Multimedia Performance Research Articles

Piece of Mind: knowledge translation performances for public engagement on Parkinson's disease and dementia.

The subjective experience of illness is often overshadowed by the disease-and-cure focus of health research, contributing to the stigmatization of conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia. This is exacerbated by the fact that traditional means of knowledge dissemination are inaccessible to non-academic audiences, hampering meaningful dialogue with and research uptake by the broader community. Our arts-based knowledge translation project, Piece of Mind, brought together neuroscientists, people with Parkinson's disease or dementia, care partners and artists (musicians, dancers, circus acrobats) to co-create 2 multi-media performances based on scientific research and lived experience. We investigated whether the resulting interdisciplinary, multimedia performances could (1) challenge misperceptions around Parkinson's/dementia; and (2) render neuroscientific research accessible to a diverse audience. Prior to and immediately following virtual screenings of the feature-length Piece of Mind Parkinson's and Dementia filmed performances, audience members were invited to complete pre-post questionnaires comprised of demographic, Likert-scale and open-ended questions. Responses indicated that both performances elicited strong emotional engagement and improved self-reported understanding and empathy towards individuals with Parkinson's and dementia. Based on a thematic analysis on open-ended questions, we consider the barriers and facilitators to the audience's receptiveness and discuss the performances' potential as a knowledge translation tool. By presenting an emotionally engaging perspective on Parkinson's and dementia, Piece of Mind acts as an important complement to text-based knowledge dissemination in health research.

Combining the Arts: Multimedia Performances in the Early 19th-Century Habsburg Empire

Combining the Arts: Multimedia Performances in the Early 19th-Century Habsburg Empire

“In the Name of the God of All Names: Yahweh, Obatalá, Olorum”: The 1981 Quilombos Mass as an Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Brazil

AbstractOn November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

Sino-futurism and alternative imaginaries of Digital China

This paper investigates the role of digital technologies in transforming China's self-image. It focuses on the use of extended reality (XR) in ceremonial events and art exhibitions. The paper offers two case studies. The first study, Beijing 8-Minute Show (2018), a multimedia performance at the closing ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games, set the scene for what was called the Science and Technology Winter Olympics in 2022. The second study, Blueprints (2020), was a multimedia exhibition in the UK by the artist Cao Fei, which drew attention to a future of increased alienation, loss of privacy and digital surveillance. In the paper, the framework of a ‘techno-cultural imaginary’ shows how China's self-image is increasingly tied to modernisation. The paper demonstrates how the ‘two cultures’, science and the arts, have converged in policy thinking. In this reset, China's so-called cultural confidence is re-energised by digital platforms, echoing the description of Digital China. Sino-futurism, originally used in relation to Chinese sci-fi literature, provides a stepping-off point to imagine the future, which is alternatively characterised as techno-utopian (within China) and dystopian (in the West). Drawing on the qualitative analysis of publicly available interviews, media reports, online comments and close reading of the art content, the paper argues that XR allows the government to present Digital China as a positive blueprint for human progress. Meanwhile, XR is capable of generating critical stories about China, which contradict the message the government seeks to cultivate with its public diplomacy and propaganda campaigns.

Intertextual Inquiry and Interpretive Creation: Pope.L’s Experimental Staging of William Wells Brown’s The Escape

Abstract This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right. Engaging in a complex intertextual and intercultural dialogue with its antetext, Pope.L’s staging brings into focus particular aspects of the contemporary moment. While Brown’s play presents race as first and foremost a performative category and stresses the possibility of autopoiesis qua performance, Pope.L reduces slavery to an ontological condition. Its title and manifold multimedia performances notwithstanding, there is no escape from enslavement in Pope.L: The Escape. Performance remains contained in and prescribed by an ongoing condition of physical and psychic enslavement. With this radical adaptation, Pope.L responds to what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “ontological turn” in recent Black thought. In light of the ongoing structural and quotidian violence against People of Color, this approach insists on the central significance of the bodily experience of racializing attributions for understanding social relations as well as Black collectivity. It also provocatively asks whether the performative does indeed suffice to unsettle the structural coordinates of anti-Blackness that continue to impact and overdetermine contemporary lives.

Kafka’s Ape Meets the Natyashastra

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures.

