here it is 2014, a world who never stops. Advertising, consumption, new technologies, and dictate of the media are everywhere.
Digital technology take a predominant place in our daily life. Which has also expanded in our Performance Art realm since several years.
How all these field deeply touch by technologies innovation, digital grow up very fast?
How, nowadays, innovative tools already generalised, are used by Artist in performance?
Video, film, mapping, and all digital media art are more and more used in the art field nowadays.
But doesn't it put a screen, a gap between audience and performance?
Artist and immersive performer use this media more and more to explore different aspects of participation.
In witch way it is effective and how space and location affect the bonders of the new technologies.
Already with the Fluxus, Nam June Paik, with his video installation (for example «Family of Robot: Baby» in 1986), suggested that technology is both a product of human innovation and a potential cause of our retreat from reality. In a sense he explicitly humanised technology as a means of resistance, commenting, «One must ... Know technology very well in order to be able to overcomes it.» Stating that the purpose of video art is «to liberate people from the tyranny of TV», he was reminding us of the capability of technology to consume our lives, and asserting the need for us to see it in a deferent form, such as art.
Guy Debord in 1967 published "the society of spectacle" which he made a film later. That explain how our society is based on images and consumption. For him “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris in "Performance and place" present a range of difference artists, academics, curators and producers in the files of performance, live art and film. They give a critical and personal visions of of the real and the virtual, in the context of our contemporary society art practice and shares thoughts.
In the early 1960’s mass media, theme and subject were combined by a group of artists to produce work that both shocked and amused the public with its new form of communication. The main example of this is Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. This has become known as the movement Pop Art.‘I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life’ declared Andy Warhol and attacked the consumer society which creates more and more a fake world: ‘ I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts’.
Lets take the example of TV reality. People are film without any script or story tallying, It’s them 24/24h. Is it even real? It is called reality TV show. I think It is more a show rather than a reality. TV sells us a concept of a reality more than the reality itself. Andy Warhol goes further and said: « Some day everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.» Manipulated by media, our reality nowadays sums modified. The dictatorship of images and their power on us affect our own identity and our way of living.
According to Steve Dixon co-authored (with Barry Smith) the book Digital Performance: "During the latest decade of the twentieth century, computer technologies played a dynamic and increasingly important role in theatre, dance, and performance genres emerged in interactive installations and on the Internet."
In theatre practice, Robert Lepage created Ex Machina a new company who creates different show such as The Dragons' Trilogy or Needles and Opium, Coriolanus, Macbeth, The Tempest. All created in collaboration with different skills artist such as computer designer, video artist. Different digital artist who make his work innovative and new in the field.