The chapter offers a critical examination of interdisciplinary collaborations in performance making to shed light on how they are instrumental both for artistic innovation and for fostering knowledge production within and across disciplines. At the same time, being situated at the confluence of different fields of practice and research dwelling on different epistemologies and approaches, interdisciplinary collaborations do more than configure new ways of making art: they contribute to synergies between arts and technology fields, marking places of cross-fertilisation, blurring boundaries and influencing their mutual evolution. These interdisciplinary work spaces present a tremendous potential for innovative art making, as they bring together deep knowledge of the arts and artistic sensibility with a sound understanding of technology languages and possibilities. Some of the most innovative creative practices continue to come from interdisciplinary collaborations between performance artists, choreographers, computer scientists, and media artists. Artists including choreographers have used digital technologies as choreographic tools, shared working spaces, experimental playgrounds, or have embraced computing languages more broadly to approach their art making, envisaging their artistic work in computational and algorithmic terms. Starting from the second half of the twentieth century, when some of the first experiments using computers in performance making were initiated, digital technologies have been employed in different ways to assist, enhance, or completely re-configure the artistic creative process. This chapter explores the convergence between performance-based cultural heritage and new technologies, with a focus on interdisciplinary collaborations in creation and making processes. Performance has a multidisciplinary appeal, both as an invitation to study performative acts through the lens of disciplines ranging from history to anthropology, and reversely, lending its own perspectives and paradigms to shed light on processes and phenomena in different fields of study (Madison and Hamera 2005). As Dwight Conquergood argues, “(p)erformance studies is uniquely suited for the challenge of braiding together disparate and stratified ways of knowing” (Conquergood 2002: 152). Performance as cultural practice and performance studies have always been positioned in complex interrelationships with other disciplines.
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Together, interdisciplinary artscapes and interdisciplinary knowledgescapes contribute to opening up and pushing the boundaries of thinking and art making, reconsidering taken for granted assumptions and coming up with radically new art forms. These spaces offer a fertile ground for creative initiatives and knowledge advancement drawing on integrated perspectives, theories, methodologies and approaches from arts and technology fields. Through a close analysis of interdisciplinary undertakings in making digital performance, we show how creative work in mixed teams of performance artists, researchers and practitioners on the one hand, and researchers from technology and design-focused disciplines on the other, is instrumental to the development of what we call ‘interdisciplinary artscapes’ and ‘interdisciplinary knowledgescapes’. At the same time, being situated at the confluence of different fields of practice and research dwelling on diverse epistemologies and approaches, interdisciplinary collaborations do more than configure new ways of making art: they contribute to synergies between arts and technology fields, marking places of cross-fertilisation, blurring boundaries and influencing their evolution.