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This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer’s writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination.

If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a “forest knowledge,” where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments require a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic: the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide.

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and media artist. His first ensemble, AlienNation Co., has been based in Houston, Texas. He directs the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University London, and teaches performance technologies. Since 2004 he co-directs the Design and Performance Lab and has created numerous dance performances, installations and video exhibitions. The DAP-Lab’s immersive dance installations, metakimospheres, began touring in 2015-19. Mourning for a dead moon, a dance work propelled by the climate crisis, premiered in London in December 2019. In 2021 the DAP-Lab started to offer workshops on"Somatechnics and Dis/abilities," making forays into correlated work with tactile-sensual techniques and VR-technologies.

He is author of Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism; Media and Performance: along the border; Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture, and Performance, Science & Technology, and several other books, and co-editor of Dance and Cognition, Dance and Choreomania, and Tanz der Dinge/Things that Dance.

Ankündigung / about the book