Technologie speelt een steeds actievere rol in ons dagelijks leven, industrie, onderwijs en wetenschap. Deze rol is steeds minder die van een passief gereedschap en steeds meer die van een partner in allerlei activiteiten. Deze ontwikkelingen vestigen de aandacht op technologie als performer en op wat SPRING Festival Fellow Jon McKenzie technoperformance noemt: de performance van technologische ‘agents’. Het SPRING City Symposium stelt de relaties aan de orde tussen deze hedendaagse ontwikkelingen en een geschiedenis van technologische performers in de kunsten. McKenzie (Dean’s Fellow Media & Design, Cornell University) introduceert zijn ideeën over technoperformance. Daarop volgt een presentatie van Pedro Manuel (coördinator van de master Theatre Practices van ArtEZ) over zijn onderzoek naar de geschiedenis van theater zonder menselijke acteurs en spreekt Marian van Dijk (directeur Museum Speelklok) over het project Robots love Music. Beiden stellen op hun eigen wijze de relatie tussen historische en hedendaagse performance van technologie aan de orde, of hoe hedendaagse ontwikkelingen de historische ontwikkelingen op een nieuwe manier relevant maken.
Festival Fellowship
Samen met de opleiding Theaterwetenschap van de Universiteit Utrecht en het Centre for the Humanities organiseert SPRING wederom een Festival Fellowship. Dit jaar is Jon McKenzie uitgenodigd als SPRING Festival Fellow. McKenzie is hoogleraar Engels en behaalde zijn PhD in Performance Studies van NYU. Momenteel doet hij onderzoek naar nieuwe media, performance theory, globalization en burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid. Als onderdeel van het Festival Fellowship geeft McKenzie een bijdrage aan het City Symposium en verzorgt hij een seminar voor (research)master studenten en promovendi. Daarnaast is hij gastspreker tijdens verschillende programmaonderdelen van de SPRING Academy.
Bio Jon McKenzie (EN)
Jon McKenzie is Dean’s Fellow for Media and Design and Visiting Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance and such essays as “Laurie Anderson for Dummies,” “Democracy’s Performance,” and “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need Is Love.” His work has been translated into a half-dozen languages. McKenzie’s StudioLab pedagogy combines seminar, studio, and lab activities to bring scholarship to communities and policy-makers. He also creates experimental videos and gives workshops on performative scholarship and transmedia knowledge. In 2013, HOBO Art Foundation and the New Theatre of Warsaw co-produced Disastronauts, an experimental theatre work with dance and Theremins based on Perform or Else and his video The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r. McKenzie is Centre for the Humanities SPRING Festival Fellow 2018, a fellowship generously sponsored by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.
Jon McKenzie also presents his lecture Thought Action Figures at Parnassos on May 23. Entrance is free, please send an email to: tim@uu.nl. More information.
Bio Marian van Dijk – Robots Love Music (EN)
Starting September 21, Museum Speelklok will be all about musical robots. In the international exhibition Robots love Music, robots of all sorts and from all across the world can be viewed in the museum: ancient robots, metal robots, supersonic robots, life-size robots, closets with hidden robots and many invisible musicians. All of these robots will be playing live music. Musical ‘robots’ have evolved in such a way that they do not only mimic human movements, but compose music themselves and even improvise. Next to the interactive exhibition this autumn, there will be a variety of robot events taking place throughout the city of Utrecht in collaboration with universities, venues and musicians.
Marian van Dijk started as the director of Museum Speelklok in 2015. Van Dijk has a background as amusician, musicologist and museologist and fulfilled diverse executive positions with the cultural sector. Museum Speelklok has been around for over 60 years and is located in the centre of Utrecht city inthe Buurkerk. In 2017 the museum welcomed over 100.000 visitors.
Bio Pedro Manuel – theatre without actors (EN)
Pedro Manuel is a Portuguese theatre maker, theorist and tutor. In 2017 he acquired his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (funded by FCT). In his PhD dissertation he researched ‘theatre without actors’, such as performances with spectators, non-actors, technology or natural phenomena, focusing on how those performances rehearse new relations of co-presence, perception and knowledge between humans and non-humans. You can find his PhD dissertation on https://narcis.nlby searching for ‘theatre without actors’.
As a theatre maker, Manuel is moved by how making-appear entails a make-believe, exploring how we can rehearse expanded modes of acting on stage and in the world. He has shown work in Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Festival Temps D’Images, Festival Escrita na Paisagem, CCB, as well as in Frascati Theater, FLAM, Rozentheater, Roodkapje Rotterdam, and Het Huis Utrecht. In the higher education, Manuel has been lecturing in institutions as IADE and ESTAL (Portugal), ECA-UEM (Mozambique), Utrecht University and ArtEZ (NL). Currently, he is working as Head Coordinator of the ArtEZ Master of Theatre Practices.
More information on his artistic and academic work, you can find here: http://randomassociates.blogspot.nl/and https://artez.academia.edu/PedroManuel