Dissertation outline

This is part of the essay plan I'm writting for my MA.

This essay will investigate the manner in which multidisciplinary performance facilitates collaboration between art forms. It will concentrate on the use of dance, music, video and network technologies within multidisciplinary art. It will examine and critique the frameworks and facilitation used by artists and choreographers in creating multidisciplinary works and set these against my current work with networked collaboration. It will analyse how these frameworks function and how they can be generated and adapted by the singular art forms that they are made up of. It will subsequently examine how they are presented to the audience.

The essay will:

• Highlight aspects of these frameworks that both facilitate and hinder multidisciplinary work. These issues will also be discussed through examination of other, specific practices in adjacent fields.

• Analyse my own practice within the context of this work, identifying the aspects of my work that address the issues highlighted.

• My current work has led to the creation of networked environment where dancers, musicians, artists and data streams can all work together over a local or global network. The following is an except from my notes on a workshop I did at the Ikon gallery:

Collaborative network

Our Gridded technology allows for collaborative performance. The traditional separation and resulting lack of synchronisation between disciplines during performance is abandoned in favour of a modular system, which promotes learning, exploration and experimentation that increases the indeterminacy in the creation and reading of the work.

The Gridded distribution of artists and technical know-how does not, as may be expected, decrease the strength of relationship between disciplines, but rather makes possible a more integrated performance through interdisciplinary communication. The notion of content fusion is a result of the inclusive methodology employed.

Since usability has been a priority in the conception of the system, performers (dancers, VJs and electronic musicians in this case) are liberated from the burden of poor software interfaces and are instead free to concentrate on interpersonal communications and the reactions of other performers.

I will examine several philosophical concepts where relevant. The work of Deleuze & Guarttari on the Rhizome and its relevance particularity to technological network systems. It will also touch on both Brecht and Wagner’s ideas relative to inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary practice.

Through studying community driven web 2.0 applications, such as Flickr, Bluedot and YouTube it will examine future possibilities for multidisciplinary works. I can investigate and construct my own collaborative art web 2.0 application based on my current network design.