Perform or Else

"Performance" has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by "performance?" In today's world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and technological and scientific breakthroughs. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other? InPerform or Else, Jon McKenzie uncovers an uncanny relationship between cultural, organizational, and technological performance. His conclusion--that performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth--is an exhilarating realization of how culture, business, and science have become hyperlinked through globalization. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking.

Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of interface design and multimedia at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia).