Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) was a drug-fueled rock concert-cum-multimedia art event where layers of mediation mixed with immediate experience: The Velvet Underground performed their innovative music in front of films of themselves performing, Factory Superstars danced and performed poetry, various Warhol films projected on the walls, flashing lights flickered on mirrored surfaces, and a crowd of spectators – both famous and unknown – packed in to see and be seen, to dance and trip into the early hours of the morning. The experience of the EPI was a potent combination of alienation, mediation, and commercialization. The EPI was a promotional vehicle for Warhol, Warhol's Factory crew, and the Velvet Underground, but is also a complex example of spectacle that has been under-analyzed in recent scholarship. The EPI's unabashed emphasis on marketing, packaging, consumer goods, and empty celebrity are all manifestations of fears of late capitalist excess, but beneath the veneer of vapidity was an undercurrent of counterculture political activism and social awareness. Original contributions include cultural analysis, interpretation of contemporary reviews and reports, examination of the event's lack of art historical presence, and incorporation of music scholarship into the Warhol historical canon.

jn4.gesture is an interactive multimedia composition for dancer and computer designed to extend the possibilities of artistic expression through the use of contemporary technology. The software produces the audiovisual materials, which are controlled by the movement of the dancer on a custom rug sensor. The software that produces the graphic and sonic material is created using a modular design. During run-time, the software's modules are directed by a scripting language developed to control and adjust the audiovisual production through time. The visual material provides the only illumination of the performer, and the projections follow the performer's movements. The human form is isolated in darkness and it remains the focal point in the visual environment. These same movements are used to create the sonic material and control the diffusion of sound in an eight channel sound system. The video recording of the performance was made on April 22, 2002. The work was produced in a specialized performance space using two computer projectors and a state of the art sound system. Arleen Sugano designed the costumes, choreographed and performed the composition in the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theatre (MEIT) at the University of North Texas. The paper focuses on the design of the program that controls the production of the audiovisual environment. This is achieved with a discussion of background issues associated with gesture capture. A brief discussion of human-computer interface and its relationship with the arts provides an overview to the software design and mapping scenarios used to create the composition. The design of the score, a graphical user interface, is discussed as the element that synchronizes the media creation in "scenes" of the composition. This score delivers a hybrid script to the modules that controls the production of audiovisual elements. Particular modules are discussed and related to sensor mapping routines that give multiple mapping control to computer function enabling a single gesture o have multiple outcomes.

Barbara Clausen thinks about the relationship between experience and knowledge in curating performance art. She will in particular explain her curatorial work on Babette Mangolte''s first international solo exhibition which took place at the VOX center for contemporary art in Montreal in 2013. This exhibition and film retrospective showcased Mangolte''s various practices and modes of production, as one of the key chroniclers of 1970s performance in dance, visual arts and theater, ranging from early archival works to new site specific multi-media installations. Clausen will consider the complexity of Mangolte''s practices in light of the current processes of change that are taking hold in the visual politics of performance arts’ past and present.

In Part I of this thesis, I examine the use of Latin American rituals, ceremonies, and traditional folklore as conceptual and compositional material; studying and re-contextualizing concepts, cultures, and ideologies, and introducing them to foreign audiences. I explore issues such as laptop improvisation, interaction with other performance forces, and the utilization of the social elements of non-western celebrations, as explored in Clestrinye, a work for live and fixed electronics, mixed ensemble, dancers, and painters.

The homes we grow up in have a great impact on the homes we create as adults. Many of the traditions I saw in my childhood home were expressions of love within our family. These everyday traditions helped not only to build bonds within my nuclear family, but also with the chosen family I have formed as an adult. Repeating these traditions, or at least my best memory of them, has helped me in building my own home now. The ways I interact with my friends often reflects those same traditions I learned from home. I brought a few of these traditions to the gallery for my show, making the space an extension of my home and the traditions shared there.

