1. introduction
Digitalisation and Revisited Methods

The synthesis of dynamic digital media and live, physical action present in multimedia performances affects both the production practice of performance art and the theoretical frameworks of performance studies. Through digital technology and cultural expressions engaging digital technology, like multimedia performances, interpretive methods of humanities are being challanged. Not only does digital media call for new production designs and new theoretical frameworks; digital media may call for new or revisited methods of inquiry, as these become crucial in order to get at novel, visualised digital media and, in this instance, the interplay of digital media and live performance.

For resons discussed throughout this thesis, digital media studies may benefit from an exploratory and practice-based orientation towards digital media accompanying the traditional interpretive and critical approach of humanities. In the following, I will explore the role of practice-based methods in developing understandings of digital media, with reference to my own practice-based involvement in collaboratively constructing multimedia art performance works.

My experience of practice-based study of digital media derives from the collaborative multimedia performance production Extended. This experimental production was part of the practice-based educational design of the master-level course “New Media Education”, which involved not only media students but dance-students and choreography-students in the collaboratively making of four media-rich dance performances.

As practice-based method is both field of inquiry and research design ín this research, involving both a piece of work as well as a written dissertation, the following thesis holds a twofold purpose of performing practice-based method while exploring practice-based method. Such twofolded or reflexive structure may be said to tag alongside studies of new, increasingly evolving and in many ways distinct and divergent digital media, but is also set off by how the academic written formats and interpretive methods of humanities may resist or oppose exploratory practice-based experience. This, in turn, compels us to rethink learning and research as cultural practices, situating this thesis on practice-based method against a broader framework of hermeneutics and epistemology.

Interlinked, however secondary to the twofold purpos of my thesis, is my present attempt to explore ways to communicate/convey practice-based research through digital media, in this case on-line, multimodal communication. To combine these three purposes in one thesis is my suggested response to some of the interrelated challenges present within digital media studies and perhaps equally a matter of media studies at large. These challenges include research and learning into rapidly evolving digital and multimodal media forms, conceptualiseing the intersection of practice and theory as research, and exploring multimodal, on-line ways of communicating media research.

Set in a multimedia performance context, these elements may be said to together consitute a hybrid and contingent research design - a mutable design shared with contemporary research initiatives investigating the intersections between digital media, creativity, practice and theory. By these research initiatives research paradigms are broadened to include experimental, process-oriented practice-based inquiry into multimodal digital media involving performance contexts and multimedia on-line research communication.