keening, right, this like incredibly powerful weeping. Much of it from the physical audience, you hear her in the space, but you see an empty stage. Right. So there's this like experience of grief and loss and what you are witnessing is pain, or you are hearing is pain and what you are seeing is absence. In the video, they cut to her where she is. And so there's this, there's this going back and forth between the empty space and her as a, as a, as a figure in a body. And I was like, oh, so that's what she was doing. Right. Which raises some really interesting question, which is like, what is the, what does it mean to have watched that performance? Can I say that I watched it if I saw it live and I never watched the digital version and I never saw where she was, what she was doing. If I had only seen the digital version, right, would I could I say I had seen it, right. But I would have missed like the, the feeling like the sweat and the, and the heat that was in that space and what it is to hear another live human being like profoundly weep, right in the same, in the same room. So this raises some really interesting, interesting questions as well. We also one of the other things that I've been really interested in is video annotation. I've been having my students do more more work in a very rudimentary way with, with looking at, at annotating video and there are a number of, of platforms in which this happens. Derek Miller, right. I think is a great, this is, this is probably old off your website. I've been trotting this one around for a while because it's so colorful, right. And it's like if you go back, right, it's also pride, right. Okay, skipping ahead. This is a relatively new project. It's called in terms of performance and it's a, it's essentially it's like, it's like the, the most text heavy online project because it's really about words and how they manifest. But it's a kind of rolling and expanding database of terminology and language. And it just got started. But I think it's really interesting because it gives us a way of kind of holding on to and following, right. How language changes and how terms get used and who's, who's picking them up. And it also then, you know, we can sort of think of this as a kind of mode of collection that might then at some point be really ripe for analysis, right. So if we go back into this in 10 years, what words popped up in what order, which were the ones that were most often looked at, when did and where did these words come from, right. We sort of think about, you know, for a long time we had our East Coast, West Coast performance studies divide, you know, so you could actually trace, right, where those are, where those are circulating. It's also an area that's being picked up in, in professional theaters, right. So this is the Battersea Art Series Art Center that is now using the tool developed by the George Mason, right, the Roy Weisenberg Center for Digital History at George Mason University. They have an open online tool that you can use called Omeka. And this basically helps you create timelines, can be very useful in history projects. But they're now using it as a way of highlighting the history of the theater and creating again a kind of documentation. And so here again, we kind of see the blur of the collection, the analysis and the dissemination that the digital makes, that makes possible. And this is Joanne Tompkins, digital three dimensional reconstructions of performances in the Rose Theater, taking into account space but also light and what we know about like the sun and the position and understanding what the lighting effects would have looked like in this period during particular performances, right. So really interesting kind of projects. These are again some recent publications that I think do a good job of highlighting some of these questions. I would imagine that many of you are familiar with Deborah Kaplan's notes from the frontier. If you're not, I encourage you to read. This is a review essay that came out in Theater Journal in 2015. And it marked a really significant shift, I think, from Theater Journal in which in addition to book reviews and performance reviews, they recognized that there is now this other space and this other venue for publication, right, which is like digital scholarship. So works that might never emerge in a book form or in a printed journal, but that nevertheless are deeply engaged in and connected to questions of theater history and theater studies and performance analysis. So she details and reviews, gives a review of four such projects. And I think does a really nice job of contextualizing it. And I see this, you know, I assigned this essay quite a bit. I see it as a really kind of critical marker, both in terms of the first essay that Theater Journal is publishing in this sense, but also to the extent that she, that we will come kind of back to this as these projects and where they are, right, and they emerge. It comes very quickly on the heels of the joint Aster-Atha Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship, right. So we can see that the whole field is beginning to make somewhat of a shift in an acknowledgement of this new kind of area. That's not to say that I think we're getting rid of journals or books any time soon. But I am encouraged by the idea of creating more opportunities to examine this kind of work. And so there are a few examples here. This is set done by Jennifer Robert Smith at the University of Waterloo. Another really important project on the Juba Project is a history of early blackface minstrelsy in Britain. It includes a number of really wonderful video and simulations. I mentioned the media commons before, right. So again, this is like related to a project that was started with Kathleen Fitzpatrick and supported by the Modern Language Association. This is a Humber Gramaturgy with a principal investigator of Wendy Arons at Carnegie Mellon University and a team of collaborators really looking at this. This is an interesting project. This is Miguel