Popular Entertainment, Science & Technology

Technomorphic clowning as enhancement of human autonomy? Comic performance and robotics? Variety and science?

Popular entertainment has always been intertwined with the cutting edge of technology and engineering. In popular entertainment spaces – including circuses, vaudeville, music halls, but also world’s fairs and even small backyard variety shows – technical contrivers, stage engineers and performers have contributed to negotiations about the future of their art via technological innovations, continuously (re)inventing and improving props and performance equipment. Around 1900, for example, internationally touring (American) circuses and circuses performing in designated buildings in European metropoles not only used and showcased brand-new transport technologies (such as automobiles), but also offered exciting new opportunities for experiencing reality through displays of mobility, speed and electrifying visual turmoil.

Across our various projects, we are interested in how different popular stages and technologies, as well as popular media, convey ideas and meanings of science and technology. For example, what can animated film tell us about our ideas of the technological future that non-animated films cannot? To what extent does the circus embody technological progress? What can comic (book) robots tell us about the power of technology to drive novel performance styles?

Discover humorous historical human-machine performances in our recent publication on performing androids and so-called “Moto Phoso” performances, and the 2023 CPAS student project “Enacting Innovation” by Sarah Barnes.

The playful and ludicrous use of technological inventions in disparate but interconnected entertainment genres has contributed to the construction of a modern aesthetics with stunningly humorous – clownesque – momentum! Get in touch with Anna-Sophie if you want to find out more and get involved!

Through their interactive art installations Aparna Rao and Søren Pors – the Bangalore-based art duo Pors & Rao – explore how life-suggesting animatronics can evoke the perception of complex inner states in inanimate objects. In this interview, Aparna Rao discusses her approach to technology, the nature of her many collaborations with technologists and her interest in combining high-tech and high-art.

In this interview circus artist Martin Riedel and technology artist and programmer UliK discuss their productive collaborative work at the intersection of performance art and technology. They describe not only how their joint work in and out of the circus ring influences their understanding of art and technologies, but also what kind of new knowledge results from it.

*Glitzern & Denken* is the Science Variety Show hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the natural history museum in Germany’s capital. In this conversation, Ines Theileis and David Ziegler – the show’s artistic director and project lead – discuss the vision and goal of the Science Variety, and the power of the variety format for bringing art and science together.

Photos by Jürgen Bürgin