| Description | The Digital Performance Archive is a largely 'artifical' mixed-media collection, brought together between 1999 and 2000 to 'archive' emergent digital performance activities and practices of the time, as part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanites Research Board (AHRB). The collection contains the project administration papers, the collected printed materials - both publicity/promotional ephemera for events and performances, texts by live artists and performance companies, together with published and unpublished papers by academics and researchers - video documentation of live performances (and digitised copies of the same), CD Roms, webpages from the project website and papers connected to final publication. Digitised copies of the videos in the collection are available to view on site at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. |
| AdminHistory | The Digital Performance Archive was a project funded by the Arts and Humanites Research Board (AHRB) to collect and 'archive' documentation from a wide range of artists working with live performance and emerging digital technologies. According to the administrative documentation, the project ran officially between 01/01/99 and 31/05/02. An email (DPA/1/2/6) sent out widely to the digital arts and academic communities at the start of 1999 announced its aims as a 'joint project by Nottingham Trent and Salford Universities (UK) to undertake a major collection and analysis of digital performance events and developments throughout 1999. The project will also trace and archive antecedents from the yeras 1990 - 1998, thereby recording a permanent history of digital performance in the last decade of the twentieth century'. The project established a website (no longer available online) that listed the majority of the items collected, along with texts and images of related material. In 2007 MIT published the book, 'Digital Performance: A History of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation by Steve Dixon with contributions from Barry Smith', based on the research and examples collected over the course of the Digital Performance Archive project. |