A computer scientist and a performance and new media theorist define and document the emerging field of mixed reality performance.
Working at the cutting edge of live performance, an emerging generation of artists is employing digital technologies to create distinctive forms of interactive, distributed, and often deeply subjective theatrical performance. The work of these artists is not only fundamentally transforming the experience of theater, it is also reshaping the nature of human interaction with computers. In this book, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi offer a new theoretical framework for understanding these experiences―which they term mixed reality performances―and document a series of landmark performances and installations that mix the real and the virtual, live performance and interactivity. 
Benford and Giannachi draw on a number of works that have been developed at the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory, describing collaborations with artists (most notably the group Blast Theory) that have gradually evolved a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to combining practice with research. They offer detailed and extended accounts of these works from different perspectives, including interviews with the artists and Mixed Reality Laboratory researchers. The authors develop an overarching theory to guide the study and design of mixed reality performances based on the approach of interleaved trajectories through hybrid structures of space, time, interfaces, and roles. Combinations of canonical, participant, and historic trajectories show how such performances establish complex configurations of real and virtual, local and global, factual and fictional, and personal and social.

Performing Mixed Reality

Computers & Technology

Benford, Steve

Giannachi, Gabriella

Games & Strategy Guides

The MIT Press

How the archive evolved to include new technologies, practices, and media, and how it became the apparatus through which we map the everyday.
In Archive Everything, Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries. 
Archives today offer a multiplicity of viewing platforms to replay the past, capture the present, and map our presence. Giannachi uses archaeological practices to explore all the layers of the archive, analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution project, a digital archive of feminist artists. She considers the archive as a memory laboratory, with case studies that include visitors' encounters with archival materials in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She discusses the importance of participatory archiving, examining the “multimedia roadshow” Digital Diaspora Family Reunion as an example. She explores the use of the archive in works that express the relationship between ourselves and our environment, citing Andy Warhol and Ant Farm, among others. And she looks at the transmission of the archive through the body in performance, bioart, and database artworks, closing with a detailed analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Infinity Engine.

Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

A computer scientist and a performance and new media theorist define and document the emerging field of mixed reality performance. Working at the cutting edge of live performance, an emerging generation of artists is employing digital technologies to create distinctive forms of interactive, distributed, and often deeply subjective theatrical performance. The work of these artists is not only fundamentally transforming the experience of theater, it is also reshaping the nature of human interaction with computers. In this book, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi offer a new theoretical framework for understanding these experiences--which they term mixed reality performances--and document a series of landmark performances and installations that mix the real and the virtual, live performance and interactivity. Benford and Giannachi draw on a number of works that have been developed at the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory, describing collaborations with artists (most notably the group Blast Theory) that have gradually evolved a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to combining practice with research. They offer detailed and extended accounts of these works from different perspectives, including interviews with the artists and Mixed Reality Laboratory researchers. The authors develop an overarching theory to guide the study and design of mixed reality performances based on the approach of interleaved trajectories through hybrid structures of space, time, interfaces, and roles. Combinations of canonical, participant, and historic trajectories show how such performances establish complex configurations of real and virtual, local and global, factual and fictional, and personal and social.

MIT Press]

Virtual Theatres: An Introduction

The first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre, performance and digital arts, Virtual Theatres presents the theatre of the twenty-first century in which everything - even the viewer - can be simulated. In this fascinating volume, Gabriella Giannachi analyzes the aesthetic concerns of current computer-arts practices through discussion of a variety of artists and performers including: * blast Theory* Merce Cunningham* Eduardo Kac* forced entertainment* Lynn Hershman* Jodi Orlan* Guillermo Gómez-Peña* Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca* Jeffrey Shaw* Stelarc. Virtual Theatres not only allows for a reinterpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice, but also demonstrates how 'virtuality' has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

Humor & Entertainment

Routledge

The first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre, performance and digital arts, Virtual Theatres presents the theatre of the twenty-first century in which everything - even the viewer - can be simulated. In this fascinating volume, Gabriella Giannachi analyzes the aesthetic concerns of current computer-arts practices through discussion of a variety of artists and performers including: * blast Theory * Merce Cunningham * Eduardo Kac * forced entertainment * Lynn Hershman * Jodi Orlan * Guillermo Gómez-Peña * Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca * Jeffrey Shaw * Stelarc. Virtual Theatres not only allows for a reinterpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice, but also demonstrates how 'virtuality' has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

