Like it or not, we live in the ‘posthuman age’. While the glut of information and digital technologies are often viewed through a dystopic lens, Birringer exalts the ‘contemporary technosphere’ (p. xii), where he sees a new aesthetic arising from the merging of art and science. He finds that the combination of human and digital necessitates the creation of ‘a critical context for analyzing hybrid systems of organization’ (p. xvi). While he does not quite get there, he does provide a worthy introduction to a ‘new poetics’ of emergent behaviour comprising moving bodies, wearable computer items, gaming processes, digital landscapes and changing technology.

Focused primarily on contemporary dance, this study is grounded in the previous generation's exploration of available technologies: Cage and Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver. Despite this focus some of the most potent examples are drawn from postdramatic theatre through the work of Robert Wilson and the Wooster Group, where the convergence of dance, theatre, performance, happening, installation and technology provides the most useful synthesis. The work of second-generation interactive artists clearly foreshadows the development of bio-artists working at the nexus of biology, neurology, biochemistry, kinesthetics and aesthetics, as it is here where ‘performance departs from constructed linearity and becomes submerged in generative, emergent, adaptive processes’ (p. 327).

While computers cannot emotionally or kinesthetically respond like humans (at least not yet) they can respond via algorithms and feedback loops. It is this type of interactivity where ‘artists are working in a field of constant (dis)integration, and continuous re-constellation’ (p. 177), where the ‘principle of digital variability’ (p. 291) is one of the few constants central to this study. A compendium of practical and theoretical examples, interviews, book reviews and conference descriptions, this text reads, at times, like a dense catalogue of performance activity. Instead of carving an analytical pathway, Birringer presents snapshots of theory (notably Barthes, Brecht, Benjamin, and Paul ‘DJ Spooky’ Miller) interspersed with performance descriptions – fragments that cohere, to employ a gaming image, like the textual equivalent of a Katamari, that popular video game where a rolling, sticky ball grows in size and scale, as the objects the user can pick up also get larger and larger. Rather than overwhelm, this listing suggests that hybridity is all around us, constantly changing the face, body and understanding of humanity. Birringer does not articulate this new poetics so much as foretell its coming as the prophet of ‘the underlying ecology of the interrelations between performance and computer science/engineering’ (p. 290), where artists and scientists, computer programmers and biologists work to develop new technologies, new terminologies, new methodologies and a new aesthetics.