The world is digital now, so what does this mean for digital performance and the arts?

Featuring practice and research demonstrations, talks, round tables, provocations and coffee sessions, the Symposium will ask how the field of digital performance has developed over the last decade. Have digital initiatives such as Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, NT Live and BMW Tate Live, augmented reality and urban gaming applications, shifted digital performance practice and research from cultural avant-garde to the mainstream? Which are the most exciting current entanglements and intersections developed between performance and technology? What can be defined as digital performance at a time when performance is always already digital? (following on from Charlie Gere’s argument about the term ‘digital culture’ being a tautology as culture is already digital (2008)). And what is the role of digital performance research today?

The Symposium will launch two new Digital Performance initiatives:
• The Practice-as-Research cluster Laser Unicorns, encompassing artists and academics from the UK, Europe and USA
• The Digital Performance strand of London South Bank University’s Centre for Research in Digital Storymaking