 I really looked closely at the syllabus, which is a lecture, ostensibly, about teaching and theory on the last day of the first week, before lunch, to be followed by a seminar on all of those things after lunch. So a couple of caveats before I get started. Okay, thank you. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. You're very kind, very kind. You know, I'm very fragile, so I appreciate you taking care of me here and at home. So a couple of caveats. First of all, this will not be really a lecture. Again, I appreciate that very much. Thank you. This is not really going to be a lecture. I'm hoping it'll be a little bit more interactive than that. The second caveat is I don't really know how to, like, I don't know more about teaching than I think any of you do. And I'm not totally confident that what I do in a classroom works class to class, semester to semester, year to year, decade to decade. Institution to institution, right? So I'm not, and I'm not going to give a bunch of exercises. We can talk about some of those, or things that I've done. I'm happy to discuss things that I've done that have worked. I do want over the course of the next, you know, 45 minutes or so to talk a little bit about how I approach some of the stuff, like the intersection of digital technologies and theory with my students. I'd also like to make sure that before we conclude this session that I give you some of the resources that I draw on quite a lot so that you have them as well. It occurred to me when we were, you know, when I was looking at the title of teaching theory, right, you can kind of take that in two ways, right? It's like the how to teach theory, but it's also the theory of how to teach. And in a lot of my work I almost always think about what I'm doing is having some kind of pedagogical, right, or learning value for someone, right? Sometimes it's my peers. Sometimes it's my superiors, right? The tenure dossier being a very particular genre of writing form, for example. Sometimes it's my students. The other caveat is that a few years ago I started and wrote and taught all too briefly in a graduate program, but for the past three years I've been surrounded by very privileged 18 to 22 year olds, right? Emphasis on the very in that sentence, right? So it's a very particular kind of teaching environment. I teach a lot. I tend to teach a lot of intro stuff. I've taught big and small and all over the place. But before we get going too much further, oh, one final caveat. I've also tried to adapt this to speak in some ways, and I've been more successful with certain people than others, to things that are coming up in your projects. So I've kind of taken things that I know a little bit about or I've thought a little bit about and tried to kind of link them to the things that you are thinking about. It is not going to touch on everybody's fully, but hopefully it will touch on enough of you that you can convince the other people that this was not a waste of their time. Okay, so before we get started, things that are on your mind or that you would like to see covered either this morning or this afternoon when it comes to teaching. Yeah, Alicia. You are not necessarily prepared for college and have difficulty approaching text. Yes, okay. Great. No, no, no. To add on to that, maybe students who don't have access to their own technology, except for possibly on a campus, which could vary obviously amongst all of us. Noted. Yes, yeah, Mike. Theory in my world, it tends to be synonymous with expository, analytic, argumentative essays. Yep. I want to actually raise kind of a couple things in response to that. So, one, how can we do theory differently? Okay, so as a form of theoretical praxis or performance or making of some kind. The second side of this is that I want to make sure in my teaching, and I'm still working on this, how to give agency and equity to the things I am theorizing about. So to put, for example, to make say Kafka's penal colony have as much agency in a conversation about canality and discipline and so on as Foucault's essay. So that the Kafka is allowed me to critique Foucault. Right? So that idea of not dissecting the work, but giving it its own voice and agency in a theoretical conversation. I hope that, that's kind of an obtuse point. It's difficult for me to even articulate which is part of the problem. Right? Yeah, I enjoyed what you were saying, so I will ignore that. But no, I take your point, right? How do you keep works alive in the classroom for themselves and not let them just become cadavers that we sort of use theoretical scalpels on to carve up into little bitty pieces? Yeah, Catherine? The value of analysis and how to make it exciting. Just this, that what theory does to performance. Just that pulling apart and any exercises around that, yeah. Okay, yeah? Making the interfaces, the digital interfaces that our students live with every day both visible and bounded in the classroom. Yes. Okay, I'm going to take a couple more. Yeah, Jenna? Accessibility. So accessibility of the content. And also I just mentioned of the actual. Yep. Yep. Just say languages and terminologies to be able to argue for the resources that we need in the classroom from those other places on campus that would provide them. Okay. That last one is probably going to be most fully, we can most fully explore that this afternoon. I have, I think I have things that are going to touch on most of these from what I have here. With this question of advocacy on behalf of teaching with administration, that's a, I think a separate one and actually is better accessing conversation with each other. And relates not indirectly to the Twitter discussion of theater and its value that Mike and a few other people have been participating in. There was another hand over here. Yeah, Ryan and Tiffany. I have two. One is something Derek said on Monday. He stuck with me, which is that he's terrified to be in the classroom with these technologies that he doesn't necessarily know as well as say like a computer science student. Yeah. So one question is teaching about him with these technologies that we are ourselves still learning in grappling with. Sure. And then the second is something you said that stuck with me is this week a couple of times is that we can never forget that these technologies, these are military technologies, right? So how do we kind of teach with an amount of these technologies while still holding that tension and criticality? Yeah, Tiffany. I was also going off of the accessibility issue. So I primarily have undergraduate students. So how do you make these kind of very theoretical, very abstract ideas accessible and understandable for the 18 to 22 year old and then going along with that providing them with the tools to do something with them and create and make and and get away from that conventional 10 to 12 page research paper? Sure. Okay. So I don't know if I'm going to hit everything. This is a good starting point. Anything we don't cover right now, we can absolutely pick up later this afternoon. I'm going to start by talking, I think mostly kind of in the theoretical conceptual area about how I approach this. And rather than tell you what I do, I'm kind of going to do a little bit of what I do. And then we can talk specifically about exercises and tools and techniques and questions of accessibility. And some of that, we're not going to resolve that, but some of that can also become a kind of brainstorming of how we can parlay that into, you know, in our discussions this afternoon. I mean, one of the things I want to start by saying, which is I've worked on DH projects. I've collaborated. I've conceived of a couple. I've done a lot of work with people in computer science and engineering. I love engineers. A, because they're incredibly well funded at most institutions. So they are much less competitive than people in the arts and sciences sometimes. Right? Because people in the arts and sciences are, you know, like competing for crumbs. And at least in my experience, the engineers are like lions feeding on plenty of red meat. And they're like, sure, we'll share our meal with you. So they're really great. And the only thing you need to really know about engineers is that you have to give them an interesting problem to figure out. Which is kind of the essence of theory. But at its core, I'm not really a DHist. I'm certainly not a computer scientist or a programmer. And for years, I had a really hard time actually answering. I don't know if you have to