Karen Finley's The Constant State of Desire merits attention because it acknowledges modern language's inability to represent the suffering of victims and creates awareness of our personal involvement in constructing gendered identities. Finley expresses her abhorrence of the desire for power and perfection by asserting that power is secured in American culture through physical and economic domination. In addition, the pursuit of perfection is engrained in one's psyche through media images and habituated behaviors. Finley does not offer a new language through which to communicate suffering, but she draws the reader's attention to the inadequacies of psychological and cultural rhetoric, thus engaging in an important step of language creation. Finley's art makes use of dominant and nondominant languages combined with body language to illustrate that neither are adequate for representing marginalized bodies of postmodern culture.

This thesis is an examination of contemporary artist Mariko Mori's use of fashion in her work from 1993 to 2001. Contained within her sartorial phrasing is an involved relationship with the body, female and Japanese, as it exists within technological modernity. Tumult characterizes Mori's body as she images it early on in her career. This highly alienating space in which she positions herself gradually transitions to a space of respite for the performative body of another actor by 2001's Wave UFO. Wave UFO creates a mediated space for healing the modern body plagued with isolation through transcendence provided by technological means. Minimalist fashion, as a kind of plastic mechanization of corporeal experience, helps to accomplish this healing. Mori's Wave UFO attendant costumes present minimalist fashion as a location for reconciling spiritual identity in a postmodern age. The flat-panel costumes have the effect of disfiguring the bodies of the attendants into amorphous plasticized shells (much like the backdrop of the Wave UFO) and mechanizing the movements of the wearer. The sleek technological sensibility of the costumes, in conjunction with the stark sterility of the immersive Wave UFO interior, are the culminating expression of the ambivalent liminality Mori's body takes from 1993-1999. This is a body that floats between absence and presence, self and other. This thesis begins with a survey of Mori's 1990s work, including her 1994 self-portrait series that launched the artist into international recognition. The 1993-94 self-portraits present a playful mimicry and a self-aware exploration of regional dress as it is found on the streets of Tokyo. By the end of the decade the play shifts to minimalist self-denial that achieves a transcendence of the imaged body once grounded in the urban self-portraits. After exploring necessary and appropriate contexts of Japanese fashion and other cultural contexts, the thesis culminates in an extended analysis of Mori's 2001 Wave UFO installation. Mori's suggestion that technology can achieve transcendence of the body furthers the theorization that minimalist fashion overcomes the physical and ideological boundaries of human existence in a modern world.

Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) was a Juilliard-trained cellist whose life and work made an indelible mark on the development of the American avant-garde. In her career, Moorman acted as a performer, collaborator, composer, administrator and muse. She solely founded the inaugural New York Avant Garde Festival, and subsequently directed fifteen of these festivals between 1963 and 1980, the feat for which she is most widely acknowledged today. Yet, her revolutionary performance practice, which blurred the lines between her life, her body, and her work, and brought into focus the dynamics of corporeality, the feminine body, female nudity and sexuality, and gendered politics within the contexts of musical performance, has so far escaped serious consideration in the written histories of the American avant-garde. This dissertation describes the nature of Moorman's practice as one that evolved to become inherently and irrevocably embodied, explores how this approach fell at odds with the pervasive avant-garde philosophies of music, and illustrates how her work troubles even a feminist musicological analysis. Further, through a contemporary critique of Moorman's oeuvre which centralizes the social, cultural, and political implications of her body in performance as integral to the work, this project offers a retrospective visibility to the artist which allows for a reframing of her practice as foundational to the aesthetic development of the postwar musical avant-garde. By way of these efforts, Moorman's legacy is presented as one that is both historically significant and vital to current and future musicological discourse.

Incorporating traditional craft mediums of crochet and embroidery, I use digital technology to experiment with wording to graphically represent my abuse trauma. Due to the severity of the subject matter and the work ethic I employ in my art practice, using my hands and being completely involved is a form of masochistic pleasure. My process takes on a Sisyphean approach of penance for the sins of others in my work. During my studio practice, my process reaches a meditative state where my mind is clear and free of the burden. Once I've completed a panel of trauma, the burden is transported into the art and a state of enlightenment is achieved. I began this program taking an analysis from an external perspective, gradually shifting my focus of artistic practice to my internal struggles with memory and repressed abuse trauma. Since I have selfishly focused on my personal tragedies for inspiration for the past three years, my work can now address a more universal subject matter in the future

No description available.