About

Dr. Joel Saltz is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University. He serves as Vice President for Clinical Informatics at Stony Brook Medicine, as well as Associate Director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center and Director of the Institute for Engineering Medicine. His research focuses on high-end and data-intensive computing, applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence, pathology informatics, large-scale data analytics, and clinical informatics. Dr. Saltz's work involves leveraging advanced computational techniques to improve healthcare outcomes, particularly through data-driven approaches in biomedical and clinical settings.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Art history
• Art
• Law

Selected publications

• Radical empathy

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Theater practitioners and viewers are growing increasingly sensitive to the ethical issues that arise when actors portray characters whose racial identification is different from their own. The first part of this essay examines the rhetoric employed by defenders and critics of cross-ethnic casting, focusing on cases where the character being portrayed belongs to an under-represented ethnic group. It distinguishes among three distinct arguments that critics who object to the practice of cross-racial casting implicitly invoke: (1) the labor argument, (2) the semiotic argument, and (3) the ontological argument. Each of these arguments has different implications and applies to a different, though overlapping, set of cases. Most of these arguments, however, are predicated on the assumption that the relationship between the actor and character in theater is one of resemblance. The second part of the essay proposes that the ludic theory of theatrical performance, developed in the author’s previous work, circumvents these arguments. The impulse to traverse social identity categories in performance can stem from a deeply ethical impulse to achieve empathy across difference. Anna Deavere Smith, who enacts diverse racial, cultural, and socio-economic identities in her solo work, exemplifies this ludic approach and offers a powerful model of radical empathy in performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Open wounds Holocaust theater and the legacy of George Tabori

  2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Art history

  "This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914-2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori's work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies. Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori's theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori's postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays' relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture."--

  Publisher

• From Semiotics to Philosophy: Daring to Ask the Obvious

  Performance Philosophy · 2015-04-10 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  From the late 1960s through the 1980s a steadily-expanding group of international scholars joined forces to develop a comprehensive and unified semiotic theory of theatre. The semiotic wave had largely subsided by the early 1990s, leaving in its wake a profound, and largely justified, scepticism about universal, essentialist, and ahistorical theoretical models. It is possible, however, to ask basic philosophical questions about the ‘nature’ of theatre and performance without falling into the trap of universalizing or essentializing what are, in fact, historically and/or culturally specific practices and biases. In this essay, I advocate an open-ended and dialogic process that characterizes the work of many contemporary philosophers, in both the analytic and continental traditions, and in particular those who have been inspired by the late-Wittgensteinian notion of philosophy as a kind of conceptual therapy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digital Literary Studies: Performance and Interaction

  2013-05-17

  other1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter begins with a review of significant pedagogical and scholarly applications of computers to performance, and then turns to artistic applications. The projects considered in the chapter rely on the multimedia capabilities of computers, that is, a computer's ability to store and retrieve text, images, and audio. Other projects have exploited the power of computers to generate complex simulations of 3D reality. Computer simulations of performance spaces and performers are powerful research and teaching tools, but carry inherent dangers. Performance reconstructions can encourage a positivist conception of history. Computer-controlled lighting and scenery changes are simply automated forms of pre-computer stage technologies. Telematic performance acquires its greatest impact when spectators interact directly with people at the remote site and experience the uncanny collapse of space first-hand.

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• Media, Technology, and Performance

