Jon McKenzie – författare

Perform Design Act is a groundbreaking reflection on two decades of Performance Design as a transformative interdisciplinary field, challenging conventional approaches to creative practice and event-making.

This illuminating collection examines the evolution and impact of Performance Design since its establishment as a university subject twenty years ago. The authors, pioneers in this interdisciplinary domain, present provocative insights gained through extensive collaboration with thinkers, artists, and institutions across music, theatre, dance, architecture, and design. Employing critical analysis and innovative expressions, the book explores how Performance Design has developed its theoretical foundations while emerging as a significant art form in its own right. Readers will discover how this field has reshaped approaches to event creation, spatial relationships, and worldbuilding through its unique integration of diverse creative disciplines.

This book will appeal to artists, researchers, educators, and students in spatial, visual, and performing arts programs, as well as those engaged with social and cultural humanities who seek to understand how creative practices intersect with broader societal contexts.

''Performance'' has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by ''performance''? In today''s world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other?In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to ''perform...or else''. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking. It will profoundly shape our understanding of twenty-first century structures of power and knowledge.

''Performance'' has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by ''performance''? In today''s world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other?In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to ''perform...or else''. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking. It will profoundly shape our understanding of twenty-first century structures of power and knowledge.

This book sets forth a pedagogy for renewing the liberal arts by combining critical thinking, media activism, and design thinking. Using the StudioLab approach, the author seeks to democratize the social and technical practices of digital culture just as nineteenth century education sought to democratize literacy. This production of transmedia knowledge—from texts and videos to comics and installations—moves students between seminar, studio, lab, and field activities. The book also wrestles with the figure of Plato and the very medium of knowledge to re-envision higher education in contemporary societies, issuing a call for community engagement as a form of collective thought-action.