Stephen Barber
Fellow
Author of numerous books on international performance cultures, including three studies of the work of Antonin Artaud (most recently, on the final notebooks: Artaud: Terminal Curses, 2008), and books on the Japanese performer/theorist Tatsumi Hijikata, on the work of Jean Genet, and on the films of the Vienna Action Group’s performances. He has also published many books on urban cultures in relation to performance, film, photography and digital art; his most recent publication (2012) is on the personal archive of the moving-image pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge. The Times newspaper in London called his books “brilliant, profound and provocative,” and The Independent newspaper described him as a “writer of real distinction.” He has held posts at the California Institute of the Arts, Tokyo Keio University, IMEC in Paris, and was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Program in 2006. In 2012/13, he was a Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” During this Fellowship he wrote the book Performance Projections which will be published by Reaktion Books and Chicago University Press later this year. He currently holds a two-year “Gerda Henkel Stiftung” Scholarship. Barber is Professor of Visual Culture at Kingston University in London.
THIS AUTHOR WROTE
Author of numerous books on international performance cultures, including three studies of the work of Antonin Artaud (most recently, on the final notebooks: Artaud: Terminal Curses, 2008), and books on the Japanese performer/theorist Tatsumi Hijikata, on the work of Jean Genet, and on the films of the Vienna Action Group’s performances. He has also published many books on urban cultures in relation to performance, film, photography and digital art; his most recent publication (2012) is on the personal archive of the moving-image pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge. The Times newspaper in London called his books “brilliant, profound and provocative,” and The Independent newspaper described him as a “writer of real distinction.” He has held posts at the California Institute of the Arts, Tokyo Keio University, IMEC in Paris, and was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Program in 2006. In 2012/13, he was a Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” During this Fellowship he wrote the book Performance Projections which will be published by Reaktion Books and Chicago University Press later this year. He currently holds a two-year “Gerda Henkel Stiftung” Scholarship. Barber is Professor of Visual Culture at Kingston University in London.
October 15, 2014
In June 2014, Stephen Barber and Rustom Bharucha met for a conversation on Bharucha's latest book Terror and Performance. In this talk, Bharucha and Barber explored the key notions of the book as well as the process of writing itself. Listen to the entire conversation here.
February 20, 2014
This essay is based on a paper the author presented during the Symposium Dumb Type – The Birth of New Media Dramaturgy at Freie Universität Berlin in April 2013. It focuses on Lovers (1994) – the first moving-image installation work of Teiji Furuhashi, viewed within the framework of the histories of immersive moving-image projection environments involving human figures in performative movement. Alongside Lovers, it examines a film-projection experiment, The Birth, shown at the Expo ’70 in Osaka involving the work of Tatsumi Hijikata. The final part of this essay extends back to 1893 to look at the originating event for all projections of moving-images within specially-designed, enclosed spatial environments: Eadweard Muybridge’s project to create the first-ever space for the projection of moving-images to public audiences, through the construction of his ‘Zoopraxographical Hall.’