  Theatre Journal · 2013-10-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Media, Technology, and Performance David Z. Saltz (bio) Multimedia Performance. By Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer. Basingstoke, UK: Pal-grave Macmillan, pp. 2012; 240. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation Of Performance. By Chris Salter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010; pp. 504. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010; pp. 304. Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity. Edited by Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 256. Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections In Multimedia Performance. By Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 256. Toward the end of the 1980s, digital technology began to make significant inroads into mainstream culture. Computers grew in power and acquired the ability to drive and manipulate visual and sound media, even as they steadily decreased in size and cost. A disparate group of artists emerging from the worlds of electronic music, video art, performance art, and theatre—such as George Coates Performance Works, Troika Ranch, Laurie Anderson, Stelarc, David Rockeby, IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina, Jeffrey Shaw’s ZKM Institute for Visual Media, and Granular Synthesis—began to integrate new digital technologies into live performance. In the heady period prior to the bursting of the dot-com bubble at the end of 1990s, champions [End Page 421] of the new cyber culture greeted digitally enhanced performances with utopic enthusiasm. But the work also met with some resistance, provoking anxiety by challenging modernist attitudes about the irreconcilable gulf between media and performance and helping to fuel a debate about the very idea of “liveness.” As the flurry of creative activity continued to build throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, however, this work received only a smattering of critical attention—for example, in books like Johannes Birringer’s Media and Performance Along the Border (1998) and Theatre in Cyberspace (1999), edited by Stephen Schrum, and in articles published in specialized journals like Leonardo. Around 2004, the floodgates opened and a rush of books appeared, including Gabriella Giannachi’s Virtual Theatres (2004), Matthew Causey’s Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture (2006), Greg Giesekam’s Staging the Screen (2007), Nick Kaye’s Multi-media: Video–Installation–Performance (2007), and, most significantly, Steve Dixon’s compendious Digital Performance (2007), written in conjunction with Barry Smith. Laptops, tablets, and smart phones are now ubiquitous, and digital technology is no longer the province of a geek subculture. The five books under review here, all published since 2010, evince the proliferation of attention currently afforded to media-rich performance practices. Nonetheless, the critical discourse is still in its early stages, and basic questions about the scope and definition of the field remain in play. Indeed, scholars and practitioners have yet to settle on a name to describe performances that incorporate digital media. Currently, common descriptors include: multimedia performance, intermedial performance, performance and technology, cyborg theatre, digital performance, virtual theatre, and new media dramaturgy. The differences in nomenclature reflect subtle but important differences in how people delineate the parameters of the field. The five books under review here all focus on encounters between human beings and a technological “Other,” but what is this Other? How broadly or narrowly is “technology” defined? Is the focus specifically on interactions with screen-based media, such as video or film, or even more narrowly, just digital video? Or does technology transcend screen-based media to encompass sound or any electronically controlled element, such as robotics, or even more broadly, any complex mechanical element, such as pre-digital automata? There is similar latitude on the “performance” side of the equation: is the focus just on theatre, or is it also on dance and performance art or on interactive installations in which the only live performer is the viewer/participant? Do events that take place entirely in virtual space like performances in the online virtual world Second Life or in video games count? A related issue is the tension between newness and continuity: on the one hand, many writers emphasize the way that new technologies produce a radical break from the past, profoundly altering our...

