This panel featured Katherine Mezur (University of Washington) presenting "New Medium: Ditching the Disciplinary Rules and Founding Tech/Performance" and Aden Evens (Dartmouth College) presenting "Desire and the Mouse." The third scheduled speaker, Lev Manovich (University of California at San Diego), was unable to attend.

Katherine Mezur (University of Washington) and two University of Washington students, Eunsu Kang and Diana Garcia Snyder, who collaborated on an interactive dance performance called "PuPaa" joined us via webcam from Washington to discuss their work. Mezur's presentation focused on the conceptualization of a new media, its presentation, aesthetics, and practices, which explores image play and the interaction between human bodies and technology.

Mezur is interested in looking at how digital art coalesces into transitional space from three perspectives: that of the witness, the choreographer, and the media artist. For her, one of the primary characteristics of technology is its slippery and elusive nature. Attempts at incorporating technology into traditional performances leads to rigidity of stage and screen, forcing bodies and technologies into weird compromises in which human and technology barely acknowledge one another.

The repeatability of media necessitates pushing the borders of the possible: "We need to think big. We need to get rid of forms, sequences, protocol. For a while I thought that engineers should dance and dancers should take a math class. Now I want a visual consciousness that unites."

Her example of a way in which we can experience a new media is the 2008 performance of "PuPaa" (http://kangeunsu.com/pupaa/documentation.htm). In this work, directed by Kang and choreographed by Snyder, the slow movements of the Butoh style of dance combine with the cameras and lights situated on the bodies of the dancers to communicate with the audience in a new way. (Another site: http://dxarts.washington.edu/~eskang/pupaa)

Eunsu Kang described her experience with the project by explaining her background as a media artist interested in the post-human media body. She had previously experimented with mobile sound projection systems, but when she tried them, they did not convey the impression of merging into the human body but rather remained a device that the individual was wearing, rather than a part of him or her.

This was not her experience with "PuPaa." Initially the dancers in "PuPaa" were afraid of moving around with the devices and cords, but then they began to sense it as a part of their body, as augmentation. Later they felt sad when they took off the devices (for example, they would say "See you later!" to their machines) and they gave their equipment names. In addition to incorporating the bodies of the performers, "PuPaa" also involved the audience: At the end of the show, one of the dancers is wearing a camera on her wrist and she points it at the audience, which is then projected onto a screen formed from the skirt of one of the performers.

During the Q&A, a member of the audience asked about the future of this type of performance and about the questions raised by preserving it digitally. Mazur responded by emphasizing that video recording is another kind of performance, but it is not THE performance experienced in the space by performers and audience. Dynamic kinds of recording such as 3D offer possibilities but live bodies are still essential.

Aden Evens (Dartmouth College) explored the nature of human-computer interaction in a different way by focusing on the mouse-based interface and its position in the expression of desire. The mouse is a narrow, restricted interface that mediates between the material and the abstract by translating human desires through a sequence of elementary commands. Although a single click is a complex act that involves hundreds of muscles and computer elements, it comes down to a binary opposition: either the button is pressed or it is not.

The mouse operates on differential mathematics, recording its numbers to the computer 1500 times per second, and excludes facets of touch (namely, it doesn't matter how hard the button is clicked). The materiality of the mouse is coded binary, as though the computer reaches out through it to interact with the human body. Thus the user's body also becomes digitized and oriented towards the interface, translating human desires into a single binary act.

The digital world is not the material world, but a world generated by processes of abstraction in which touch is curtailed because what you are touching does not actually touch you back. The icon thus functions as the complement to the mouse click because it becomes "whatever can be clicked." Even in the simplest case, the icon for a file does not resemble that file; it functions as a handle rather than a signifier. For Evens, this abstract nature is precisely that which makes the computer so powerful.

During the Q&A session, Mazur asked Evens about whether he has considered the emotional connection felt by the user: when she deletes an icon, she has an emotional reaction to her action. She wondered what happens to the user who interacts with the interface?

Evens discussed the potential of Mazur's work to understand how the hybrid form of human and technology changes the way bodies work. Rather than simply working towards a more efficient input device, we should consider what it means and what is actually happening.