LASALLE faculty and students are prominently involved in a large variety of research activities and projects, including publication in peer-reviewed academic journals and books.
Journal and book publications
Defining Heritage and Cultural Preservation through Design: A Framework for Experience Design
The recent attention towards cultural preservation and heritage studies has positioned design to redefine cultural experiences in the contemporary context. Against this backdrop, design is marked by an ability to transform and revitalise cultural practices to change and alter perceptions, generate and disseminate knowledge, and create new value through the curation of experience. A case-study on temple architecture in Tamil Nadu, India presents the tensions posed by globalisation to discuss and explore the development of design tools, evaluation of the design process, and the creation of a design-based framework for intangible culture and heritage. This paper introduces a future mode for designing cultural experiences through community engagement by identifying four key design principles guiding the preservation and sustainability of endangered cultural traditions, practices, and spaces.
Citation:
Chon, Harah. ''Defining Heritage and Cultural Preservation through Design: A Framework for Experience Design.'' Proceedings of IASDR 2021, Hong Kong 12/2021, Springer, 2022.
A Telepresence Stage: Or How to Create Theatre in a Pandemic
This report describes the authors’ research project ‘Telepresence Stage’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) ‘COVID-19 Rapid Response’ scheme. The project aims to develop effective and affordable new approaches to connect performers from their separate homes and place them within virtual sets online where they can rehearse and perform together. The report discusses the history of telematic performance and explains how this research is using some of those established approaches to open up alternative possibilities for theatre and dance companies working in and beyond the current pandemic. To date, the project has shown how a range of telematic chromakey systems can be employed to bring a whole new level of creativity to videoconference-based performance work, freeing the performers’ bodies from the entrapment of Zoom boxes and co-locating them in specially designed 3D environments. Drawing on case studies from some of the project’s eight residencies with professional performance groups, the authors discuss how existing techniques have been adapted for different levels of experience, and how the project has offered new ways of working. Whilst the pandemic is expected to be a time-limited issue, these techniques hold value for performers and creators of theatre and dance well beyond ‘lockdown’.
Citation:
Dixon, Steve, et al. ''A Telepresence Stage: Or How to Create Theatre in a Pandemic.'' International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 18, no. 1, 2022, pp. 48-68, doi: DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2021.2015562.
The Performer and Their Digital Double: A Chameleons Group Manifesto!
The chapter celebrates the histories of radical artistic manifestos and offers a version for the author’s own theatre company, The Chameleons Group (since 1994). The company takes Antonin Artaud’s ideas into multimedia realms, and expands his metaphor of The Theatre and its Double (1938) into new live and virtual performance incarnations. Working across different genres and platforms, from live stage works to CD-ROMs, interactive theatre projects and telematic performances, for over thirty years the Chameleons Group have been exploring Artaud’s notions of the double, cruelty, physical hieroglyphs and the fragmented body. Employing the manifesto form’s obligatory exclamation marks and ‘calls to arms’, it demands that you confront yourself! change your skin! be delirious! don’t care what people think! deliver darkness with light! and reanimate Artaud’s ideas for the digital age!
Citation:
Dixon, Steve. ''The Performer and Their Digital Double: A Chameleons Group Manifesto!.'' Scènes numériques. Anthologie critique: Digital stages. Critical anthology, edited by Izabella Pluta, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022, pp. 291-298, ISBN / ISSN: ISBN-13 : 978-2753583184.
The Twists and Turns of Peripeteia
The piece examines the status of digital performance as a type of peripeteia of contemporary theatre. Using Aristotle’s famous term describing a narrative fork in the road, a sudden plot twist or a fall from grace, it argues that digital technologies have exerted similarly seismic twists and turns in the directions and aesthetics of contemporary theatre productions. Technologies have always been heralded and celebrated, and feared and despised in equal measure, from the Luddites to contemporary digital naysayers, and the same is found to be true for performance practitioners.
Citation:
Dixon, Steve. ''The Twists and Turns of Peripeteia.'' NÉ QUI, NÉ ORA: PERIPEZIE MEDIALI DELLA PERFORMANCE CONTEMPORANEA [Neither Here, Nor Now: Medial Peripeteias of Contemporary Performance], edited by Ester Fuoco, Rome, Ledizioni, 2022, ISBN / ISSN: ISBN: 9788855267502.