Escobar who did his PhD at the University of Singapore. And this is his dissertation, which was an entirely digitally constructed dissertation built from scratch, right. He basically taught himself coding and HTML so that he could build a website that would document, analyze, and present his research on Weying Contempo, right. So contemporary shadow, Javanese shadow puppet theater. And it includes videos and oral history interviews and his own analysis. And anyway, it's an extraordinary website that was then presented as his dissertation. I was brought in as one of his sort of external readers. And the people at Singapore, there was like a little bit of tension about whether this would count as a dissertation. And so the, the, you know, so I was brought in basically to say that it counted. And I was very happy to say that it counted. So I can't take any credit for helping him develop it. I came to it when it was done, right, just to say like, well, yes, this counts, right, stamp of approval. But it's a really extraordinary, extraordinary project. And, and I frequently present this to people and one of the things I say about McGill's work is that, right, he taught himself computer language along time, along with teaching himself the languages he needed in order to communicate, right. So I mean, it really became a multilingual, multimodal project that's really an extraordinary work, primarily of collection, right. And analysis. All right. Yes, please. So this overview so far has been sort of the first, the first week of scholarship and media theory, which we'll be delving in much, much greater detail. And you'll be meeting with a lot of the leading figures in these areas of researchers, different perspectives. The second week, as I said, is going to be focusing more on performances and corporation of media. So this is going to be the shortest part of our introduction today. But remember, I alluded to the that there were some exceptions that proved the rule, of course, there had been some use of technology. And so next slide. So some of the earliest and most significant examples, interestingly, way back in 1914, I mean, the initial use of film, as again, many of you know, there weren't movie theaters actually earlier on, there were like little things that you'd look into. So it's going back to like using a handheld, it was a one person experience. And then of course, there was the vaudeville circuit. So so films were another specialty act in vaudeville. So it wasn't seen as distinct from live. It was another, what a cool thing. And very early on, we had Windsor McKay, who was one of the very first animators, not the very first, but one of the very earliest introduced his early animation of the wonderful Gertie the dinosaur is part of a vaudeville act before it became a standalone film. So he came out as a person. And this was, of course, a film reel. But it was time to interact with him. Gertie would come out and you would say, Gertie, please come over here. Don't do that here. Would you like to eat something, eat some food? Gertie would eat it. He splashed the water. And ultimately, the, you know, McKay goes backstage and then jumps on to the dinosaur and rides off. So this is like really cutting edge, 1990s interactive media stuff, right? Happening right at the beginning. So it shows it's not that people weren't capable of doing it. It's the world and this is very popular. But then you have that rift that I described that prevents this kind of thing from becoming commonplace. Another huge exception, of course, was Piscator, whose use of technology was completely different, much more in the way of commentary to provide this critical perspective and provide a broader political, social commentary on what was happening with the live performance. And that, of course, was then inspired the living newspaper in the United States. And really, as many of you know, those of you are certainly in theater in Tennessee Williams, when he was doing glass menagerie, was inspired by Piscator and initially wanted to use projections. And that was Nix. So that was influential. And then, of course, in the 1950s through the early 80s, Boveda's work with media was, you know, again, very prescient. It was using film technology, but doing exactly the sorts of things that in the 90s, people like George Coates started to do more commonly. And some of those shows, it's actually really fascinating. I was in Prague for the Performance Philosophy Conference last year. And so I went and I saw that the circus performance, which was probably the most famous done in 1977, is still in the repertoire. And what was really intriguing to me about this, to flip back at the sort of the Los Lander, which is the original and which is the imitation, the live or the media. When it was first produced, of course, the big gimmick is you had the actors on film and you had the big images of these clowns and they would jump onto the screen and out of the screen and in and out back and forth. So it's like, wow, there are like these live actors are on the screen. Now, of course, there have been several generations of actors who have been trained to do exactly these roles. So what we see is the live performers imitating the original performers on the screen is like, wow, they found somebody who almost looks a little bit like the real thing, which is on the screen. So it's still in the repertoire, but it's totally transformed its significance. All right. And then, of course, in the in the art, so these were in the theater world, in the art world, you had the development of what soon would be called performance art and experiments at art. And again, ironically, a lot of performance art was very much about the body. And it was even, you know, it was reinforcing this rift between media and technology. But, you know, Black Mountain College in the 1950s was did famously did these wonderful, they weren't called happenings yet, but events that incorporated all different, you know, mixed media, including projections and images. And then in the 