Directed by David Stout in collaboration with the Intermedia Art Class
Comprised of graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines of visual art, music, film, and dance, the Intermedia Performance Art class explores new collaborative structures utilizing an adventurous mix of old and new media possibilities. Contact ++ was created in a short timespan of 10 weeks. The class participants were asked to consider the dialectic between the physical body and the increasingly complex networks that envelop us. In this sense the term "network" can describe electronic communications and ambient computing structures, as well as our connectivity to everything from transportation to food distribution to the inner workings of our own minds and bodies. This open theme resulted in diverse approaches to a number of subtopics, including ubiquitous surveillance, social networks, audio-visual feedback structures, digital representation, externalized memory and a variety of methods juxtaposing the virtual to the physical. The evening's works were presented in a hybrid fashion, merging elements of music, theatre, installation art, and network media performance into a shifting array of events that happened at various locations within the space. There were few chairs and no one spot offered a perfect view. The audience was free to move about the space and would find the viewing area to be quite elastic, expanding at times and contracting into tight quarters at others. We were particularly happy to have three graduate choreographers from TWU join the class this semester and look forward to more collaboration between UNT and TWU in the future.