Tisch School of the Arts - Dept. of Drama

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Tuesdays: 2:00pm - 4:45pm
NYU Silver Center for the Arts and Sciences
(formerly known as the Main Building), Room 412

Instructors: Toni Sant + Martha Wilson
Office Hours: Thursdays 5pm-6pm
TSOA 721 Broadway, Room 305A

This course examines ideas of online performance from two perspectives: historical and practical. The historical perspective traces the development of performance art in the United States with particular emphasis on early feminist performances by Susan Mogul, "culture wars" performances by Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey, and Teh-Ching Hsieh's year-long "time clock" performance among others. We shall also see how over the past decade the Internet has often been explored as a site for performance, first through the medium of text and later with graphic browsers and applications using multimedia over faster modems. The present moment compares with the "golden age" of American avant-garde practice in the 1970s, when artists were encouraged to experiment wildly. Thoughout the semester, students will generate their own experiments in Live Art on the Internet through collaborative performance work, which will be presented to the class as it evolves.

The Internet is still a wide open frontier with very few fences in place. We will explore how performers are exploiting this new medium as well as raise questions on the artistic, legal, political and economic implications of presenting live art on the Internet, with special emphasis on liveness and the ontology of performance. What happens when live performance is mediatized via the Internet? Performers are often unwilling (perhaps because they view their bodies as their instruments) to make the leap from the human body to the body of the Internet, with its parallel circulatory system and interactivity. Rather than merely using the world wide web as a broadcasting medium for existing work (or even works which would loose little without the wired component) this class explores the online world as a new performance/art medium in its own right.