Machinology

A review by Debra Levine of our book Remain (Ioana Jucan, Rebecca Schneider, and myself) has just been published in the Dance Research journal.

Quoting here the nice ending by Levine that notes especially the exchange between performance studies and media archaeology and ecology:

“This excellent volume offers methodologies in performance studies and media archeology to work with remains and relics as speculative objects and vestigial technologies. The text convincingly argues that their ongoing presence is not merely indexical to a foreclosed moment in the past, but instead, as Schneider writes, “a decay that just won’t quit” (73, quoted from Schneider 2012, 159). Their stubborn presence— the fact that remains are “scriptive things” (a term coined by Robin Bernstein to indicate their passage to and from biobodies; Berbstein 69), as well as interfaces—allows performance studies to play with media archeology and ecology as a performance of exchanges which revise the temporality and the materiality of the remain, and as Parikka notes, can be afforded a “liveliness of multiple afterlives” (43).”

The book is available from University of Minnesota Press as paperback and from Meson Press as Open Access download.