1960s, Billy Clover created experiments and technology arts and technology, EAT, where he would bring together artists like Rauschenberg with engineers to explore all sorts of uses of, at this point, usually not digital, although it's a little bit of early digital stuff, but it was usually analog technologies and live performance. And of course, Namjoon Pike and people like that, we're doing this kind of work in the 1960s as well. So when we move into this era then of digital performance, what's really significant, some of, as I said, some of it is bringing in, making it a lot easier, facilitating the sort of use of technology that could happen without the digital. But it's, I think, really useful to focus on what digital technology actually, what affordances it brings to the performance event that were almost impossible or inconceivable with analog technologies. And one useful thing to bear in mind is when digital technologies first developed, it's not that there was an inherent aversion to incorporating it into the theater. Quite the opposite. I mean, as soon as we had the ability, we had electronic light boards. This is before most people had personal computers, you know, and the floppies would store all the like use. And I was actually a Broadway production, one of the first that used electronic lights and the floppy was erased and they had no like use and they said, well, either give you a refund or you can sit here with just house lights in the performance. But, you know, so they adopted that very early on. And of course, digital audio, as soon as that became available, much easier than using the reel to reels. But the significant thing about those uses, even to some extent mechanics, you know, if you had a controller, they could drive a motor to make a turntable go. But those were all doing exactly the same things that had been happening without the digital technology. So you couldn't tell if it worked, if the light board was a computer light board, or you had somebody still doing the old manual thing, or if it was a, you know, reel to reel tape, or a, you know, digital sound. So the controversy became precisely when the technology becomes part of the event. It becomes not just behind the scenes, but it brought on stage in some way. And that, so that's the era of digital technology. And so in terms of documenting this history, so as I said in the 1990s, you really get a proliferation of this work. And then the first then histories, of course, happened in the 2000s, looking back, one of the earliest was Gabriella Genacci's virtual theaters, which was very short, and one of the first attempts to sort of create the big picture. By far the most comprehensive and still sort of the Oscar bracket of the digital world is Steve Dixon's digital performance, which is an amazingly comprehensive, though it's so comprehensive that he has to apologize in the beginning saying, of course I'm not covering everything, because you might think that he is, there's so much stuff. And it's a very, very useful resource. Chris Salter, a number of chapters from Entangled are part of your readings. It's another really useful lot of overlap between the technologies, but I actually wrote about this in the theater journal and you can sort of look back at that. But interesting, I think there's a fundamentally different perspective that they take on it, which is very useful and interesting. And there are certain things that fit within the purview of Salter's idea of digital performance that don't fit within Dixon's and to some extent vice versa as well. But they both reinforce this narrative of starting from Wagner and this sort of total theater and then moving towards the present day. And then finally, Sarah Bejong and Jen Parker-Starbuck and this other guy, David Saltz, created this book, sorry about it, which is kind of then the next generation, because it's like the readings that you have, it's a history of the histories sort of stepping back and sort of problematizing, because each of these tries to come up with different frameworks to fit this in and then that becomes sort of the subject of the book, the different frameworks that one might construct and thinking through that or thinking through the impact and the significance of incorporating the digital into-life performance. So this is going to be in the second week, you're going to be meeting with a number of people, doing both hands-on workshops, reading lots of examples. You all come with your own examples. So I'm not going to create a mini Steve Dixon for you here, but then thinking about the types of technology that go beyond simply showing a film. So the first, the most basic thing, projected video and animation is the earliest form which could be done with a film or it could be done with digital technology. Then when we move into interactively generated imagery, that's something a pre-reported film can't do. And that could be anything from motion capture to control animations in real time to controlling images with sound and all sorts of or with biometrics, with your heartbeat, all sorts of these sorts of events they've been having. And then that started starting in the late 80s. You have the beginnings of this kind of interactive work. And a lot of it came out of music initially. So we're creating alternate musical interfaces. But then they were triggering images. So it immediately breaks down the whole definition of music versus dance because you've got the movement. You've got so suddenly instead of just a performer who is sort of invisible playing the music, you've got somebody who's moving to create images and sound together. So I'm simultaneously a composer and a dancer and a choreographer. So all of those things become one. So it radically transforms the whole nature of the event and even the definition of what kind of event it is. Telematics. So the ability then to bring together performers from around the world into one place. Robotics in performance. And we'll be talking a bit about that later on. Great examples. And I know at least