do this on your like annual report, you know, where you put like what you are. They always give you an example, like, you know, I'm an organic chemist. Right? I'm a thing, I'm a something. And I would put like this kind of tortured long, I am a scholar investigated interest, you know. And then I came up with the perfect phrase, which I now use all the time. So I'll use it again here. I am a theoretical theorist. Right? And it's like a theoretical physicist. Right? In that, a theoretical physicist see, observes, analyzes and predicts natural phenomena. I observe, analyze and predict artificial phenomena. Right? And I apply that lens to understanding the world around me and the manifestations of performance in theater and theatricality everywhere. That's really my big agenda with my students is to give them a critical frame that they develop themselves that's in language that they write and create and pull on and that is meaningful for them and that they kind of take this out into the world as a tool for decoding and understanding. Right? So and in service to the things that they care about. Right? Because I teach a lot of people who are never going to make theater. Right? I teach a lot of future finance in years. Right? And I love them because I'm like, you will serve on boards one day. This is a board. When you make your big pile of money, here's what you will do with that money. Right? I teach a lot of people now who are interested in computer science. And I teach a lot of people who are broadly invested in the liberal arts and don't know what they want to do. Right? I see the world as theatrical. I see the tools of theater and theater making. And by theater, I also include dance and various kinds of performance as well as media. If you've read any of my work, you know that like I cook media and theater and theatricality on a spectrum in which they are never completely separate from one another. So this is a little bit about how I approach this. Hopefully it will be somewhat interesting to you. I welcome contestation. That would be the first thing I do in my classes. Right? I can be wrong. And I will actually give extra credit for people who can refute me with evidence, which is kind of fun. It means that their glowing screens are usually put in service to fact checking me as opposed to Facebook. At least some of the time. There are some key ideas that I use. And the first is probably the most important. And it addresses a couple of these questions like the value of analysis, which is the re-familiarization. Right? You know, we're all familiar with, you know, distancing effect and de-familiarization. And I think especially when we talk about theory, like alienation effect is not just a phrase that applies to Brecht. Right? It's something that many of our students, at least many of my students feel separated from. So it's about basically reminding them of what they know. And reminding them that what they know from wherever they come from has value, has use, and has applications. Right? So it's about re-familiarizing material. And this kind of major idea of meeting students where they are. I also believe very strongly in the value of repetition. And you'll see it. I'm going to basically give you like repetition with revision, right? Which is sort of like, you know, Gertrude Stein by way of Susan Laurie. Right? That there is, you know, none of us learn anything well once. Right? And you even saw it yesterday, right? When Philip Alslander was giving his lecture and he gave you like a list of three things. And then like two sentences later he said, and what was the first thing? And everybody was like, at least me, I was like... Like I'm still trying to write, finish writing down the thing you said like two pages ago. Right? You know, like our brains do not necessarily assimilate and understand that kind of stuff. And especially our students, like they are not Renaissance theatergoers. Right? They are not Elizabethans. They do not learn in the oral mode. Right? They do not absorb that. That's why they listen to the same music over and over and over again. Right? It's why I listen to the same music over and over and over again so I can figure out what it is. Because the first time I hear it, I'm just... Right? It's all coming at me. I have no idea. So repetition. The second is giving them permission to explore and experiment with an established ideas and to take things apart for themselves even if it's wrong. Right? That there is nothing so sacred or so beautiful that it cannot be improved on by them. So I do a lot of stuff with adaptations, manipulations, remixes. And this also gives us not only the opportunity to use a wide variety of tools. And I've scaled a bunch of my teaching over the years to things that can be done with cell phones and text messages. Right? Because almost everybody has access to texting. Even if you don't have access to Photoshop or something like that or you don't have reliable access to a computer. And then the last is creative responses. And this is like sort of opening up the range. And again, I can talk a little bit about some of the stuff that I've done in the past that I've liked. But we can also, again, I think this afternoon is a great opportunity to talk through some of the material but also to think about what are some possible assignments that you might come out of this with. So this... I'm going to give you a couple examples of my refamiliarization. Right? So one of the things that I want... I'm looking for theorists is I'm looking for theorists and I'm looking for pieces of theory and ideas that have a direct connection to things that I know my students are experiencing in the world. So one of my favorite things to talk about is surveillance, social media, and Marshall McLuhan. Right? And TV. My students are watching a lot of TV. I mean, they have no idea. Like they've never seen a TV set that looks like this. Right? Let alone one that did not have a remote control. Right? The idea that you had to, like, ka-funk, ka-funk, ka-funk. Right? That's like, what? Right? Like media archeology is kind of a fun part of class. This is one of my favorite quotes from him. This is actually one of his... Not a terribly well-circulated text from 1970 called Anesthesia and in a collection called From Cliché to Archetype. And it's this great kind of comparison of the idea that satellite technology turns the whole world into a stage. Right? So he goes back to Shakespeare and the idea... And that we're all living in a proscenium arch. Right? And so I give this to my students and I say, you know, what does this make you think of? Right? And immediately they're like, oh, yes. This is social media. Like, this is Facebook. Like, yeah. Okay. You know. Right? You're around in public doing your thing and then we make fun of people in the 70s and what they wore. And then I show them the cover of this book. Right? And now I know you're not supposed to judge books by their cover, but they can sometimes be very helpful to analyze by their cover. Right? And we look at this image of the woman. Right? Who's a really... If you look closely and think about it, it's a very strange image. Right? For one thing, like, she's almost, like, disembodied of herself. Right? She's got this kind of zoning, maybe intoxicated of some kind. You know, it's like... It's maybe it's a dance pose. Right? It's taken from a fashion magazine. Right? If we start to look at fashion magazines of the late 1960s, we can start to see that. And then we talk about this, like, echo. Right? Like this idea of trace. And that she is not one person, but many people. And that her movements, right, leave... Right? Leave traces, leave echoes. Right? And then I turn them and I say, okay, so we're working on this. And then I start talking about, okay, so our own technologies. Right? So this is a project from Microsoft Research called LifeSense. And it was developed to help people with Alzheimer's. And it would take a photograph periodically during the day so that at the end of the day, the person who had Alzheimer's could revisit those photographs as a way of recalling and triggering memory. Right? And they found that this was really helpful. Well, this sounds fantastic, right? Right? Brilliant. Okay. Then I talk to them about this little project. This was originally called the Mimodo. It was then called the Narrative Clip and I believe it was just bought by Google. And it comes with this absolutely fabulous little promo video. This is back from when they were on Kickstarter, you