Stephen Di Benedetto

Provoking Attendant Response: Performance Design and the shaping of human experience

Panel Abstract: A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (an international, nonprofit association of scholars and creative artists dedicated to discovering and articulating the aesthetic, cultural, ethical, and political forms and significance of the contemporary arts) would like to include PSI in our discussions by sponsoring this panel. Public art has become a significant movement today constructing intermedial zones between separated cultures, genres, and singularity. The shift into the public sphere has created an interaction between artistic fields that opens up new possibilities for multifaceted discussions between literature, film, architecture, and performance. We would like to investigate notions of the audience (live or virtual) as public from the perspective of film, music, performance, visual art and cognition. What are the ways in which our differing ways of theorizing the public affect the composition and form of art objects/ events that fuse multiple traditions to go beyond genre to affect audiences? Our papers variously explore: How would we describe a dialogic interface between audience, work, and text and as an example of participatory public art? What are the difference between the sanctioned public viewing (such as the carefully calculated performances during the 60th anniversary of the PRC) and the illegal nondisclosed non happenings (such as the Tiannenmen Square Protests)? What are the differences in experiencing the same opera live or mediated by the screen? Can live stimulations create a shared experience across divergent cultures? What strategies do our differing approaches employ to investigate the arts of the present?