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• Editorial Comment

  Theatre Journal · 2009-05-01

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  Editorial Comment David Z. Saltz Some scholarship makes its primary contribution by introducing readers to significant new facts and ideas. Another type of scholarship distinguishes itself by drawing unexpected connections and revealing new patterns within well-established fields of knowledge. The six superb essays in this general issue of Theatre Journal are, by and large, of the latter type. The first four essays revise our understanding of modernist theatre—sometimes in radical and even unsettling ways. The issue begins with Matthew Buckley's revisionist account of melodrama's genesis and legacy. While the conventional view holds melodrama to be the antithesis of modern drama, a laughably hackneyed, formulaic, and outdated relic, Buckley situates melodrama at the core of both modern drama and, more deeply, the modernist sensibility. The key connection the essay establishes is between the origin of melodrama and the trauma produced by the French Revolution, which reverberated throughout Europe and the United States. According to Buckley, the conventions of melodrama are most credible "to those whose experiences of violence and dislocation were most intensive and sustained." As the type of trauma that gave rise to melodrama persisted and grew increasingly acute throughout the twentieth century, Buckley argues that there has been a relentless but "gradual intensification and consolidation of melodrama's hold, of its increasingly deep and pervasive penetration of mass consciousness"—a process that continues, albeit unacknowledged and repressed, right up to the present day. Melodrama, in Buckley's view, has reinforced "deep-seated patterns of affective response"; in other words, it has shaped our very patterns of thought. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met melodrama and it is us. Kimberly Jannarone's essay is similarly ambitious in its challenge to conventional wisdom and far-reaching in its implications. Her essay focuses on Antonin Artaud, long hailed as the prophet of modernity, embraced by the avant-garde movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and inextricably associated with aesthetic and political radicalism. Jannarone draws on crowd theory to argue that Artaud's emphasis on creating an intense and unified emotional response that overwhelms critical faculties links his ideas directly to fascism: she situates Artaud's work squarely within the historical context of the contemporaneous fascist movements in Italy and Germany. Moreover, she strives to demonstrate that Artaud's approach to theatre is entirely consistent with the fascist theatre that flourished during the 1920s and 1930s in Italy and Germany. This argument challenges our most fundamental assumptions about Artaud and his place within modern theatre and politics; those whom Jannarone persuades to travel even partway down the path of her argument will never think of Artaud in the same way again. The nineteenth-century movement and performance pedagogue François Delsarte is typically viewed as exemplifying a conventional, formulaic approach to performance that twentieth-century practitioners of all stripes thoroughly repudiated. Much as Buckley does with melodrama, Carrie Preston, in her contribution to this issue, "Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film," locates Delsarte at the heart of modernism, revealing his influence on modern dance through Isadora Duncan and Ted Shawn and on cinema through D. W. Griffith and Lev Kuleshov. In contrast with the first three essays, which are international in scope, Mark Phelan's "'Authentic Reproductions': Staging the 'Wild West' in Modern Irish Drama" focuses on a single country: Ireland. Within that context, however, the argument is similarly revisionist. Phelan establishes a link between two plays that bookend the twentieth century: Gerald MacNamara's The Mist That Does Be on the Bog, a largely forgotten work written in 1909 at the dawn of the modern Irish theatre movement, and Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets, a highly popular though critically neglected work written in 1990 at the height of postmodernism. The tissue that connects these two works is their common critique of the cultural politics of nationalism, and in particular of the myth of "authentic" Irishness. Phelan's essay, [End Page 7] by unearthing a submerged narrative that spans the twentieth century, adds a new dimension to our understanding of modern Irish theatre. Over the past few decades, a great deal of useful scholarship has been devoted to demystifying classical Japanese theatre traditions...

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• Editorial Comment: Digital Media and Performance

  Theatre Journal · 2009-12-01 · 3 citations

  editorial1st authorCorresponding

  Editorial Comment: Digital Media and Performance David Z. Saltz As Steve Dixon has observed in his influential book Digital Performance,1 which is cited frequently in this issue of Theatre Journal, the 1990s represented a high-water mark in digital performance. That decade saw an explosion of innovation and euphoria surrounding the use of digital technologies—video projections, MIDI-triggered images and audio, sensors, telematics—in live performance events and performative installation art. All five essays in this special issue on digital media and performance focus on work created during the subsequent decade—that is, the first decade of the twenty-first century—though in most cases, this work was produced by groups who achieved their first successes in the 1990s or earlier. As Dixon suggests, from a technological standpoint, there have been few radically new developments during this period. With the collapse of the dot-com industry, followed by the sobering mood that followed 9/11, the euphoria abated. Nonetheless, the use of digital technology in performance, from Broadway and West End theatre to rock concerts, has persisted and indeed become increasingly commonplace as digital technology itself has become vastly more ubiquitous, affordable, and accessible to nonexperts in this era of iPods, iPhones, Second Life, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter. The first three essays focus on extremely well-known groups that have integrated media with live performance in innovative and influential ways: the Builders Association, the Wooster Group, and the Blue Man Group. All created significant work in the 1990s (and, in the case of the Wooster Group, even earlier) and are still going strong today. All are icons of postmodernism, using media to interrogate modernist assumptions about unified identity and performative presence. The Builders Association incorporates spectacular video projections, both real-time and pre-recorded. Leslie Atkins Durham’s essay focuses on one of their most famous and frequently discussed works, Alladeen (2002–05), about Bangalore call-center workers who adopt American personas in their telephonic interactions with customers calling from the United States. The production uses media to present documentary footage of actual Bangalore operators, and also to explore the dramatized workers’ construction of global identities, specifically the American identities the call-center workers appropriated from the popular sitcom Friends. The production’s combination of live performance and video vividly highlights the mutually dependent relationship between fiction and reality, and between presence and representation. The next essay, by Johan Callens, focuses on the Wooster Group, one of the first theatre groups to combine live performance with video. (Indeed, as Theresa Smalec notes in a book review included in this issue, Elizabeth LeCompte, the Wooster Group’s director, began working with video as early as 1975, as an actor in the Performance Group’s production The Marilyn Project, directed by Richard Schechner.) Specifically, the essay focuses on the Wooster Group’s recent Hamlet, a production that has already attracted more critical attention than any of the company’s work since the 1980s. This production is not so much a version of Hamlet as it is an encounter with, and a living reproduction of, John Gielgud’s 1964 stage production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, specifically as filmed by Bill Colleran. Callens’s essay, rich in insights and historical information, analyzes the production as a “performance of compulsive mourning” that works through a series of cultural and personal traumatic losses. The most distinctive and compelling aspect of the essay, however, is its form, which echoes the Wooster Group’s aesthetic by adopting a rigorously focused [End Page 1] but highly associative structure. The essay follows a thread of associations encompassing a multiplicity of visual artworks, films, and novels depicted or alluded to within the production and its various promotional materials, such as, among many others, Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Liz Taylor, Kathe Burkart’s Liz Taylor Series of paintings, the film Nurse Betty, and Marguerite Nelson’s novel Hollywood Nurse. The Blue Man Group, like the Builders Association and the Wooster Group, originated Off-Off Broadway in New York City and has attracted critical renown. However, while it continues to evince its avant-garde roots, it has acquired a broad mainstream appeal and commercial success, with regular appearances on...