know, 2011, 2012. So I'll show them this video. Did it not show me my video? There we go. Sometimes the best moments in life are the simple ones. The things that pass us by without us even noticing. Not even noticing. The small surprises. The everyday experiences. At Mimodo, we love the simple moments. But we hate forgetting them. So we started thinking, what if we could capture those moments and create a true photographic memory? What if we could build a camera small enough to never be in the way and smart enough to capture life as we live it? As you live it. This is what we ended up with. The Mimodo Life Logging Camera. It's small, light, weather-protected and takes beautiful 5 megapixel pictures. It was 2011. Just clip it up and it starts taking pictures. Put it down or place it in your pocket and it stops. It's that easy. And all the pictures are safely stored on Mimodo's storage service. We know what you're thinking. Two photos a minute is a whole lot of photos, right? Well, to make things as easy as possible, we developed apps for both iPhone and Android that automatically organizes the photos on a timeline. Want to remember the name of the restaurant last night? Easy. Thanks to Mimodo's smart algorithm, GPS and time data, you can just search, find and share. It's really passionate about getting this product out into the world. We've been working for a year to develop the camera at apps. We had a great team on the job. But we need funding to start production of the first 1,000 cameras. Help us reach this goal and be one of the first to wear a Mimodo camera. Reserve one today. I can like relive your childhood. Okay, so I'm talking to this and this almost unfailingly creeps people out, right? I will admit I was one of the early contributor to this Kickstarter campaign. But everyone in my house told me that I was not allowed to ever wear the Mimodo. So I only got the t-shirt instead of the actual device. So then I talk to people and people are like, oh my God, that is horrible. I would never do such a thing. I'm like, I know, right? I'm like, okay, how many people are tracking some part of the quantified self, right? And people are like, you know, I've got a fair number of Fitbits and Apple Watches. And then I'm like, okay, how many people have turned off all your location services on your phone, all of your tracking data on your phone, you have no web browsers loaded on your phone, you have no social media apps loaded on your phone, right? I mean, can you just, and I whittle it down until maybe there is someone like Andrew Starter here who I'm gonna out as a flip phone user, right? And he has the advantage of only being trackable by cell phone towers, which I will come back to later in the talk, right? And all of a sudden it's like, okay, this is something that we are doing every day, we are thinking about every day. And then if we go back to that McLuhan slide, right? From 1970, oh, okay, starts to make a little bit of sense, right? So you are performing all the time. Who is the audience? Well, increasingly it is algorithms, right? Well, algorithms are not really an audience. Who are those algorithms, right? Who's using those algorithms? Right, corporations, companies, right? And so all of a sudden, right? And this makes total sense that I could do this in about 10, 15 minutes in a classroom, right? And so then I talk about this idea, this is actually from the computer electronic show now just CES from 2013, right? So this is five years ago, right? And people are talking about how tech is now merging with us and what that looks like, right? So, okay, so I'm kind of obsessed with the mid-20th century. Phil Auslander was like, I don't know why I really like the mid-20th century. I'm like, I got a bunch of ideas why you love the mid-20th century. And a lot of them have to do with the simultaneous development of commercially available television and the emergence of cybernetics and how those then radiate together became two really key technologies that not only shaped our technological infrastructure but also shaped our conceptual metaphors, right? And continue to today, right? That we are still operating within, I would argue, a kind of television framework accelerated and accentuated by cybernetics, right? Norbert Wiener in 1948 wrote that the 18th and 19th centuries had been the centuries of mechanization that the 20th century would be the century of communication and control, right? And when I start talking about like trains and Apple watches, my students are like, totally, right? They get that. And I love pulling in a bunch of theory. And again, when I do this, especially with intro students, I teach a class called Theater as Social Media, in which I combine kind of key moments in theater history and key play texts that I want them to understand with fairly high-level, dense theoretical texts that may or may not be contemporaneous with the play that we're talking about, right? And one of my favorites that I use, and I've used it with a whole bunch of plays. It almost doesn't matter. But again, following on this idea of contemporary tech is Susan Sontag's Odd Photography. I've taught the whole book. I've taught sections of the book. But this is my favorite quote where she talks about that the more that video cameras become ubiquitous, the more they will be trained to narcissistic uses, that is to say self-surveillance, right? And then we have a whole conversation about selfies, right? And where they came from and why they're there and who's taken them and why they take them and what it means, and this is where I pull in. And then I can pull in all kinds of things like discussions of ethics and copyright and I can bring in issues of cut and paste and I can connect them to the ways in which contemporary law is changing because I get a fair number of lawyers, right? And then, you know, I mean, and so the idea is that, but then also like, you know, why do you take a picture of yourself? Anywhere, right? What is that, what brings that value or meaning to you? And I will always get people who say, I never do that, right? And that is also a really helpful conversation. Why not? Right? Why do you not? And then just at the moment where I feel like they're falling asleep or they're fading off in this, I hit them with this photo. It's favorite. What is this image? And yes, apologies to Emily again. I might click and just steal this off. And what's great is right then, and then this gives me a whole opportunity to talk about, you know, who is Susan Sontag, right? And who took this picture? Annie Liebowitz, right? Any weirdness going on there? Right? Right? Susan Sontag writes like probably one of the most critical texts of photography and lived, right, for many years with a photographer, perhaps the most recognizable photographer, right, of the late 20th century. And I love this image because I know very, very little about it. Right? I mean, I know nothing about it other than really what I see here. And I haven't really done any research on it, though I offer that invitation to my students. But then we kind of speculate. We start doing some analysis of this image. Right? Like, why is Susan Sontag, and I show a bunch of other pictures of Susan Sontag. Like, this is not the typical Susan Sontag photo. I don't know if you're familiar with some of her other images. But this is not generally how she represents herself as a public intellectual. Right? We also then get to talk about media archaeology, right, that her laptop dates this image better than any other format. It's like, oh, okay. What is that model of MacBook? Right? When did it come out? Right? So now we kind of know where she is. And I just love it because I have this idea, and this could be totally wrong, but I have this idea that she is going to a party where this is mandatory. Right? I choose, and my Susan Sontag imagination, that she does not do this for fun on weekends, although that might be even better. Right? But she is going to some kind of event, and she has this idea, and so she sits down at the computer to do, like, one last thing. I know none of you have ever done this, too. Your spouses who are anxious to go to said social event. And anyway, we went to this kind of moment, like, sneaks over, right? And she often does with her camera, and she, like, manages to capture this at the exact moment that Susan Sontag looks at, recognizes what is happening, and flashes back onto this quote. Right? And so I read this quote and this image together as a way of introducing