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This dissertation examines the social contexts for music livestreams, in order to lay the groundwork for future studies of both livestreaming as a whole and individual case studies. No frameworks currently exist for analyzing music livestreams. Although the technologies of livestreaming have been evolving over the past few decades, there have been no organized or successful attempts to standardize the ways we understand and study this fast-growing medium for music performance. Chapter 1 provides basic definitions of livestreaming, and then emphasizes the framework of liveness, arguing that although livestreaming technologies developed relatively recently, the practice of transmitting and receiving live music has been developing since the late-nineteenth century. I examine livestreaming as a continuation of broadcast media wrapped up with conceptions of liveness that have been constantly transforming over the long twentieth century. Chapter 2 connects livestreaming with the social media platforms that have emerged in the past two decades. I also position livestreaming within discussions and anxieties surrounding attention and distraction in the context of digital media. In Chapter 3 the discussion of attention extends into the realm of joint attention, and the ways livestreaming engages our attentive capacities in groups to facilitate specific modalities of participation—observational, reactive, and generative. Finally, the conclusion pulls these frameworks together to demonstrate their use in an analysis of music livestreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the patterns of behavior and audience engagement, conceptions of liveness during the pandemic, and the effects of these factors on the social aspects of live music.

Since its inception in 2007, the microblogging platform Tumblr has grown from its modest roots as a social media website founded on short form, user-generated content into a hub for diverse subcommunities and unique experiences. Scholars have been keen to note the breadth of Tumblr users’ worldviews and knowledgebases, and to identify the significance of its practices and emergent cultures. This thesis intends to expand upon such research and create a substantive theory of Tumblr which recognizes the platform’s relevance according to users, and in connection with current scholarly understandings. It situates Tumblr as a key online platform in the creation of identity, community, and meaning for its users, one which has proven to be influential in present understandings of how people gather and interact in virtual spaces. Using constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology and the lens of social constructionism, this thesis seeks to analyze the lived experiences of users of Tumblr to theorize how their time on the platform have shaped who they are, how they engage with others, and how they navigate the world around them online and offline. Additionally, this thesis looks to suggest what the practices of Tumblr have contributed to users’ understandings of community and identity, as well as to provide suggestions for future scholars.

Site-specific continues to be a recognizable descriptor that, when applied to performance, codes for a (potentially) culturally transgressive and aesthetically transformative work that relies on the physical co-presence of non-theatrical site and spectator to produce its effects. Digital and networked technologies, however, destabilize site as a physical concept, expanding the ways in which performance might relate to both virtual and actual environments. In this dissertation, I investigate site-specific performance’s contemporary identity crisis. As the disciplinary frameworks of site, specificity, and performance each expand, affected by the influx of virtual and mediatized interventions, staging practices evolve along with them. The integration of new media forms in performance creates new possibilities for aesthetic and spectatorial experiences. Media technologies like virtual reality systems, interactive gaming interfaces, and live Tweeting alter sensory perception and remediate theatrical experience for a user-spectator who might experience multiple, simultaneous places of performance. I examine the ways in which these technologically-altered spatial experiences in performance reclaim a specificity purported to be lost. Considering the virtual as site-specific challenges narratives of technological determinism that relegate digitality to realms of disembodiment and distraction. I demonstrate that our digital age is not an age of spatial ambiguity but an opportunity to consider expanded forms of spatial specificity in performance. I explore practices which mix the spatial realities of the spectators by combining, in one form or another, physical and virtual components across multiple spaces, either simultaneously or in archive. These forms mix the experience of a physical environment with that of imagined metaphor, reorient the maps of spectator and performer, displace performances into multiple sites, and dismantle disciplinary binaries of liveness and presence. I present challenges to the conventional disciplinary frameworks that assume a version of liveness and presence that is predicated on physicality. These challenges demonstrate performance’s capacity to extend ways of “being there” without physically being there, reshaping numerous spatial axes of exclusion that include race, class, gender, and physical ability. With the transformations and disruptions involved in making the virtual site-specific, contemporary works reawaken critical analysis of habitual functions of space, shedding light on the intersections of spatial politics and embodiment.

