The author, a choreographer, offers a critical study of the intimate relations between performance art and media production in contemporary culture. The text interweaves the author's recollections of his own work with commentary on contemporary artists from Nam June Paik to Madonna. At a time when 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.