them to Susan Sontag, right, as a really important thinker, as a way of opening up a text that is dense but incredibly relevant, and making it meaningful in their own lives. Right? Making these people real. Making their situations accessible. Right? Again, re-familiarizing themselves. Right? Giving my students a place in these texts and a way of understanding them. And I do this with a lot of stuff. Like, I love pulling weird stuff that they would not find on their own that has meaning in their lives. The other one I really love that goes along with the same quote is this image from 1974. Right? This is Namjoon Paik's TV Buddha. Right? And now this is like, you know, and then we can talk about, well, how does the framing of Buddhism, you know, change, right, this relationship of staring at the self through TV? Is this an example of narcissistic self-surveillance? And then we get into a whole speculation of, is this what Sontag is talking about? And what does it mean for us to identify a figure like the Buddha as narcissistic? Right? Like, what's the, what is the, and then they get to talk about Namjoon Paik. And they go into a whole, right, a whole kind of exciting, exciting thing there. One of the other kind of mid-century theorists that I'm really into at the moment, this is the other thing, is I really only talk about things that I think are fun. I really, I try to avoid things I don't think are fun. And if I have to teach something that I don't think is fun, I try to find the most fun part of it. Right? Because no one ever takes a theater class because it's a good idea. Right? No one's like, yeah, well, you know, I guess I'll be a theater major because, you know, gotta pay the bills. Right? No. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. Everybody does it because it's fun. Right? You take a theater class because it's fun. Right? Maybe you also are being cynical and you think it's an easy A. Right? But usually, most of us got into this because there was something pleasurable about it. Right? So I try to remind and feed on that impulse in my students. Right? That theory is fun. It's fun because it connects to things that you're doing. It's fun because it's interesting on its own. It's fun because these are weird little detective puzzles. It's fun because it puts you in conversation and in dialogue with other people and other times who did really strange kind of weird, wonderful things. Right? Like, I don't show them the picture of Susan Sontag looking like a lioness like with the silver streak. Right? So they'll find that on their own. I show them her in a teddy bear costume. Right? Jacques Alonso is another theorist that I've been super, super into lately. Technological Society, originally written in French in 1954, translated into English in 1964. By the way, I'll make all these slides available. So if you missed something or you want to get some of this quote. And I use this a lot. And, you know, he talks a lot about what he calls technique. Right? And he's a contemporary of McLuhan. Not usually as well cited in the literature as McLuhan, but certainly not unknown in media studies and communication studies. He has this idea of the machine being autonomous. Right? And then structuring human behavior according to its own rules and social behavior according to its own rules. But when the machine goes away. Right? And my students often kind of have a tough time with this. So I eventually found the perfect way of illustrating this. And so hopefully my video will work again. Vacation photos. You won't see in the tabloids. New Frank Gary plans for my team. In Brooklyn. See that? Just start organizing my world tour. Trying to be a rock star in a road model. Got to track all my investments because I'm retired, right? My passport says, Sean, but you may know me by another name. H.P. Bavillion Entertainment Notebooks with Intel Centrino Dual Mobile Technology. The computer is personal again. Right? I could watch this and talk about this all day long. Right? You want to talk about neoliberalism, the person as brand, person as generating, right? Individual wealth, right? And that mechanism is technological and based in the computer, but the computer is not present. Right? JZ operates according to the rules of the computer and everything that he creates, right? This kind of interesting synthesis between his hands, right? The hands of an artist. And I find the framing of this also really compelling, right? That we never see his face. We don't need to see his face, right? It's his hands and his suit and the tie and all of this kind of stuff. So we spend a lot of time kind of playing around in that image as well. And it becomes a really helpful way of illustrating some of the things that a little is interested in. And then I also put theorists in conversation with each other. Right? So I mentioned it whenever it was the last time you were forced to listen to me Tuesday, I think. And I was interested that actually Auslan had also mentioned Nick Koldry. This is from a, and I don't know if Phil knows this book. It came out in 2017. I've been getting a lot of traction out of it. I should give credit to Will Lewis, who's just finishing up his graduate studies. He just defended his dissertation at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I was one of the external readers on his committee. And this is a book that featured very prominently in his work on the changing role of the spectator in digital culture and digital contexts. And I've been really into some of the work that they've been doing, particularly in this book. There are a couple of articles that are really helpful also. And so this makes perfect sense to my students also. I kind of brought this up towards the end of my class in the spring semester. This idea that they never exist independent of media. And the example I always give is that once you become really invested in Instagram, you will never see the world the same way again. Every sunset is like, ah, is it worth? And this goes back also to the lenses in this idea of as potential opportunities for data analysis. Or when Steve Barry talked about that he now sees the world in terms of data structures. Which I think is true and I think the work that he's doing is really interesting, but we can extrapolate from that mindset pretty quickly to a kind of colonial mindset which is seeing the world in terms of what we can get out of it. Like seeing the world as raw resource for us to extract, process, and distribute. Collect, analyze, disseminate. And that's not to say, I should be really careful here, I'm not meaning to call either of those people colonial or imperial, right? Or to suggest. It's simply to say that again when we start talking about pedagogy and teaching that we can start drawing some connections very quickly to a pretty wide range of areas. And that again, I know some of us teach more in embodied modes and physical modes, right? These video and these sort of pop culture things also help us access that. Yeah, Christine. So a lot of the readings that I mean, the readings have been so fantastic. One that I've been really excited by is the work about in the age of digital. Yes, yes. I'm hearing even the title wrong. But one of the things that really struck me that I'm kind of seeing and what you're doing here is this idea that we moved from, you know, the age of technological reproduction which is defined by exhibition to the age of digital reconstruction which is defined by manipulation. Yes. And it seems like what's very exciting to me about the examples that you're giving and thinking about how that works with teaching but also where my own mind has got up to and not much further is I feel right on that nexus of understanding the move between exhibitionism and to manipulation as a primary mind of dealing with the world through media and I kind of think maybe our students are sort of on the curve towards manipulation further than someone of my age, you know, but the collision point between exhibition and manipulation as a mind of being in the world is Instagram, isn't it? Among other apps, right? I mean, you know, Snapchat filters are certainly a major key part of that and, you know, I really enjoy like the little AR animations, right, where you can get your bitmoji to do various things so I have like a little video of my bitmoji like taking notes and falling asleep on top of a copy of Arto's Theater and It's Double, right, which I think is just endlessly witty, you know, that's a joke that I try with my students occasionally and it takes a bit of the laboring and then by then it's not funny anymore. But yes, I mean, I think and of course, you know, for some of us we feel the momentum and the shift from one thing to another. Our students are not necessarily aware of that shift because they haven't felt that shift. So in that instance, I'm always trying to kind of shift them back but one of the other interesting examples that we have is when we read The Importance of Being Ernest, I also give them this essay which is about his train lecture tour that he did in the United States and I think it was like 1892, 1893, so a couple of years before he wrote Importance of Being Ernest. You're fact-checking me mentally. Do you want to look it up? Hang on, I'll be a little sorry. I think it was closer than that. Oh, you're probably right. No, not necessarily. Someone with a glowing throat. Do I get your credit by now? You do! You do, absolutely. You fact-check me and I'm wrong, go for it. What's interesting about that whenever it happened, maybe it was the 80s. If it is the 80s, it's like the very late 80s because it's pretty close to when Importance of Being Ernest comes out. But what's interesting is... It was 1882, the one that I wrote. 