Visual arts, dance, theatre: Multimedia performance and contemporary Hong Kong art

This article takes as its focus multimedia performance in Hong Kong in the 1980s, a period which saw high levels of collaboration across the visual arts, dance and theatre. The significance of these cross-media fertilizations to the development of contemporary Hong Kong art is drawn out in discussion of two artists, Josh Hon (b. 1954) and Choi Yan Chi (b. 1949), whose respective encounters with experimental dance and theatre subsequent to their return from higher education in Europe and North America made them newly sensitive to elements of time, space and movement. The subsequent appropriation of these materials of contingency into experiments with performance, installation and painting produced aesthetic strategies by which the artwork could be made porous to its local context. The significance of these exchanges is that they point to an alternative point of origin for processes of localization integral to the emergence of contemporary art in Hong Kong which typically has been bound to major political inflection points and a concomitant local cultural introspection. Attending to the substantive and diverse transnational connections of artists, these developments are instead indexed against international art historical and intellectual shifts beginning in the 1960s away from universalism and interiority and towards relativity, contingency, fragmentation and embodiment, thereby restaking Hong Kong’s claim to the global contemporary.

Through Ice and Snow. Mountain Films as Educational Films in the 1920s and 1930s

The article focuses on two cinematic representations of alpinism and its multimedia performance practice in the popular education programmes of the Vienna Urania in the 1920s and 30s: First on Arnold Fanck’s early mountain film Im Kampf mit dem Berge (DE 1921). I am not concentrating on Fanck’s film version, but on the version produced by the Urania for popular education, which was distributed throughout Austria as Urania-Kulturfilm. I ask how the Urania utilised Im Kampf mit dem Berge as part of a media package (consisting of films, lectures and slides) and which media-pedagogical methods and practices were thereby employed. How did entertainment and instruction relate to each other? The second film I will look at is the ambitious Austrian amateur film Mit Steigeisen und Eispickel (c. 1934) produced and filmed by a group of mountaineers. I investigate how this film relates an established repertoire of images to elements of educational films to introduce the audience to new techniques of ice climbing: What techniques of showing and instructing are discernible and to what extent are the film and its performance practice ‘educational’? To sum it up, I interpret the mountain and alpine film as educational film and investigate the role and qualities attributed to the medium film as a teaching tool for conveying and disseminating contemporary ideas of the mountain and alpinism.

Connections; The artistic process of creating a multimedia performance

Connections; The artistic process of creating a multimedia performance

Development of Multimedia in Local Wisdom, Thai Incense Making

The purposes of this research are : 1) effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for local wisdom, Thai incense making ,2) the assessing is effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for local wisdom, Thai incense making , and 3) a study of student is satisfaction with teaching of multimedia teaching material for local wisdom, Thai incense making. The population is grade 5 students at Wat Huay Rong School (Government Housing Lottery Office 160) about 27. The instruments use in this research include multimedia teaching materials, practice test, multimedia performance assessment form and satisfaction assessment form (questionnaires). The statistics use in this study include average and the standard deviation. The research found that as follows: 1) effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College were 80.19/ 85.19 which was higher than the specified criteria. 2) The opinion assessment teaching of multimedia teaching material for local wisdom, Thai incense making that it was appropriate, possibility and usefulness was at the highest level in all aspects.3) Student satisfaction with teaching of multimedia teaching material for local wisdom, Thai incense making at that was the highest level in all aspects.

Experimental Theater of XX-XXI Centuries as a Public Speech Laboratory (Problem Statement)

The purpose of the study is to create a history of the experimental theater of the 20th century , understood as a laboratory of public speech , as well as to identify the place of the experiments of the theater of the 19th-20th-21st centuries in Russia on the map of contemporary art . According to the concept of the materiality of the performance , which is created by performative means , the voice , performance space , presence , body , oral speech can be considered as a multimedia performance . Along with the methods of historical science necessary for the study of archival and published documentary evidence of experiments with public speech in the theater , the methods of the sociology of art , the history of ideas , and cultural history are used , which allow establishing links between the inventions of new techniques and methods in the art of the theater , the accompanying social and historical events and reveal the genealogy and history of techniques and methods .

StellarScape: An Immersive Multimedia Performance Inspired by the Life of a Star

Abstract StellarScape is an immersive multimedia performance synthesizing music, science, visual art, and technology. The performance includes live musicians, sensors, electronic music, and dance, all collaborating through interactive cinematography. The result combines kinesthetic and acoustic sensing with astrophysical simulations of star formation in real time. This convergence research collaboration is catalyzed by the union of concepts at the confluence of astronomy, humanity, artistic expression through music and dance, and sociotechnical experience. This article summarizes the authors’ motivation for undertaking the project, the interdisciplinary collaboration required to execute it, the authors’ goals for the audience experience, early results of the first performances, and ways the piece can be delivered in the future for entertainment, outreach, and education.