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial Comment

  Theatre Journal · 2008-05-01

  editorial1st authorCorresponding

  Editorial Comment David Z. Saltz In recent years, Theatre Journal, reflecting trends in theatre scholarship, has significantly broadened its scope through, among other things, an ever-increasing acknowledgment of plays originating from outside Europe and America, and a radically expanded notion of both the dramatic text and the performance event. In this context, the five essays in this general issue may at first blush seem somewhat old-fashioned: all focus on plays (in the conventional sense of the word) by American, English, or Irish playwrights, most of whom—such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and Suzan-Lori Parks—are already highly familiar to students of theatre. Where each of these essays makes its distinctive contribution is by reframing the plays within carefully selected, rigorously defined, and richly restored contexts of performance. Archbishop Tutu, in a statement quoted in Sara Warner's essay, observes that "a person is not basically an independent, solitary entity. A person is a human precisely in being enveloped in the community of other beings, in being caught in the bundle of life." As the essays in this issue amply illustrate, Tutu's observation applies just as well to plays as to people. Thomas Postelwait has clearly articulated the intimate relationship between theatrical event and context, emphasizing that "an event and its context are, by necessity, mutually dependent conditions. Intersecting both synchronically and diachronically, the event and context participate together in an historical matrix."1 The first three essays in this issue, by Warner, Paul Murphy, and William West, exemplify attempts to reframe context synchronically, extending and deepening our understanding of the world within which the plays were originally performed; the final two essays, by Edward Kahn and Yeeyon Im, exemplify attempts to reframe it diachronically, investigating the interpretation, performance, and reception of canonical Shakespearean tragedies within a geographical and temporal context far removed from that of the plays' composition. The essays all reinforce Postle-wait's basic point that to delineate the field of events, ideas, and sociopolitical facts that constitute a performance's context is a decisive act of interpretation in itself, one that not only profoundly influences the conclusions one draws about the meaning of a play and/or its performance, but also the questions one asks—and even how one perceives the identity of the performance event itself. Suzan-Lori Parks's controversial play Venus, the subject of the opening essay, has hardly been a victim of critical neglect. The play, rooted in historical fact, revisits the story of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, an aboriginal South African woman who in the early nineteenth century was exhibited in Europe as "The Hottentot Venus." While there have been many superb critical treatments of this play, including a recent essay in Theatre Journal,2 most have analyzed it either in terms of contemporary American theatre and society—the context of its composition—or early nineteenth-century South Africa and Europe—the context of its historical narrative. Sara Warner's inspiration is to stir post-apartheid South Africa into this contextual stew. Warner observes that Venus's debut in April 1996 occurred only one day after the first South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing (itself the focus of a recent Theatre Journal essay),3 and six years before Baartman's remains, which had been on display in Paris's National Museum of Natural History, were finally returned to South Africa for burial in April 2002. Warner designates the TRC hearings and the commemorations of Baartman's South African homecoming as "acts of interment." By contrast, she regards Venus, along with much of Parks's other work, as a "drama of disinterment": [End Page viii] "Acts of interment such as Baartman's funeral and the proceedings of the TRC are rites designed to provide closure. Dramas of disinterment, on the other hand, are aesthetic and cultural productions that insist upon a never-ending opening." Critics' failure to recognize the difference between these two projects accounts for much of the antipathy directed toward Venus. Although Venus's detractors accuse the play of gratuitously sullying Baartman's reputation and dignity, on Warner's reading the play accomplishes nothing less than Baartman's "aesthetic resurrection." Paul Murphy's essay examines...