82? Because it was close. When was the second one? It was the second one. It was the co-organized one. When was the second one? Yeah, the second one. Okay, that's the one I'm talking about. He did go twice. I thought the second one was closer to the... No, I'm just gonna... I'm laughing at myself. No, why are you laughing? You should be laughing at me. And not in a nice way. These are the pity chuckles I get down in the front. I appreciate that also. Anyway, while we were fact-checking, he had his image as he circulated and the trains actually helped him stay one step ahead of bad reviews that would come out in newspapers in response to his performance. So he basically got to refine his TED Talk before people figured out that the TED Talk was not any good because of the train travel. And he also circulated his image as an advertisement on these little train cards. So he was sort of depicted as the quintessentialist thief with the phop haircut and the sunflower and the little knickers and the furs and many of the images that circulated that we were most familiar with. And so we kind of read that back against the importance of being earnest, both how the importance of being earnest trades on train travel as a way of reinventing yourself and giving you access to different spaces in which you can refine your presentation of self in everyday life to go back to Goffman. But then the students, when they do projects on this, we talk about Finsta and Insta, right? And the Insta is your Instagram, right? And then there's your Finsta, which is your fake Instagram, right? And that's the one that you like share with your parents and the one that you present, right? That you make available to employers, right? So they get the importance of being earnest like that. They're like, well, yes, I am one way in the city and another way in the country, right? And they also understand that play in terms of social media, right? In the way that people are performing and constructing alternative identities and the way that those circulate. And then we kind of look at them in the context of train travel and images and then we compare that to contemporary like publicity and celebrities and this idea of endorsements, right? And then you can kind of spin that off in any number of different directions, depending on who your students are, right? And again, much of this material is readily accessible. I mean, in terms of ability to get it. With this one, I show this one in a combination because I'm always very cognizant of wanting to reach as many people as possible. And so I try very hard to mark but also then to limit some of my biases. So I try to get them to see this not just in terms of entertainment and pop culture and things like that but in other spaces. So I show them this combination of images. This is a gathering of the faithful near St. Peter's to witness Pope John Paul II's body being carried into the Basilica for public viewing in 2005. Okay? This next image is the installation of Pope Francis at the same Basilica in 2013. Right? 2005? 2013. Right? And then, you know, from the sacred to the profane depending on your point of view, I suppose my son would really object. He was like from one sacred to another sacred. Yes. Did you hear that Pope Francis said that the mass was not a show and people should not be using their phones? Yes. Which tells you something about what's been happening in mass lately. Right? I think of this when I was talking about the Beatles at Chase Stadium. Right? And I'm like, wow, they just needed to overcome that with better amplification. Right? Okay, hang on a second. There is an even better moment. Alright, hang on one second. I have to do one thing to forgive me. I should have just like let it play. And then I would have figured it out. There's one particular section in this that I really love. And so, it's worth this inconvenience. Okay, hang on. Okay, great. Okay, we'll go here and now I've broken it completely. That is super strange. I think you're in the slide show. Well, I know it. That's why I should be able to Okay, let me try one more thing. Well, that is disappointing. So the key image here is basically that as Beyonce performs let me try one more thing. And then we'll come back. Maybe I'll get rid of my mirrored displays. Maybe that was the problem. Yeah, play it there and then it's larger. It's for whatever reason the file is like is not happy at the moment. Look at that. Technology. Huh. Wow, she does not like being interrupted. My bad. The kind of key moment here that I would show you if not for the spinning beach ball of death. Alright, I'm just going to try and play this and if it doesn't work then we're done. This is not an unfamiliar dynamic. Right, because nothing makes you a bigger tech idiot than standing in front of a classroom. It's like all your skills instantly disappear. Alright, let me see if I can find us here. Okay, so there's a moment. I encourage you to watch this. It's just like somebody's YouTube video. Just Google Beyonce Formation Tour London. I'm so glad this was being live streamed also. I'm so glad we could maximize the audience for this. And basically what's kind of wonderful is that you get our cell phone with all the other cell phones and then we watch Beyonce come up and it's fabulous and then we watch her come down the middle. So this person's got like killer seats. And Beyonce comes down the middle promenade part of the stage and the camera follows and then we're watching the back of her and her dancers and now we can't see anymore. And there's this kind of wonderful moment where the phone kind of hovers and then it turns back to videotape the screen because despite the physical proximity you can't actually see Beyonce very well but she's like a million feet tall up on the screen so that is a better thing to film. And when I'm more in control of my technology I can do this. And then of course they all know this and I use formation very strategically in my classes. Because this is like Beyonce is one of the great unifiers of my classes. I very rarely get people who have never heard of her or have no interest in her. And then I talk to them about the design which of course is created by a theater person as Devlin who's designed at the Royal Court among other places and has done some really fun stuff and so then that gives us an opportunity to start thinking then about the role of design and this is one of Devlin's early sketches for this tour and again one of her first ideas is that there's this rotating box. Again as Mike told you on the first night I am obsessed with boxes. This is another set that Devlin did for the Nether at the Royal Court in 2014 that I saw. It was described, this is about virtual environments played by the American playwright Jennifer Haley. People described the set as being in a glass box but in fact it wasn't. It was actually symmetrically placed plastic trees in front of mirrors that were out of sight lines and opposite each other so that the parallax view created by the mirrors on the three sides of the stage created the impression of a virtual box in the stage space that you had. She materially created virtuality theater magic loved it and this gets my students very excited about design and theater and different kinds of theater and