The first book in the field to explore the links between theories of globalization and surveillance, bipower and biopolitics, performance and theatre, computer arts and politics, "The Politics of New Media Theatre" is an investigation into the political role played by the new media theatre. Gabriella Giannachi explores how new media arts constitute themselves as a radical political movement, and presents an analysis of both the role of virtuality in radical performance and politics in virtual and mixed reality practices. This outstanding new work offers an analysis of leading political, philosophical and artistic texts and artworks, and represents a milestone for anyone interested in new technologies, theatre and politics.

The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Performing Arts

The first book in the field to explore the links between theories of globalization and surveillance, bipower and biopolitics, performance and theatre, computer arts and politics, "The Politics of New Media Theatre" is an investigation into the political role played by the new media theatre. Gabriella Giannachi explores how new media arts constitute themselves as a radical political movement, and presents an analysis of both the role of virtuality in radical performance and politics in virtual and mixed reality practices. This outstanding new work offers an analysis of leading political, philosophical and artistic texts and artworks, and represents a milestone for anyone interested in new technologies, theatre and politics.

The Politics of New Media Theatre (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Performing Presence: Between the live and the simulated (Theatre: Theory – Practice – Performance)

Performing presence: Between the live and the simulated proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media, has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence. Addressing new media art and performance, multi-media theatre, video installation, mixed reality environments and locative arts, the book presents case studies of work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul Sermon, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, The Builders Association and Blast Theory, as well as analyses of a series of related experiments created for CAVE, an immersive virtual reality environment. Performing presence combines extensive analysis, and extracts from interviews with the artists, as well as the documentation of elements of work and working processes, in order to provide specific insight into these engagements with contemporary practices and concepts presence. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance, contemporary art, media, new media and technology.

Kaye, Nick

Manchester University Press

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of the Italian theatrical post-avant-garde marked a watershed in the development of experimental performance. In its vital mix of aesthetic experimentalism and philosophical and political engagement, the work of directors such as Federico Tiezzi, Mario Martone, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and Romeo Castellucci confronted the ubiquitous influence of North American art, performance, and popular culture, while challenging and transforming the European the-atrical avant-garde. This book provides the first full-length English-language study of the emergence and development of this work, its theoretical underpinning, and its impact on contemporary performance theory and practice. In detailed and illustrated analyses of performances by key companies including Magazzini Criminali, Nobili di Rosa/Falso Movimento, Gaia Scienza/Compagnia Teatrale di Barberio Corsetti, and Societas Raffaello Sanzio, this book sets out the post-avant-garde's highly rigorous engagement with concepts of the real, contemporary urban experience, the nature of mass media, and visual and performance art. The book concludes with an exploration of performance by a new generation of companies who have extended this post-avant-garde practice in performances engaging with the aesthetics of theatre, film and new technologies, including Motus, Masque, Teatrino Clandestino, Fanny and Alexander and Egumteatro. Contents: Experimental performance-European theatre-Post-avant-garde-Italian experimental performance-Theatre and performance art-Theatre and dance-Multimedia theatre-Theatre and new media-Federico Tiezzi: Carrozzone/Magazzini Criminali-Mario Martone: Nobili di Rosa/FalsoMovimento-Giorgio Barberio Corsetti: Gaia Scienza/Compagnia Teatrale di Barberio Corsetti-Romeo Castellucci: Societas Raffaello Sanzio-Contemporary experimental theatre.

Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Experimental Performance After 1970 (Stage and Screen Studies,) (English and Spanish Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Peter Lang Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Giannachi, Gabriella. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Giannachi, Gabriella

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Giannachi, Gabriella. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Performing Mixed Reality

Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday

Performing Mixed Reality

Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday

Virtual Theatres: An Introduction

Virtual Theatres: An Introduction

The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

The Politics of New Media Theatre (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Performing Presence: Between the live and the simulated (Theatre: Theory – Practice – Performance)

Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Experimental Performance After 1970 (Stage and Screen Studies,) (English and Spanish Edition)