The presentation “New Media Scenography” follows up, and builds, on the “Live Movies” presentation. It includes discussion of questions such as:
Why draw on cinematic practice to create live performance?
How does this practice affect concepts such as presence and representation, stylization and “fantastic realism”?
Why explore the notion and technique of stylized performance?
How might animation, projection and digital sound be employed to create new stage forms?
How do contemporary audiences’ new, unfolding multimedia sensibilities perceive and discern the presence of performers in a dramaturgy of screens, electronic characters, digital sound and projected dreamscapes?
In order to embrace these questions, we consider the ideas of philosophers including Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Donna Haraway, Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Walter Benjamin, science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, and theater practitioners such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator, Robert Edmond Jones and Josef Svoboda, as treated in the essay “Live Movies: A Personal (Future) History of Multimedia Performance” in our recent book Live Movies: A Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts. The above authors’ work is explored in terms of virtual environments, simulation, spectacle, surveillance, mediated realities, fluid identity and cinematic narrative.
After exploring these theoretical underpinnings, we present performance concerns and practice through the lens of our recent work on multimedia and projection design and scenography for a production of Hamlet, produced by the Actors Guild of Lexington in Kentucky, in October 2007. This consideration includes presentation of practical tools such as 3D models of performance spaces, digital scenographic models and storyboards, and show control systems. This component of the presentation draws on the essays “New Media Scenography” and “Welcome to the Z: Synthesizing the Simulated with the Real” from our Live Movies book.
Both these presentations are shaped and completed by questions from, and discussions with, seminar participants.
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