bringing these things together. But then again also goes back to that and HEP quote about what we expect to see how our views have changed where technology lives and how often we misunderstand what we are looking at. This is also a really helpful moment when I can then take a moment to talk about the things I do not know which are significant. I learn more of them every day it is really depressing. I knew so much more when I was younger. These are some other shows. I will not spend a ton of time on them. My voice has an echo in it by temporary distortion. This is a box performance, there are two way mirrors on either side of the box so you can look in but they actually but of course as part of this this is Kenneth Collins who is reading Marshall McLuhan the media is the message and the massage but that is what it looks like inside the box. Which we then talk about YouTube as diary and megaphone as solo performance and worldwide performance and the sensation that you are close to someone because you can see them close up but they don't necessarily see you even if you think they are looking at you. We talk about tropes of music videos and then I have them make music videos so they can take a piece of music and they can recut and I give them the essay on work of art in the age of digital recombination and then they use that as principles. I make sure that this is set up so my students tend to be fairly technologically advanced but they weren't always so much so but you can do a lot of things with text messages so I've had students make whole stories and narratives out of text messages I don't know if you read in the New Yorker recently there's a new narrative and television story called I think it's scam S-K-A-M it's a mainstream drama but it's told entirely through apps so you kind of have to follow it like a scavenger hunt through various kinds of media I just discovered it I haven't really played around in it I will absolutely teach that and make it available I talk about three it's been moving quite a bit so this is another box performance this is if you want to play Love in the Time of Grinder opening apps sexual ethics privacy concerns this caused a big controversy because when he was doing this in Berlin so he would chat with people and try to get them to come to his box to engage in intimate non-sexual activities so like holding hands making pancakes sitting quietly for an hour sharing a meal things like this and then one day he started chatting with this guy who he rather liked and Therese got a little coy and so he said should I tell you where I live I have a very unusual living arrangement he's living in the middle of a public square this is just the middle of the street and my friends in Utah who were seeing it when he was there they referred to it later Therese was the town pet everybody kind of got me like but in Berlin there was this kind of exchange he wasn't totally forthcoming when the guy he was chatting with showed up he realized that all of his chats as well as his Grinder profile had been broadcast and made physically available on the LED screens on the side of Therese's box Therese again that's another picture and became very angry a whole outburst they closed the show early Therese and the theater both apologized although it was a kind of not quite full-throated apology it was an apology and it brings this whole idea of privacy what are the expectations of privacy when you are on an online dating app that Grinder has millions of people on so you are ostensibly visible but what are the rules what are the expectations of that level of privacy versus 20 people being able to see that but in a public sphere how does that shift so it also becomes an opportunity to talk with my students about that I was thinking a lot about something you were talking about with your project Ryan and sort of being interested in this intersection of transness and the digitality and how those things connect and so another series this is the C.S.S.P.A. series obviously taken from the McGree and the Foucault this is a series of boxes that would be placed in a public square and closed in the morning and then as they opened they would reveal a different person inside of them and a mix of display and access so this is not my body this is not the future these cause again not a small amount of controversy and I was thinking actually of this in addition to bless you Fiona from Shrek hard to connect those two things I can't go back but the idea that the form or the frame is independent of what's inside it I don't I can't quite go there in part because these this is not nature in part because these radically shift the idea of our frame and our sense of what is the social what is the public based solely on what is our relationship and our ideas about the bodies that are in these boxes right and I think there's something really compelling there and they again become right to what kinds of display do we sanction what kinds of display do we fear what kinds of display do we think are okay one of the things that Gris has on his website he says unsuspecting passersby are encouraged by the business like presentation to determine their position in relation to these controversial images why are some images considered tainted when they were tolerated just 20 years ago have we become less malleable as a species or have we simply lost our naive political correctness you know he's kind of into provocativeness provocation is it good that our children do not see certain things or have we gone to the extremes in our drive to protect another piece that he did that I rather like and I talked to my students quite a lot about is guilty landscapes this is actually it looks like single channel video but it is in fact an interactive piece in which you observe a person for one person at a time so one viewer goes into a kind of gallery white cube museum space you see a person in a so called guilty environment so a place in the world that is directly suffering as a result of the industrial world's choices so where the impact of industrial society where this is felt globally unseen in these landscapes that's where the guilt comes in and you see a person and then you realize at a certain moment that in fact that person also sees you and you realize that because they begin imitating you and then there becomes a kind of mirror game of exchange and so all of a sudden this idea of distance and separation becomes immediately collapsed and you become implicated in the landscape and you become seen in your space in your highly privileged right fortunate space that is the result often that privilege and that comfort of what you are seeing in the guilty landscape and there's a whole series of these they're quite profound and this one is in Thailand and in fact the young man takes off his clothes and encourages you to do the same and then the last artist that I'll talk about I think it's the last artist no it's not even close to the last artist I have a bunch more this is Chris Fredonk I'm not going to say too much about Fredonk because Peter Ekrasol and new media dramaturgy talks quite a lot and has worked very closely with Christophe Fambarro Fambarro by the way is Chris Fredonk's dramaturge and someone who works in a mode that made me think very much of your project Christine with Chris Fredonk Chris has a history as an engineer and as an artist but was also trained in theater and he has always worked with dramaturges even on pieces that have no semblance of text so his dramaturge for a long time was the famed European dramaturge Maria Ivanko Koven that would quote I believe and now it's Christophe Fambarro and he does these really kinds of compelling and that's not to say that I don't sometimes take ethical issue with Fredonk's work particularly around questions of gender but it's always compelling and this is a piece called ESOS which is based on the international standardizations organization that controls shipping, global shipping and IT protocols and these are not unrelated the subject matter that Fredonk draws on is based in stories by J.G. Ballard particularly the atrocity exhibition among others which is a very interesting text if you've not read that recently because it's written entirely in paragraphs that are boxes right so if you read the text it's like these each kind of part of the story is rendering is in these rectangles it's in these boxes really provocative provocative book so Chris builds these boxes there's an array of nine boxes you look down in the boxes through