Description: In Media & Performance, choreographer Johannes Birringer offers the first comprehensive critical study of the intimate relations between performance art and media production in contemporary culture. Richly illustrated and composed, the book interweaves Birringer's recollections of his own work in the alternative culture with commentary, on contemporary artists, from Nam June Paik to Laurie Anderson and Madonna. At a time when the new arts are being accepted and adopted by mainstream institutions, Birringer reclaims performance as process and movement, as political commitment to social activism and community, as aesthetic intervention into technological and economic structures of domination, and as anarchist disturbance of aesthetic pretensions.

Birringer begins by tracing the origins of avant-garde dance and revealing how it has been transformed politically in, for example, the anachronistically utopian work of the Slovenian choreographer Dragan Zivadinov; sexually, in the awkward yearning expressed in the performances of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater company; and technologically, in the work of the Australian performance artist Stelarc, who literally wires himself into robotic machinery and imaging equipment. Later chapters explore the creation of digital-based interactive art, the use of video in the works of performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Nam June Paik, and the creation of video sculptures such as Francesc Torres's Oikonomos, which was never exhibited due to a protest by the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the artist's plan to install a video monitor on the genitalia of their copy of a statue of Zeus. The author discusses the performance aspects of such political eventsas the breaching of the Berlin wall and the destruction of Sarajevo, and examines the use of video and agit-prop performance in political activity, including protests by the gay activist group ACT UP.

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