New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces, are playing a highly visible role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum studies scholars see the participatory experiences mediated by such technologies as potentially redefining relationships between the institution and the public by allowing museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural elite. In these pages, I employ rhetorician Gregory Clark’s (2010) theory of rhetorical experience to investigate the claim by museum studies scholars that a “paradigm shift” is being enacted by digital technologies within museums. I show that digitally mediated experiences, particularly those facilitated by touch, can induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their engagement in the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and interpretation, to the documented, public roles of educator, curator, researcher, and critic. I also show that the rhetorical nature the experiences that invite visitors to participate in such activities can effect changes in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer.This qualitative study takes place in two public institutions with recent installations of groundbreaking exhibition technologies, the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. I use ethnographic methods, including participant observations and interviews, to identify what I term the “habits of interaction” afforded by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of physical and digital activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one’s ability to take up new interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated experiences and one’s previously existing digital literacies, I closely examine the rhetorical experiences visitors engage in through interaction with touchscreen interfaces. Museum visitors interacting with these interfaces see themselves as actually “able to touch the art” and thus as active participants in the work of the museum. Such experiences can shift visitors’ interpretive positions by persuading them to take up the roles of instructor, researcher, critic, and curator, which are traditionally reserved for the institution itself.

This dissertation explores how creative collaborative practice transforms subjectivity, before it is leveraged as an industrial resource. Raising key questions about the nature of collaborative practice itself, I discuss in detail the histories and processes of select collaborative groups in order to unfold an idea of intensity among participants that exceeds the boundaries of each artist without eradicating individuality. I argue that from the commingled exchange occurring in a material and discursive mash-up called "the mangle," emergent onto-epistemologies arise that disrupt static physical and identity formations. From this disruption, the ways in which language or sense-making functions are transformed and begin to include alternative ways of knowing that occur in bafflement, the inability to comprehend, and dysfunction. I work rigorously to transform the chaotic status of these negative terms into something that can be understood as lively, creative, and transformative in their own right and not merely opposites of order, understanding, clarity, and sanity. Overall, the project is highly trans-disciplinary in that I analyze art works and art practices, films, musical performances, composition techniques, and my own long-term creative collaborative work with a group called Multipoint. Further, in a very focused effort to transgress disciplinary boundaries, I place Material Feminism and post-Marxist theory alongside the philosophical works of Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Derrida. Divided into five chapters, the project addresses different aspects of intricate sharing and mangled time. The preface and the first chapter introduce the concept of trans-subjectivity and outline a chaotic, intense description of collaborative practice as I conceive it for this project, tracing a myopic history from the 1950s to the present to consider various forms of collaboration and their effects. The second chapter imagines networked, complex bodies in the video works of Natalie Bookchin and in installation art generally. The third considers the way language becomes complicated and remade through forms of virtuosity and incomprehensibility, while the fourth develops a theory of a-productivity involving lingering in conditions of highly queered time. The last chapter reads Giorgio Agamben's "whatever being" through Derrida's concept of impossible hospitality to envision the potentials for emergent forms of community.

This project analyzes contemporary KPop as a commercial cultural production and as a business model that emerged as the South Korean state�s U.S-aligned neoliberal project. This thesis focuses on Kpop's functions as an ideological, political, and economic apparatus serving the production and reproduction of desires in the emergence of various sub-cultures at disparate sites across the globe. Legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, and (late) capitalist developments sanctioned the conditions for this particular form of mass and popular culture, making KPop a commercial commodity for contestations of appropriation and reappropriation by those in power and those in the margins. By examining the institutionalized and systematic new media platforms and internet technologies that enable new forms of globalized interactions with mass culture in general and KPop in particular, the thesis locates how resistant and alternative (sub) cultures emerge in variable conditions and locations. Through newly found mediums online, emerging cultural formations challenge and negotiate the conditions of commercial and dominant systems, allowing various and localized subaltern (secondary) cultural identities to decenter, disrupt, and instigate KPop and its neoliberal governance, to reorient and reappropriate them in the process as well.

The miscommunication between sender and receiver during transcoding indexes specific historical moments similarly to analog film's indexical trace. Iconography and glitch art begin to establish glitch's deictic index. The glitch aesthetic exposes societal paranoia by illustrating dependence on the digital and fear of system failure. With the advent of video sharing sites like Youtube and popular cyberfilms, the glitch aesthetic has evolved into a pop culture artifact.