stereoscopic glasses that are in the top and inside we can also ask actually Farah Murray about this because in fact he filmed this at MPAC the experimental media and performing arts center at RIT I think I'm getting that right in Troy, New York I believe he did this before Ashley got there but it's in that facility and then within what he did he shot the performers from above with a 3D camera against a gridded backdrop so black with white lines to create a really strong sense of 3D so when you look down through the top this is one of his images I have a couple that are mine it looks as if the people and then he projects on the bottom of the box which continues the frame so it really looks like these people are living three dimensional beings in a box but they're about two fifths scale of an actual human being he calls them the creatures they're completely bizarre mostly right so and then they kind of interact images or ideas that he draws from Ballard short stories so we watched this this is from one of the short stories called escapement in which a couple bourgeois couple is hanging out watching television and the husband notices that in the television he's watching the same stories coming up over and over again but as if it's breaking news and so he realizes that he caught in a temporal loop you're at how to get out of it or how to hang on and of course these are all recorded temporal loops that we're watching and there's also this moment where he talks about hugging the TV and one of the characters says don't hug the television and then you realize that you're watching it like this you know that you are literally hugging your TV right I was thinking of this when someone mentioned the whole leaning back versus leaning in like climbing climbing upon and then they look at you which is just like kind of marvelous kind of marvelous this would be an earlier one that called in which is another part of my obsession with boxes and verdant and some of my questions around gender and how he approaches that in some of this so when you ask him about these the different people that are in these boxes and this is life you walk around a box with a human being in it submerged in water with an air hose that goes to a tank an oxygen tank outside the aquarium the woman is dressed as a maid or maybe a waitress and her body position is this the man is dressed in a three piece suit with a briefcase and his body position is this when you ask him about that it's just people just people okay Jenna and Kimmy and Mike I was thinking this is somebody these are people you really need to know if you don't already which is the critical engineers this is another artist group that I talk a lot about with my students because I see them living in a society that now just compels them and encourages them to fling their data and their information around willy-nilly because they can get like five buck off coupons somewhere the critical engineers are wonderful because a lot of what they do is really critical but also really dangerous they know how to protect themselves the project that I wanted to talk about which would go back to to Andrew in his flip phone is a piece called border bumping and so this is Julian Oliver we brought him to the University of Buffalo through the Techna Institute for Arts and Emerging Technologies in 2013 to do a project across the Niagara River so across the US Canadian border there and what he did is he basically wrote an app that you could download onto your phone that would track and broadcast which cell tower you were connected to at any given moment and then as you crossed the border it would redraw the border in real time not based on where the border was is a kind of geo-political boundary but according to when the cell towers thought you had crossed the border which is not at all aligned with the actual physical border which is on Beaver Island or Fort Erie can tell you every once in a while people on the American side would get charged international roaming on their cell phones because for whatever reason the cell tower across the river had picked them up and everything that they were doing in that instance even though they were in their own living rooms so this is the project that he did so he identified all these different cell towers that went along the boundary he identified how the data is being exchanged and he's done other projects that sort of illustrate how when you send an email for example how many computers it goes through how vulnerable it is and how you would never know any of those servers could absolutely in milliseconds copy, store, whatever you would put there and you would never be the wiser so and then it would again redraw the border in real time the other one kind of along these lines that he made is the transparency grenade this is like a super illegal piece of equipment art project but basically what this does is the transparency grenade made in the body of a metal and silicone F1 Soviet hand grenade it's equipped with a tiny computer a microphone and a wireless antenna and basically what it does is when you pull the pin it captures all of the network traffic and audio at the site of the grenade and then it securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information and then email fragments HTML pages, images and voice extracted from the data so everything that's on your phone right now then gets presented as an online public map where it went off so he basically captures everything that's kind of spinning around and again the critical engineers is all about awareness and exploit as a form of education like making us aware of what we're doing moment to moment what our vulnerabilities are and how these play out in the world okay and there it is and then you can see stuff from your phone suddenly broadcast because right now you know very few of us have encrypted all of the data on our cell phones and so it just but we're all connected to a wifi network and it could at any moment right so if you want to talk security these are your guys and Julian's very nice really wonderful New Zealander living in Berlin really smart, very wonderful person the last piece I want to talk about is Luke de Bois and Luke is originally a composer a computer musician does a lot of data and digital art now we had him at Bowdoin we had a retrospective called Now at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and what he did, this is not so unrelated to what these is doing he joined a number of dating app networks across the country as a man seeking women as a man seeking men as a woman seeking men as a woman seeking women and anything he did as a man and woman seeking but anyway he went through and developed every conceivable profile something like 12 dating apps and then he mined all the data everything because once you're in the network you have access to the network and then he correlated that with census data and began to reanalyze the United States population now again these are the single population and people who are on the dating apps with measures with new kinds of measures so this is a measure of shyness based on how people identify themselves on these dating apps so the darker so the the darker it is the brighter it is the shyer you are and then women are red and men are blue and then they get mixed in purple so now you have an image of the United States based on levels of shyness the other piece that my students and I spent a lot of time playing around with and had a really good time with is that he then went through and he collected basically all of the words and did a huge kind of text mining project for the words that were used in all of these in all of these online dating profiles and then he redrew the United States map and identified every city by what word was used there more than anywhere else in the country so we are currently we are currently in waiting Georgia some of us will take airplanes to fly out of company Georgia I come from incorrigible Maine but I was born in afternoon California and this is an interactive map that you can go to and and check it out the last thing I want to do before we play around is to point out a few different resources that are available for teaching and research people had mentioned earlier syllabi that are related to this I don't know if any of us had the chance to check out this website this was created by Scott Moggelson and Henry Beil in 2010 critical interventions in theater historiography and it has a number of this is in the faculty club it has a number of