Performing Resistance

Many contemporary artists, critical theorists, and educators challenge the cultural assumptions that are embedded in our understandings of technology and its relationship to art, the body, and human life. In this article, we discuss the performance artworks of osseus labyrint, Goat Island, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Juan Ybarra. Each of these collectives or groupings of artists work within the critical and multiple spaces of technology to explore questions of the body and its relationship to identity. These are also the questions that we raise as art educators who are concerned about the ubiquitous ways that technologies mediate our lives and those of our students—how we learn and what we learn both inside and outside our classrooms. We argue that performance art and critical theory provide a pedagogical space wherein art educators can examine and critique their social and historical assumptions of what it means to be human and create new metaphors for living and learning in contemporary technological cultures, such as those performed by the artists discussed.