Writings
Essays & Articles
“A Postdigital Response: User Experience Design, Interactive, Immersive, and Mixed Reality Performance”
with Lindsay Hunter
Routledge, 2022
This essay describes how “experiential” performance can respond to and act within cultures that have been formed and shaped by technologies of the digital. It considers how such performance might contend with technologies of presentation and consumption that appear to attenuate a valorized sense of immediacy and tracks the ways in which postdigital performance’s contradictory histories, impulses, and agendas may seek to empower artists and audiences alike, even as they remain part of a larger economic imperative of brand-living and the commodification of experience.
“Radiohole”
Bloomsbury, 2021
A survey of performance ensemble Radiohole’s career to date, and how their body of work on the lewd, radical, and offensively excessive is utterly American and probably our redemption.
”Your Attention Please: Media, Spectacle, and the Complex”
Scene 1, 2 (2013)
This article explores the problematic concept of attention in a mediatized culture. Using Blue Man Group’s The Complex concert as a case study, I historicize and analyze discourse on attention and perception through phenomenological and deconstructive frames. The heterotopic multimedia concert calls the possibility of attention into question, and with this challenge the Blue Man provides a constructive re-evaluation of consumption and media culture.
"The Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf: Simulacral Performance and the Implosion of Orientalism"
Theatre Survey 54, 1 (2013)
In The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa staged by the Theatre of a Two-headed Calf, the company deploys aesthetics of kabuki, punk rock, repetition, and two-dimensionality to draw attention to the postmodern superficiality both of contemporary media literacy and the avant-garde's appropriation of "Eastern" performance styles.
”Convergence and Contingency: The Early Media Work of Reid Farrington”
Theatre Journal 68, 3 (2016)
The work of media artist and director Reid Farrington, which primarily combines content from theatre and film, is exemplary of performance that engages with and challenges convergence culture—the shifting, consolidating set of tools of production and distribution, as well as the social and cultural practices that stem from a participatory media culture. Part of a Special issue on Digital "Issues," edited by Jen Parker-Starbuck.
“Dicking around with Radiohole: Toward Hyperreal Performance and Criticism”
TDR 51, 4 (2007)
Reappropriating the iconography of “America” as portrayed in Melville's Moby-Dick, the New York-based Radiohole offers in Fluke what I refer to as a hyperreal performance.
“In Media Res: Why Multimedia Performance?”
PAJ 29, 3 (2007)
A conversation with Eric Dyer of Radiohole, Brooke O'Harra of Two-Headed Calf, and Alex Timbers of Les Frères Corbusier about the role of media in performance.
Reviews and Reference
"Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions"
Theatre Survey 58, 1 (2017)
A review of the book by Jennifer A. Low.
“The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater”
TDR 60, 4 (2016)
A review of the book by Marianne Weems and Shannon Jackson.
“Feminist Surveillance Studies”
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 11, 2 (2015)
A review of the book edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet.
“Hierarchy”
Routledge, 2016
Contributor to volume on keywords for contemporary performance, edited by Meiling Cheng and Gabrielle H. Cody.