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  TimesPeople recommended a blog post:

  Aug 22, 2011

  Performance Art Engages All Five Senses - Room for Debate

  The further that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter take us from the real world, the more we crave for something more tangible.

  
  

  Engaging All Five Senses

  August 18, 2011

  Paul Levinson is the author of "New New Media," and the science fiction novel "The Plot to Save Socrates." He is a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

  Live performance art is more relevant today than ever before. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook do not replace face-to-face experiences as much as augment and extend them to vastly larger audiences.
  

  What's missing from all the mediated communication is the unmediated human body.

  In recent days, the YouTube clip of the "Ocularpation: Wall Street" performance piece has garnered more than a thousand viewers -- likely far more than the number of people who saw it in person.
  In an age in which the Internet gives us all we could ever want in terms of image and sound and other sensory experiences, a little full nudity in the flesh is valuable as a vehicle of shock and, hence, serves as an effective means of social protest in the case of the performance/protest on Wall Street.
  

  Virtual media do not undermine our interest in real-life communication but instead, stoke it. What we lack in all the online communication is the physical body -- that we can reach out and touch, or at least see in full dimension. This makes real contact between people all the more special.
  

  
  

  
  

  • The Lure of Enigmatic Gestures

    Liz Kotz, associate professor of art history
    
    The subtle beauty of a live event has not lost its power.
    
    
    

    • The Internet Is No Substitute

      Clifford Owens, performance artist
      
      

  Performance art, in the broadest sense, has existed since long before the Internet. The human need to express ourselves is vital and irrepressible.