New opportunities will come to pass only if control of the technology is taken from the technologist and given to those who understand human beings, human interaction, communication, pleasure and pain. It is time for engineers to go back to engineering. To develop these new technologies, we need a new breed of creative individuals, most likely those associated with poetry, writing, and theatrical direction [… ]. Who better understands human interaction than a dramatist?

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Digits, Discourse, and Documentation Performance Research and Hypermedia

The article offers a case study of the relationshipbetween current developments in Classical Studies andthe impact of computing and IT. The first sectionsummarises the main features of the Classical Studiesenvironment, especially the deep seated changes whichhave been taking place. These changes are then relatedto specific initiatives in Research, Teaching andLearning. The discussion is framed by a statement ofmicro-criteria for the evaluation of new developmentsand by reference to the macro-climate of debate aboutthe nature of cyberspace, especially the dichotomybetween conceptions of post-modern diversity and ofEnlightenment images of rational structures. It issuggested that these debates mirror those with whichthe discipline itself engages.

Electrifying the Canon: The Impact of Computing on Classical Studies

This paper re-views the field of performance studies through the lens of a large body of the practical work in new media performance and technology tools creation. It thus engages critically with the author's own earlier ideas about play, replay and the performance of self: taking a new position informed by an altered view of performance that has developed in recent years with benefit of both hindsight and the applied method of multimodal vision. Working live as a mover and director who has taken a visible physical place in mixed ability performance work, the author argues that the framing of self in performance which is personal, is complicated not only by theories of agency and the frames in which performance and performance theory are both viewed and reviewed, but also by the shifting nature of ‘self’ as the body and one's ways of engaging through the body both age and change. The paper has been written specially to set the scene for and raise key issues discussed elsewhere in this double issue...

Performing self beyond the body: Replay culture replayed

Space, as Einstein has taught us, has no limits, and time is relative to where you are moving and the speed of light Our millenium, then, is only a speck in eternal space It is, nevertheless, a point relative to which we are positioned and on which we place a limit—a date—so that our actions may be chronicled, measured, and brought to some sort of completion, thus releasing us from living forever in the present Yet, notwithstanding our ability to construct, contain and count time, somewhere someone has made a slip, for there is a ‘glitch’ in the system that still prevents millions of computers from recognizing the year 2000, by which devilry we are sent back to less than zero, to zero twice, 00 This error may well have disastrous consequences, although it would be preferable not have any of them happen—hospital operations failing, aeroplanes losing their bearings and going down in apocalyptic spectacles that are considered appropriate for a millenial ending is as if this error might be interpreted as a token of what Jean Baudrillard, in a different context that has nothing to do with computers, sardonically suggests may be our desire to wipe out history, even, perhaps, to start again from scratch Baudrillard's is, of course, one of multiple theses on the ‘end of history’ and millenial nothingness that have emerged, not least via the theatre, with the approach of the twenty-first century

Bells and Alarm Clocks: Theatre and Theatre Research at the Millenium

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X00012185

Multimedia Possibilities for Live and Lesbian Performance

The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare

Tony Coe

Papers

The Multimedia Bard: Plugged and Unplugged