In Media & Performance, choreographer Johannes Birringer offers the first comprehensive critical study of the intimate relationship between dance and performance art and the new media technologies in contemporary culture. The book interweaves Birringer's recollections of his own work in the alternative culture along with commentary on contemporary artists, from Nam June Paik to Laurie Anderson and Madonna. At a time when the new arts are being accepted and adopted by mainstream institutions, Birringer reclaims performance as process and movement, as political commitment to social activism and community, as aesthetic intervention into technological and economic structures of domination, and as anarchist disturbance of aesthetic pretensions. The author discusses the performance aspects of such political events as the breaching of the Berlin wall and the destruction of Sarajevo, and examines the use of video and agitprop performance in political activity, including protests by the gay activist group ACT UP and the disquieting performances of the former pornography actress and sex worker Annie Sprinkle. Birringer ends with a discussion of the continuing incursions of business into digital media, including the "imperialism of technological enhancements" as experienced in the culture of constant "upgrades" and the omnipresence of Bill Gates.