Development and Evolution of Show Technology: Articles and Timeline

I used my sabbatical in spring 2019 to develop two ideas about the evolution of show technology, which ended up in two articles: Show Technology Comes of Age for Lighting & Sound America, which develops the idea that entertainment technology for live shows became mature around 2010; the second, titled Bridging Art and State-of-the-Art for the USITT journal TD&T (and won the Herbert T Greggs award) discusses the impacts of this technological change on the way we teach and how things have changed since a 2002 article I wrote on the topic. You can read both of those articles here.

I’m terrible at remembering dates and so on, so to figure out this information back in 2019 I decided to make a timeline using Preceden. I thought this would be a simple little project that would take a few hours, but it expanded into an epic task that took a couple weeks (the advantage of having a sabbatical!). I tried to make the timeline as accurate as possible, but for my purposes I was looking at overall trends. The timeline is printed in the L&SA article; a static PDF is also available here. If you would like the raw data in spreadsheet format contact me and I can send it to you as long as you make whatever results you have public.

Video Talks On This Subject

Update January 21, 2024

I also have two videos on this topic; one that discusses the evolution directly that I originally did for the online 2022 NAMM convention is here. Another related to this topic from 2023 I did for Purdue and their excellent “First Fridays” feature is here.

Update July 16, 2024

Here’s another talk on the topic, from this year’s HOPE conference.