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial Comment: Popular Culture and Theatre History

  Theatre Journal · 2008-12-01 · 2 citations

  editorial1st authorCorresponding

  Editorial Comment: Popular Culture and Theatre History David Z. Saltz Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby. . . . It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. —Michael Chabon1 In 1974, TDR/The Drama Review published a special issue on “Popular Entertainments,” followed the next year by a special issue of The Educational Theatre Journal (as this journal was then called) on “Popular Theatre,” and two years later, in 1977, by a Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment—billed as “the first of its kind in the United States”—sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theatre Library Association.2 These two publications and the conference provided what were then almost unprecedented forums for prominent scholars, including Brooks McNamara, Robert Toll, Laurence Senelick, and Don Wilmeth, to present research on performance genres such as the circus, minstrel shows, burlesque shows, vaudeville, tent repertoire shows, and wild west shows that had up until that time been deemed unworthy of scholarly attention. Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and TDR, along with many other journals, now readily and regularly publish work on popular entertainment genres. Nonetheless, as recently as 2004, David Savran still felt the need to inveigh against the long-standing, class-based prejudices about the superiority of art to entertainment. . . . Theatre historians looking to have a greater impact both within and without the profession could do worse than to reconsider the kinds of theatrical practice that have held millions spellbound but have been routinely dismissed by scholars.3 The following year, in the pages of this journal, Christopher Balme avered that [t]heatre historians have long been aware of a glaring dichotomy between theatre’s cultural impact in a given period and its subsequent canonization in texts and productions. . . . Despite acknowledgment of the nonliterary aspects of theatre and the growing body of research into popular theatre and performance, there still remains a lingering suspicion of the long-run hit play and its attendant processes of commodification.4 Most recently, in the issue of Theatre Journal just prior to this one, Jill Dolan acknowledged the disparagement that she and other prominent feminist scholars held in the late 1980s and early 1990s for popular liberal-feminist playwrights such as Wendy Wassserstein “by virtue of their appeal to wide audiences.”5 [End Page x] As Savran reminds us, “the binary opposition between highbrow and lowbrow . . . in fact was consolidated only at the end of the nineteenth century.”6 One could argue that this opposition is rooted in the early nineteenth-century Romantic myth of the creative genius driven to produce art in response to an inner compulsion to create something radically new and original, as opposed to the desire to appease a political patron or to profit in the marketplace. The opposition between low and high art began to break down as deep-rooted Romantic assumptions about art and culture started to give way during the 1960s and ’70s to the sensibility that would be called “postmodern.” Hence, strictly speaking, lowbrow popular entertainment, as defined in opposition to highbrow art theatre, exists only within a historical window extending from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century—which is roughly the span covered by the five essays collected in this special issue. The distinction between lowbrow and highbrow was firmly entrenched by the 1920s when theatre was establishing itself as an academic discipline, and so it is not surprising that theatre historians would construct a resolutely highbrow canon of classics from ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and seventeenth-century France, along with plays in the tradition of European modernism. By the same token, it is not surprising that the ideas of a scholar who flew in the face of this trend and trumpeted popular...

  PublisherDOI

• Performing Arts

  Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2007-12-10 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• James Glimm

  7 shared

• David H. Sharp

  7 shared

• Munir H. Nayfeh

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

• Wonsuck Lee

  The University of Texas at Austin

  3 shared

• S.‐T. Yau

  3 shared

• S. Can Gülen

  Bechtel (United States)

  2 shared

• Dmitry Sendersky

  2 shared

• Tien-Ruey Hsiang

  National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

  2 shared

Labs

• Stony Brook Department of Biomedical InformaticsPI