Maaike Bleeker and Norah Zuniga Shaw | Performance + Technology: An Interactive Conversation, Book Launch, and Reception
Join us for an evening of art, conversation, and shared inquiry celebrating the publication of The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology.
Free for all audiences with ticket
Performance Space
This mini festival features a keynote conversation with the book’s editors, creative offerings by contributing artists and scholars, and an opportunity to experience the groundbreaking exhibition sweat variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born): where you go full, volume 5 together in the Wexner Center galleries. The program ends with a reception with light refreshments.
The evening invites audiences to think, sense, and experiment alongside contributing artists and scholars as we consider not only what technology does in performance but what performance can teach us about living well in a technoscientific world.
Coedited by Ohio State’s Norah Zuniga Shaw and the University of Utrecht’s Maaike Bleeker, The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology begins from the premise that technologies and bodies are co-constitutive and that performance offers vital methods for sensing, understanding, and reshaping those relationships. For this special event international contributors and guests will take up pressing questions from the perspective of performance and embodied experience: What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? What becomes visible as technology is approached through practices of performance with attention to bodies, movement, liveness, presence, relationality, and shared world-making? And where might artists be leading conversations about technology that other fields, institutions, and policymakers have yet to imagine?
About the artists
Maaike Bleeker
Maaike Bleeker is a professor of theater, dance, and performance at Utrecht University. Bleeker’s research focuses on processes of perception and meaning making in performance, dance, theater, and the arts, as well as in science and in public life. She combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory, and cognitive science. She is a partner in the project Performative Body Mapping (funded by the Australian Research Council) and a project leader of Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed for the Robot Revolution (funded by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, NWO). She served as president of performance studies international (PSi) from 2011 to 2016. She has also coedited several books.
Norah Zuniga Shaw
Norah Zuniga Shaw (she/they) is an internationally recognized artist, performer, and creative director best known for her award-winning digital projects for physical ideas, including Synchronous Objects with William Forsythe. She presents frequently on Livable Futures and humane technologies, and her most recent works address climate change through transmedia performance rituals and creative community dialogs. She is professor and director of dance and technology at Ohio State and cofounder of the Motion Lab at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design where she has taught interdisciplinary research, improvisation, and intermedia since 2004. She publishes on topics in dance, ecology, and technology.