Kinetic Atmospheres

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 requires 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. This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and media artist. Since 2004 he has co-directed the Design and Performance Lab and headed the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University London, where he teaches performance technologies. DAP-Lab's immersive dance installations, metakimospheres, began touring in 2015-19. He is author of Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism; Media and Performance: Along the Border; Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture; and Performance, Science & Technology.

Acknowledgements Preface 1. Introduction: theatre, atmospheres, living systems 2. Collaboration: sustainable subjects 3. Really actually windy 4. The openness of the atmosphere: internal and external imagination 5. Trans-sensory hallucination 6. Composition of atmospheres: floating islands 7. Projection environments and animated light 8. The stage and its screen double 9. Kinetic atmospheres: sounding off Bibliography Index