Featuring practice and research demonstrations, talks, round tables, provocations and coffee sessions, Dapper members provided a digital performance Symposium on 12th November 2016, at Watermans Arts Centre, which asked how the field of digital performance has developed over the last decade.

 

The sessions aimed to answer multiple questions including 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 also launched 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

 

The Symposium was supported by De Montfort University and London South Bank University.