The Machinic City: Media, Performance and Participation

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This book provides an original perspective on the role of performance art towards reflecting on contemporary urban life, with analyses in detail key projects of digitally meditated performance art in urban space from renowned artists.

The machinic city reveals the potential of performance art to create spaces for reflection and deliberation on contemporary urban living and to speculate on the future of cities. As social and spatial interactions in the city become increasingly mediated by machines, performance art can help us reflect on the new modes of subjectivity that emerge as human and machine agency become intermingled and digital media permeates the urban fabric.

Several case studies of urban art interventions are analysed and discussed as examples of the potential of the aesthetic machine of performance art, as it assembles with media, Capitalist, human and urban machines. These case studies reveal the importance of acknowledging dissensus as a constitutive factor of urban life and as a means of countering machinist determinism in present and future conceptualisations of city life.

Reviews

'Dias inspiring study makes clear that cities and machines are not always smart. His fascinating case studies show how performance art is perfectly placed to reveal the unpredictable, uncanny, powerful, playful and dysfunctional aspects of both. Drawing on perspectives ranging from philosophy and machine aesthetics to posthumanism and urban studies, Dias shines new light on our contemporary experience of "the machinic city" in bold and remarkable ways.'
Steve Dixon, Professor at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and author of Cybernetic-Existentialism and Digital Performance

'The Machinic City is, by its nature, a wide ranging study, bringing together diverse areas of thought and practice, but it is held together with and orbits around the central case study, which activates much of the key thinking and insight related to the notion of the machinic city. It is here, in the fresh and insightful analysis and account of A Machine to See With, that the concepts informing the study really sing and where they are put to work most effectively to offer us new understandings of how this particular mode of performance - positioned
in and interacting with public city spaces through participation using computational mobile devices and technologies - actually functions, breaks down and emerges as something new and unexpected. This makes the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in those types of performance, the work of Blast Theory more generally, as well as in seeing an example of how Latours ANT can be incisively applied to performance in urban spaces. It will appeal to theorists and practitioners of performance with computational digital technologies and those who create participatory performance work in public, city spaces. It is also a great text to share with students who might be trying out these types of making, revealing how all elements of a performance in public space can become constitutive (and disruptive) of the intended dramaturgy.'
Joanne Scott, University of Salford, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

Author Bio

Marcos P. Dias is Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University