The machinic city

This book provides an original perspective on the role of performance art towards reflecting on contemporary urban life, with analyses in detail key projects of digitally meditated performance art in urban space from renowned artists. 

The machinic city reveals the potential of performance art to create spaces for reflection and deliberation on contemporary urban living and to speculate on the future of cities. As social and spatial interactions in the city become increasingly mediated by machines, performance art can help us reflect on the new modes of subjectivity that emerge as human and machine agency become intermingled and digital media permeates the urban fabric. 

Several case studies of urban art interventions are analysed and discussed as examples of the potential of the aesthetic machine of performance art, as it assembles with media, Capitalist, human and urban machines. These case studies reveal the importance of acknowledging dissensus as a constitutive factor of urban life and as a means of countering machinist determinism in present and future conceptualisations of city life.