View the Twitter Feed for #madtheory2 here
View more photographic documentation here
View the full Video Program here
View other video documentation here
View Paul Sloan’s “Q.Q” text, which captures questions of the day, here
View the At-A-Glance Schedule here
View the full color Program Booklet here
View Ian Deleon’s lecture performance “Bleeding to Life” as a photo essay here
Engage with Panoply Performance Laboratory’s interactive online project “Embarrassed of the Whole #7” here
View an online version of Nicki Werner’s presentation, #ShutItDown: Black Lives Matter, higher education, and performance art as a lens,” here
MAD THEORY 2 was an exciting and dynamic art-theory-action event at the intersection of performance and philosophy. The symposium featured diverse approaches to theory and practice: experimental lectures, live performances, digital media, interactive installations, and participatory workshops. Participants were invited to investigate conversation as performance, relational power dynamics, social sculpture, and navigation of public space in everyday life. We danced like no one is watching, recorded the sound of our own breaths, took part in a micro-nomadic artist residency, and cultivated our own style of disruptive spect-actor-ship.
The day was action-packed with live presentations and participatory workshops, concurrent interactive installations, and a video program. With mediums ranging from sound, dance, and film to magnetic data tape, neon, and light, the programming featured experimental happenings such as collaboratively produced scripts and scores, opera of operations, and real-time poetic/musical composition; physical theatre, devised theatre, and toy theatre; and teleconferencing, Skype performance, and smartphone-based audience participation.
Activating the politics of aesthetics, projects explored urgent issues such as #BlackLivesMatter and activist performance art, incarceration and embodied abolitionist theory, and “I Can’t Breathe” and the sonic politics of breath. From queer reproduction and feminist satire to human/machine interface and cyborg consciousness; from persona, myth, and fiction to documentation, remix, and reappropriation; and from geopolitics, surveillance, and liminality to cultural and linguistic (mis)translation and (mis)communication, the programming showcased an exhilarating range of critical approaches, perspectives, and methods at the interface of theory and practice.
View more photos here
