The earlier decade has obvious a very excessive interval of experimentation with desktop know-how in the acting arts. electronic media has been more and more integrated into stay theater and dance, and new sorts of interactive functionality have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the internet. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon lines the evolution of those practices, provides certain bills of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, creative, and technological contexts of this way of latest media artwork. Dixon unearths precursors to trendy electronic performances in earlier varieties of theatrical expertise that variety from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the full artwork), and attracts parallels among modern paintings and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the 20 th century. For a theoretical point of view on electronic functionality, Dixon attracts at the paintings of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To record and examine modern electronic functionality perform, Dixon considers adjustments within the illustration of the physique, area, and time. He considers digital our bodies, avatars, and electronic doubles, in addition to performances by way of artists together with Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast concept, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel techniques to making theatrical spectacle, together with digital fact and robotic functionality paintings, telematic performances during which distant destinations are associated in genuine time, Webcams, and on-line drama groups, and considers the "extratemporal" phantasm created via a few technological theater works. ultimately, he defines different types of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon demanding situations dominant theoretical methods to electronic functionality -- together with what he calls postmodernism's denial of the hot -- and provides a sequence of boldly unique arguments of their place.