การพัฒนาสื่อการสอนมัลติมีเดียการปักลายดอกไม้บนผลิตภัณฑ์เข็มกลัดติดเสื้อสุภาพสตรีสำหรับนักเรียน วิทยาลัยสารพัดช่างนครหลวง

The purposes of this research are : 1) effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College,2) the assessing is effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College, and 3) a study of student is satisfaction with teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College. The population is the short-term student enrolled in the second semester of the 2020 academic year in Fabric Craft about 35. The instruments use in this research include multimedia teaching materials, practice test, multimedia performance assessment form and satisfaction assessment form (questionnaires).The statistics use in this study include average and the standard deviation. The research found that as follows: 1) effectiveness teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College were 80.17/ 87.31 which was higher than the specified criteria. 2) The opinion assessment teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College that it was appropriate, possibility and usefulness was at the highest level in all aspects.3) Student satisfaction with teaching of multimedia teaching material for floral embroidery brooches pined in lady's clothes for Nakhon Laung Polytechnic College at that was the highest level in all aspects.

The Trash Trout Motion Picture Show

The Trash Trout Motion Picture Show is a collaborative creative placemaking project that employs the power of the arts to help protect freshwater ecosystems in the Appalachian Mountains. Filmmaker Tom Hansell, musician Trevor McKenzie, and musician/dancer Julie
 Shepherd-Powell shares a multimedia performance they developed in collaboration with local civic organizations.
 

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era

New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era

Sounding the State of the World: Interview with Karim Rafi, Summer 2021

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from sound installations to gardening, which he brings together in multimedia performances and hypermedia objects that register the cultural and political forces shaping art in the 2020s, while reactivating their radical potential for relation apart from capitalist commodification.

Ageing Design of Urban Park Landscape Based on Computer Virtual Simulation Technology.

Greenery are the parks in the urban areas and it becomes progressively most significant as cities grow more crowded. In the end, urban parks contribute to the population's healthiness and welfare by providing opportunities intended for physical and social activity, leisure, and relaxation. In order to construct “Digital Land,” computer and system software and hardware were used. Computer simulations are used to examine the value of a city garden's landscape design. Digital models and multimedia performances are being built using computer-aided design (CAD), this underlines the need for digitizing data for landscape design. A region's landscapes can only be accurately assessed if sufficient information is available on the elements that influence the people's awareness of landscape quality, as well as the kind, method, and effective rate of each of them. We use an LVQANN (artificial neural network) to forecast the landscape aesthetic assessment of urban parks and priorities the model's significant factors in this research. User viewpoint and artificial neural network modelling were utilized in conjunction to assess the aesthetic quality of the urban park's environment. This was done for two reasons. The design of urban parks decision support system is known as MATLAB software's multilayer perceptions model, which gives the ability to anticipate landscape visual significance in innovative parks. In this study, the ANN LVQ model is used to execute an ageing design of an urban park landscape based on a computer virtual simulation application. An example land is selected as input and area linked to sunny spot, top view, and so on is fixed. The ANN tool box is used to develop this application in MATLAB 2018b software. The following approach is used to create the ideal urban park landscape model. An accuracy of 89.23 percent, a sensitivity of 87.34 percent, and a recall of 78.93 percent were achieved, outperforming the approach and competing with the current model.

The historian is present: live interactive documentary as collaborative history

ABSTRACT Historical narratives seek to give us a shared reality, argued through recourse to evidence. Both impulses are under threat in the Age of the Anthropocene. This article introduces Live Interactive Documentary, a ‘performance dissemination’ model for history that deploys digital tools to merge cinema and lecture into a new form. It is designed to respond to Hayden White’s challenge in ‘The Burden of History’ and Bruno Latour’s call to gather as a bulwark to misinformation and the manipulative, political cooption of postmodern scepticism. Live Interactive Documentary creates a spectacle of archive and expertise, injected with post-postmodern values of polyphony and audience exchange, grounded in the local. This essay describes the form that I piloted with a team that includes historian Robert Nelson and composer, musician and media artist Brent Lee. Live Interactive Documentary is a model of ‘moving (image) history’ that seeks to cross boundaries between practice and theory, as well as history, film, multimedia performance art and participation. This hybrid cinema model draws upon theories of historiography, film and new media. It digitises earlier models of theatre and film exhibition and responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene by prioritising negotiation, complexity and gathering face-to-face in the real space of our analogue world.

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975