syllabi that people have used I haven't checked it recently to see if there is anything particularly on digital but I think it's a really helpful resource in a number of other domains the other two I know we are running out of time so I can make some of these links available elsewhere but the other one that I wanted to point out is that a few years ago yes I need to renew my Astor membership my bad is the Astor member group for digital research and scholarship and this is a group that I created in 2014-2015 I haven't done very much with it for the last year so my apologies but if you click into the group it has a number of different resources that are there including a kind of overview and then if you go up let's try this again if you go up into group pages there is a digital resources guide again as of 2015 so take it for what it's worth a list of projects where you can list your project and also see I think the three projects that have been listed there we need to populate that but more interesting I think for our purposes today there's a thing on copyright information I circulated a thing on Twitter last night also that I think is really great there's a lot of good stuff is the tool shop and this is basically a list of various kinds of tools many of them open source but several of these are links to directories so the DIRT directory is really one of the best resources that you can find online and they do a much better job of updating what they're doing than I do but the Astro Group is a nice starting place the other thing that the Astro Group does is we have shared Zotero library so I mentioned Zotero earlier it's a citation management system like Mendelay or EndNote but it's web based and it can be collaborative so you can share you can share these libraries and then everybody who is a member of the group can oh I need to log in anyway you can go in and you can access you can upload things you can download things you can copy things to your own library but it becomes a kind of shared online resource that's helpful there as well and then the last thing I wanted to mention is a couple of other resources online in this one is Matthew Gold's edited debates in the digital humanities has a website so there are two editions of the print book but this is also an online that you can go in and out of and I again use this with my students as well and in fact much of what the University of Michigan Press is doing now so if you might mentioned enjoying the conclusion rate that we had from the you know writing history in the digital age that entire book is actually available online as are another so this also becomes a really a really good resource for how to how to use this and there are other collections right that that are sort of along the lines of World Theater Map but these are some of the ones that I use most for my students. I think that's probably good for now. I apologize. Thanks so much for listening. A few moments of questions if you want to do that now but of course we have plenty of time this afternoon as well. Yeah, Mike. I want to make sure I have what kind of questions would be best for this context so I have kind of a simple practical question but also the theoretical question about theory. Would that be better maybe about four minutes now. I think theoretical questions are probably best held for the audience. So I have then that would be what I think is a fairly simple question. Sure. You never define theory. What do you mean by theory? Sounds theoretical. That's pretty. I know. That is the question. Yeah, so I mean so one thing is that if anybody tells me it's theory I believe them. Right, so if somebody says like here is my theory of I'm like okay I'll go with that. But the other is that I do usually with my students a fairly you know extensive and energetic working up of theater and theory and their right root etymologies and the idea of seeing and the notion that theory is any kind of approach to looking at something right or considering it right. I mean I don't want to overly privilege the visual in that although I probably do. But yeah, it becomes a way of looking at it and understanding and when we start talking in kind of digital culture a lot of how I break that down is to sort of put theory in the category of analysis. Right, so it's how we make sense of things. It's how we process what's around us. I mean I think that there are a number of different definitions and ways to kind of engage with that and it's also very disciplinarily specific, right. You know your critical theory is my philosophy right and the way that these kinds of you know cross fields and I'm pretty careful with my students in terms of understanding where different ideas come from disciplinarily and how they're deployed in that environment versus which is not to say that we can't use them in a totally different way if it's productive but again always trying to kind of negotiate and type things back into the practical and the specific as much as I can. Yes, Kristen. This is kind of just a question about gender in the digital humanities. I've just noticed how many of the examples of artists and thinkers from nearly all of the presentations have been met. And I mean I'm thinking particularly about Linda's presentation in that entire presentation there wasn't a female human being referred to as an artist or thinker and you have the impression that there were no women in the world generating knowledge at all. Which puts a lot of burden on the females to put themselves back in that's in a sort of form of invisible labour and you know it's been true of almost all the presentations and I'm kind of I think perhaps it's part of the field that it's been a kind of tech geek male driven field in its genesis in terms of the tools under the hood in digital humanities a lot of the time but I'm also really concerned as an educator and thinker and someone wanting to make resources available to my students about the work of making that visible and about perhaps resources for that or you know robust archives or lists of women artists and thinkers that we could also draw on or just at least to make it more visible and I'm not really seeing that work happening here in the foreground so I don't know if that's quite a question but it's something I've noticed and I'm really and I'm concerned about Well kid hails is really quite significant among others and it becomes kind of a founding I would actually say that DH more than other aspects of media study is fairly gender integrated I don't know the specific statistics on that certainly there are a range of other artists that we could look at. Mary Mattingly is a really interesting artist and performer my former colleague Stephanie Rothenberg does wonderful stuff at the intersection of psychology and environmental science she's actually coming to Bowdoin next year as an artist in residence in the Brew Center for environmental studies so she's an artist doing digital digitally informed work so one of her pieces I'm going to forget the name of it now because it has this very funny pun basically takes mind the web for data on microlending and then applies that to a physical representation of these little seedlings and the amount of water that they are given based on microlending patterns globally and who's being drowned and who's experiencing drought so there are a number of different people to point to I apologize for my own imbalance here it's organized around boxes which I sure have more women playing around with them there's like a chime in there it's interesting that you mentioned Kathleen Hales in terms of the post human I was thinking back at my guilt to leave my presentation but of course Donna Harway is the key figure too in that discussion I remember now thinking back when I put together that slide where I actually had Kathleen Hales and Donna Harway as a theorist and then I had Stella named them but I had just an image from Stella and an image from Laurie Anderson and I was actually putting a slide together conscious of that gender balance but for whatever reason I think the post human theory in particular has been dominated by female theorists animal studies also which is kind of interesting so our third author on the taxonomies book is gender for Parker Starbuck who also wrote sideboard theater a slide in there I guess it's a question about public offerings too maybe I just got really annoyed by a little bit of us we cheers for a noise alright shall we eat and then discuss brilliant thanks very much I appreciate it