"To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death."
--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The Performance Thanatology Research Society is a group of scholars dedicated to the advancement of a higher histrionics brought on by imminent finalities. They desperately formed a few minutes before midnight on December 31, 1999 and pledged to challenge personal and global depreciation of liveness.*

The work of the society is gone about with great fear. Fear of Death and all of its entropically related phenomena motivates the group to present themselves in an exhibition of interdisciplinary hysterics. With great fear we invoke the phenomenology of our questionable presence and the existentialism in our limited human capabilities.

Action becomes the exercise of liveness, private isolated actions will not suffice, only actions observed in live performance. Therefore, the study is death, but the exercise is life. It is reminiscent of Bataille: "life is a negation of death. It condemns it and shuts it out."

Exhibitionism is essential in affirming our existence, and by affirming our existence, we carry the responsibility of overly-conscious animals confused by our own irony, an irony so ironic it is dead serious.

The society is an ever-growing collective of individuals whose endeavors of creative scholarship in the form of presentations, performances, and conceptual projects, either solo or in collaboration with other PTRS members, adds to a body of research for which there are no logical conclusions. The study of death and dying is truly the most intense study of life and living.

We are confused, we are scared, we are alive. We are all in this together.

Follow the following link for general themes.

* existence does not consist merely of alive and dead, but of many levels of liveness. By liveness we mean the amount of embodied awareness of liveness, a quality therefore not easily measured and thus far indistinctly defined.