one of you does robotic work. Telerobotics which brings them both together. So there's been a lot of work. I published an article a while ago that looked in performance research focusing on Telerobotics and collaborative identity where you actually have somebody in one location controlling a robot sort of like the Mars rover is Telerobotic and people have used that in performance contexts. Immersive virtual reality which goes back to this singular one person with their media. Then you get augmented reality which instead of being lost in my virtual world you go out in the world and suddenly the media is imposed on the world around you which even more broadly locative media which can also be sound, visual but out in the world that you bring with you. Pokemon Go is sort of popular example of that in the commercial world. And then finally distributed in collaborative environments. So this is where like for example with immersive virtual reality increasingly I can be in my own little world but interacting I know that Alicia who did a lot of work with Second Life so that kind of environment. So you're interacting with real people in real time in this virtual world and there are millions of very radically different types of performative events that can be created within that kind of technology. All right, so that ends that part of it. So in terms of kind of synthesizing and pulling all this together, right? What we've done is to create you know, a series of modules like I guess we might call them that sort of looks at the different aspects of these broader contexts of mediated performance, digital performance and the intersection with digital scholarship and theater performance studies. So this is essentially the outline of the Institute, right? And sort of the topics that we'll work through. There's a kind of rough order to them, right? In terms of thinking about scholarship in the first week and performance techniques in the second. But I think you'll find, you know, like I did with my mistaking of visualization and simulation, right? That the boundaries become quite blurry. And I think one of the goals that we have for the Institute is not to impart a body of knowledge or a series of tools and tasks and skills, but is more to facilitate your thinking about how what are the resources to help you with the projects that you are most invested in? What are the questions that will come out of these two weeks? What might you expand and where might the resources be? Again, taking into consideration that we're at different kinds of institutions. Some institutions support this stuff really well. Some don't, right? And so we've been very mindful to think about how to leverage that. So by the end of the two weeks, you will have, everyone should have, right, a robust project or an idea, at least conceptual, for how they might go forward with a DH and theater and performance studies project, as well as methods and thinking about it in syllabus for how might you construct a class or build this into one of your existing classes. And one thing I might expand on just a little bit. Also, our hope is in developing these projects, on the one hand there's the distinct possibility in the way we're going to be structuring the working group is going to be encouraging at least temporary collaborations among you guys creating project. So it would be wonderful if we ended up with some lasting collaborations that emerged from this. So it might be that there are certain institutions that can do this and others that provide that resource and you come together and you get your Reese's Peanut Butter Cup bringing them together. But also you might simply walk away saying I have this great idea for this project. I can do this piece. I need somebody else to do this piece of that piece and then you know exactly what you're looking for and you can find the collaborators to make that happen. So there are really very few limits if you think of it in a collaborative way. You can make almost anything happen. Any questions on that and we'll have opportunities for discussion in such later, but just in there's anything immediate. Recessions, thoughts, objections, other ways of thinking about some of the things that we talked about. Yes. I mean, when you do history, it's always hard and we do it one, two, three and we know it's not one, two, three, it's mixed, right? But it really is western, you know? And just to intersect that, there were, if you looked at the cultural revolution in the 70s, it was distributed by film, you know? And just that any of the categories can be sort of, we've already said they can be exploded. But so that's one aspect. But the other one is really thinking of how the machinery changed, you know? And how that also changed how we physically performed and how much, like right now, we're all with our hand-held apparatus. But when, I don't know if you all remember when you first encountered a computer, I was just blown away, you know? And what a screen was. So just to be thinking about how the actual objects were, even though, you know, we say, well, it's virtual, the objects themselves are part of that theatricality of performing the digital, you know? Yes, I wonder where we put in response to Catherine's point, I remember, I think it was the first time I encountered a computer that was in a classroom environment. Yeah, I was very young at the time, I think it was in a preschool, I think. In my, probably my first three, four, five years of performative interaction with computers was always about testing how well I could do various kinds of academic things. Where would we put the more disciplinary, utilitarian, quantifiably, you know, sort of getting you into your educational tracks, getting you into your jobs? Where would we put there? And I've gotten in mind things like John Erickson's performer else, right? So that's what I've got in my mind. Where would we put it? We can put it, yeah, right. Do you want to go left? Yeah, I think that, I think that's a little bit of a parallel track to what we've been