Performance Studies international conference #17 Wednesday 25th May Technology, Memory, Experience 12.50–13.00 15.10–15.20 RESPONSE BY: Nicolás Salazar-Sutil RESPONSE BY: Iris van der Tuin Prelude Panel Nicolas Salazar-Sutil is a Chilean cultural theorist and performance Iris van der Tuin is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht 12.00–17.00 practitioner based in London. He has published mainly on the subject University. She studied Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science, and of technology and performativity, and the interface between symbolic publishes in the field of Feminist (Continental) Philosophy. Working languages (mathematics and computer languages), and performance. on the material turn in the humanities, she is interested in onto-epis- UTRECHT CITY THEATRE, BLAUWE ZAAL, He is also a performance practitioner, and he has developed a number temological questions pertaining to matter, time/generation, and sexual LUCASBOLWERK 24 I of cross-artistic works with his company Configur8. He is a member of difference. the board of directors of PSi. 15.20–16.00 Emerging as an interdisciplinary field of study from the 1950s and 13.00–13.40 Jon McKenzie becoming institutionalized from the 1980’s with, among others, the Alva Noë establishment of departments at NYU and Northwestern, Performance University of California, Berkeley Studies by now has a history that is constitutive of its current identity. Disastronautics, Inc: Toward a Performance Consultancy !is history was the subject of the prelude panel at PSi#15 in Zagreb For decades, Performance Studies scholars have drawn on various (2009), where prominent European and US !eatre and Performance Philosophical Scores methods and perspectives from the sciences – including anthropology, scholars reflected on the transformation of Performance Studies since Choreography is a philosophical practice, and philosophy a choreo- cognitive science, ethology, psychology, and sociology – using them its emergence as a US-based development, and often (but not always) graphic one. To explain this claim, Alva Noë will discuss two poorly to analyze and critique performances. What if, in addition to casting conceived of in opposition to !eatre Studies. !e expansion of understood phenomena -- writing, and practice. Philosophy and ourselves as cultural critics, we also transformed ourselves into cultural Performance Studies into continental Europe has considerably changed choreography are different styles of engagement with writing practice. performance consultants, miming the discourse of management science the performance of Performance Studies, including its relationship to Practice (in general) is fundamental for an understanding of human life. in order to counter the values associated with neoliberal institutions by !eatre Studies. !is question of the relationship between Performance Philosophy and choreography insist on making scores and this insist- working from both outside and within? Studies and the specificities of the culture from which it is performed ence is the ground of their importance. In making this argument, the Why consult? !e Yes Men have developed methods of “identity will be taken up and further explored during the Roundtable organized author draws on the idea that human consciousness is not something correction,” forcing targeted organizations to issue embarrassing public by the International Committee during PSi#17 in Utrecht this year that happens in us, or to us, but that it is something we do. We achieve announcements, building on the Guerrilla Girls’ decades of expos- as well as by PSi#18 next year in Leeds. !is year’s prelude panel will the world’s presence through skillful engagement. He has explored this ing sexism and racism in and beyond the art world. Media theorist continue the discussion started in Zagreb from a different angle, taking idea in his books Action in Perception, Out of Our Heads, and in his forth- Gregory Ulmer’s e-consultancy emerAgency calls on humanists to act as its starting point the ways in which performance and perfor mativity coming, Varieties of Presence. !e ideas he presents here are informed by as “consultants without portfolios,” proposing such projects as a national have become key terms in a wide variety of fields, and how this has his ongoing collaboration with performers and choreographers. monument to those killed in car accidents. And anthropologist George informed new movements of thought. Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at UC Berkeley, where he is Marcus has served on an actual consultant team to the World Trade More than being an analytical and/or artistic approach to also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Organization, hired to study and report on its multinationalist culture. phenomena of various kinds, performance and performativity are perfor- the Center for New Media. For the last decade or so his philosophi- !is presentation will explore performance as a gateway drug for main- mative themselves. !ey have become our system and style, the emer- cal practice has concerned perception and consciousness. His current streaming critico-creative discourse into central nodes of perfor mative gent forms through which things are said and seen. Not only do they research focus is art and human nature. He is the author of Out of Our power, addressing such transvaluable questions as: how to teach the constitute new objects of analysis, for example behavior and acts rather Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology double affirmation in an MBA program? how to queer a war machine? than material objects and texts, but performance and perfor mativity of Consciousness (Hill and Wang/Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2009) and and how to democratize experimental theory? also produce new subjects of knowledge, new conceptions of what Action in Perception (!e MIT Press, 2004). Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English at the University of constitutes knowledge, how things can be known, and what it means to Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses in performance theory, 13.40–13.50 know. !is subject of Performance Studies will be our concern and we new media, and civil disobedience. In addition, he coordinates a major RESPONSE BY: Bojana Cvejic propose to approach this subject from the intersection of science and the initiative there in digital humanities involving new media studies, humanities, that is, from the intersection of fields of research that have studio-based practices, digital learning, and quantitative humani- been considered intrinsically disconnected or even incommensurable. Bojana Cvejic is performance theorist and maker, working in contem- ties research. McKenzie is author of Perform or Else: From Discipline Nowadays, similar movements of thought emerging from within these porary dance and performance. She studied musicology and aesthetics to Performance (Routledge, 2001), and such articles as “Democracy’s very different fields invite new modes of interdisciplinary interaction. Belgrade, and currently writes her PhD at the Centre for Research in Performance,” “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” “High How might such interaction expand and transform what is considered Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Middlesex University Performance Schooling,” “StudioLab UMBRELLA,” and “Abu Ghraib to be the subject of Performance Studies as well as our understanding in London. She teaches dance and performance theory at Utrecht and the Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold.” He is also co-editor of how Performance Studies is performed? University and P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels). of Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which focuses on performance research around the world. 13.50–14.30 Programme BREAK 16.00–16.20 12.00–12.10 RESPONSE BY: Rosi Braidotti OPENING: 14.30–15.10 Maaike Bleeker Iris van der Tuin Michal Kobialka & Rosi Braidotti is University Professor at Utrecht University and founding director of its Centre for the Humanities. She has published on French 12.10–12.50 Performance Studies: Materialism of the Encounter philosophy, feminist and gender theory, European and cultural studies. Brian Rotman Confronted by what happened on November 9, 2009 during the official Her books include Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006) celebrations as well as during those minor performative events com- and Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist !eory of Becoming (Polity Embodied Performance and Mathematics memorating the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall Press, 2002). A second edition of Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and In his lecture, Brian Rotman shall link the domains of mathematics – from the official moments staged by the heads of States to recreat- Difference in Contemporary Feminist !eory will come out in May 2011 and performance through two concepts: gesture, a ‘disciplined mobil- ing the “knocking over” of the Wall, now made out from the 1000 (Columbia University Press). ity of the body’, and diagram, the trace or projection of an embodied individually painted Styrofoam dominoes, and to French President 16.20–17.00 thought – the first, a central mode of human and mammalian interac- Nicholas Sarkozy’s facebook page featuring him “whacking” the wall a tion as well as a crucial element in all forms of embodied performance, few times with an axe on November 9, 1989, even though he did not Discussion with all speakers. the second a semiotic device and conceptual resource permeating science arrive in Berlin