[Commlist] new book: The Machinic City: Media, Performance and Participation

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New book on performance art and contemporary urban living: The Machinic 
City: Media, Performance and Participation, by Marcos P. Dias 
(Manchester University Press, 2021)


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Description: 

As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital 
media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues 
that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban 
living. Dias analyses several performance art interventions from artists 
such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which 
draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces 
for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its 
future.

While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes 
mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential 
of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human 
and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban 
space is examined through its different components - design, city and 
technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging 
potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which 
consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines.

Review:

'Dias' inspiring study makes clear that cities and machines are not 
always smart. His fascinating case studies show how performance art is 
perfectly placed to reveal the unpredictable, uncanny, powerful, playful 
and dysfunctional aspects of both. Drawing on perspectives ranging from 
philosophy and machine aesthetics to posthumanism and urban studies, 
Dias shines new light on our contemporary experience of "the machinic 
city" in bold and remarkable ways.'
Steve Dixon, Professor at LASALLE 
College of the Arts, Singapore, and author of Cybernetic-Existentialism 
and Digital Performance

Table of Contents:
Introduction
1 A Machine To See With
2 Probing the machine of performance art
3 Rethinking machines
4 The aesthetic machine
5 Participation in the machinic city
6 Future machines
Conclusion

Author: 

Marcos P. Dias is Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at 
Dublin City University

Available for purchase online:

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526135780/ 
<https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526135780/>

Hardcover £80/$120 | Also available in E-book format
ISBN: 9781526135780 | 216 pages



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