ABSTRACT
Performing and creating are practically indivisible activities for the digital musician. There is a historical basis for this. ‘Performance Art’, which has its own origins in the Happenings of the 1960s, successfully removed the work of art from an object in a gallery to an action in a particular space at a particular time. Much early experimentation with music technology was allied to similar experiments with performance ritual. Nowadays, performance need not even involve human performers. An installation can be performative, and an artifi cial intelligence may also perform. Locations may be physical or virtual, and time may not be fi xed. Certain types of movies may be interactively performed rather than just ‘shown’, and gaming too offers performance opportunities. A good example is ‘machinima’ (machine cinema), in which people use game platforms to create original theatre featuring the avatars, or virtual characters, and settings of a computer game, without adherence to the goals of the game itself. Once again, the creator, the performer and the audience constantly shift roles.
