Performance and Technology: An interactive conversation, book launch, and reception

Free for all audiences with advance registration
Reception and gallery tour to follow.

Join us for an evening of art, conversation, and shared inquiry celebrating the publication of The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology. The evening invites audiences to think, sense, and experiment alongside contributing artists and scholars as we consider not only what technology does in performance, but what performance can teach us about living well in a technoscientific lifeworld.

Co-edited by Ohio State’s Norah Zuniga Shaw and the University of Utrecht’s Maaike Bleeker, The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology (2026) begins from the premise that technologies and bodies are co-constitutive and that performance offers vital methods for sensing, understanding, and reshaping those relationships. For this special event, international contributors and guests will take up a pressing question from the perspective of performance and embodied experience: What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? What becomes visible technology is approached through practices of performance with attention to bodies, movement, liveness, presence, relationality, and shared world-making? And where might artists be leading conversations about technology that other fields, institutions, and policymakers have yet to imagine?

The book features chapters by several Ohio State faculty and alumni including Harmony Bench, Bebe Miller, Alex Harlig, Bhumi Patel, Lyndsey Vader.

Co-sponsored by the Wexner Center for the Arts with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), Department of Dance, and the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts. 

BIOS:

Maaike Bleeker is a professor of Theatre, Dance and Performance at Utrecht University. Bleeker’s research focuses on processes of perception and meaning-making in performance, dance, theatre and the arts, as well as in science and in public life. She combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory and cognitive science. She is partner in the project Performative Body Mapping (funded by the Australian Research Council) and project leader of Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed for the Robot Revolution (funded by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, NWO). She served as President of Performance Studies international (PSi), 2011-16. She (co) edited several volumes including the new Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology.

Norah Zuniga Shaw (she/they) is an internationally recognized artist, performer, and creative director best known for her award-winning digital projects for physical ideas, including Synchronous Objects with William Forsythe. She presents frequently on Livable Futures and humane technologies and her most recent works address climate change through transmedia performance rituals and creative community dialogs. She is Professor and Director of dance and technology at the Ohio State University and co-founder of The Motion Lab at ACCAD where she has taught interdisciplinary research, improvisation, and intermedia since 2004. She publishes on topics in dance, ecology, and technology and is co-editor of the new Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology.

Photo credit: Andre M. Zachery in Renegade Performance Group’s Drexciya Redux. Photo by Maria Baranova.