Reimagining Lecture Performance in the Age of Digital Art
摘要
Lecture performance has been a well-embraced form of art since the 1960s by many celebrated artists, including John Cage, Robert Morris, and more recently Hito Steyerl, Walid Raad, and Guerrilla Girls to name just a few. The form connects pedagogy, if not pseudo-pedagogy or anti-pedagogy, with performances that involve the artist’s body, text, stage setting, performative gesture, and the ever-changing technology that weaves all these together. This paper explores the transformative impact of technology on lecture performance as a form of contemporary art and aims to elucidate the ways in which technology has altered the creation, presentation, and reception of lecture performance. Evolving from the early presentation with analogue projected slides to the elaborated usage of Microsoft PowerPoint and other multimedia elements, technological advancement has pushed forward the possibility of what and how the messages could be told to the audience. Artists have also demonstrated their sophisticated articulation of the latest technology of the time, for example, voice recognition software, Google Earth, machine learning, and AR. The spectatorship of lecture performances is no longer bounded by their temporal and geographical condition because video documentation or even live streaming, which has been popularized during the COVID-19, has helped archiving and dissemination of the media for future access. The paper examines the author’s own experience in the making of lecture performance from two perspectives: the view of an artist in the context of implementing technology; and the academic role as an educator in the teaching and learning of lecture performance with the assistance of technology.