thinking about here, but certainly not like in a Foucaultian-sense alien at all, right? I mean like, and that's what Mackenzie highlights, right? That digital technologies become a different kind of discipline and disciplinary activity. We see them everywhere in different kinds of behavioral shaping, right? For lack of a better word, I'm sure there's a better phrase. But if you sort of think about the ways in which algorithms now mine your data, assess you as an individual, right? User on the web, and then use that assessment as a way of further changing your behavior, right? So they figure out what it is that you want to buy, and then they try to sell you more of that, and then they try to, you know, the psychologists have been deeply involved in advertising for a long time, and they're now deeply involved at most big tech companies, right? You don't have to rely on messy things like focus groups when you can do psychometrics and real deep analysis and know people better than they know themselves, right? There's something like, you know, like the data points of Google can predict you better and your behavior better than your spouse, for example. So I think that there's certainly, and of course we shouldn't ignore, you know, precisely the history of these devices, right? Which come out of the military, right? As do most of our digital technologies, right? They are almost all initially funded through DARPA. They are cultivated for very specific military uses predominantly in this country, but certainly globally as well. And cyber warfare is only going to become a more prevalent, right? And salient aspect of contemporary culture going forward, right? There's just a thing, I think in the Washington Post or the Guardian this morning, that the US government is now focused more on aggressive cyber warfare rather than a defensive monitoring and waiting for attacks, right? So that's a whole dimension. So, which is a long way from Mike's preschool days, I grant you. But becomes a kind of educational, you know, disciplinary activity. I think the fear that a lot of us have when we start hearing academic and educational institutions talking about like digital assessment and training is that our control and that the standardization is gonna take over, right? And that assessment is gonna be done either algorithmically or through machine learning in ways that we can't necessarily assess or understand it. And I think, and that frankly is a fear that has been with us since the 1950s, right? If you, you know, Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics in 1948, by 1954, Jacques O'Dell, a French sociologist is freaking out about the quantification of daily life and how this is gonna radically shape and transform society in a book called the Technological Society, right? Where he talks about that everything is gonna become quantifiable and we're all gonna be measured by mathematics and it will be the end of social culture as we know it, right? And again, 1954, right? So this is not a new fear at all, but I think it does. So just to kind of get to your question, Mike, I think this a little bit runs in a kind of parallel but by no means in isolation. And I think as we think about our roles, not just as scholars but as educators, what is it that we are helping our students do? How do they interact with it? How do they learn this history? And what presumptions do we make when we formulate digital projects, when we insist on certain kinds of outcomes or outputs or require students to work in a certain kind of process, not unlike your preschool classroom? And I would actually, in addition, another interesting connection, particularly we're bringing up McKenzie's performer else, as I'm thinking about it, has an intersection with a lot of work that's being done now in surveillance and in technologies but also in Chris Salter's ideas about performance, the idea that technology performs. So we like to think about technology as something that we use to empower ourselves but again, it works both ways. So one of the key ideas in McKenzie's book is this idea of performance in a sense of a high performance computer or performing well in business that it imposes a certain kind of discipline. And Chris Salter goes back to Meyerhold and talks about the way Meyerhold's biomechanics makes people into, using the ideas of Taylor, puts people into a kind of machine technological structure. So we're stripped of our autonomy and we're stripped of our agency and we become part of this technology. So that's something that I think we need to be highly conscious of and critical about and a lot of interesting digital performance going right back to George Coates was actually, his work was actually, though it was seen as very pro-technology because he got money from Silicon Valley to do it, his actual performances were often highly critical, very early on in the 90s, about the way the technology is stripping us from our agency and forcing us to conform to both corporate and military ideas and models. We'll continue to kind of explore some of those ideas over the next couple of weeks. Shall we take a five minute kind of? Or 10, well, I think we started at 10.30, right? Okay, we'll take a 10 minute kind of break. If you missed them on your way, yes, Jason? I just had a reminder about the Ramsey Center Athletic Board. I'll collect those at lunchtime as well with the money and the deposits and stuff like that. And if you missed it on your way in, the desserts from last night are on the table down in the lobby if the digital music kids haven't managed to track them down. So I encourage you to go and do that. Also, if you are in need of lunches or dinners, I have a refrigerator full of chicken and potato in Tupperware. So you should let me know. I am happy to distribute. We also have an enormous salad. A lot of salad. Indeed, we have leftover salad from last night of Vell. Anyway, so much salad from last night of Vell. Anyway, so much salad from last night of Vell. Anyway, so much salad from last night of Vell. Anyway, so.