La performance en direct dans une culture médiatisée

Dans notre culture médiatisée, toute distinction qui existait entre événement en direct et événement médiatisé s’estompe, puisque l’interprétation en direct ressemble de plus en plus aux spectacles médiatisés. On le voit dans l’intrusion des technologies des médias dans toute une gamme d’événements en direct, et notamment au théâtre. On le voit aussi dans les cas où les événements en direct récréent les événements médiatisés. Dans ces cas, l’interprétation « originale » en direct n’est plus privilégiée par rapport à l’adaptation médiatisée : celle-ci est devenue le référent de celle-là.In our mediatized culture, whatever distinction we may have supposed there to be between live and mediatized events is collapsing because live events are becoming more and more identical with mediatized ones. This can be seen in the incursion of media technology into a range of live performance events, including the theatre. It is also apparent in cases where live events recreate mediatized ones. In such cases, the traditional privileging of the "original", live performance over its elaborations and adaptations is undermined and reversed: the mediatized performance has become the referent of the live one

A performatividade na documentação de performances , de Philip Auslander

Para investigar o limiar entre performance e sua documentação, o autor categoriza as imagens como documentais ou como teatrais ao discorrer sobre os atravessamentos do documento como evidência e como plataforma de representação, entendida como geradora de identidade para a performance ao viabilizar seu acesso ao público. O autor fundamenta-se em uma questão instável, ora por indagar a relevância da veracidade do evento “ao vivo”, ora por examinar performances programadas sem audiências, evidenciando a documentação como fenômeno para o espectador. (Resumo elaborado pelos tradutores

Blast Theory’s Karen: exploring the ontology of technotexts

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatised ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatised theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive

Unsatisfactory devices: legacy and the undocumentable in art.

Regarding perception of ephemeral artwork when lost to the fractures of time Peggy Phelan states “you have to be there.” For Phelan ephemera, specifically performance “become[s] itself through disappearance,” which draws empathy with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura of the original.” In practice this a less than pragmatic account of the reality of experiencing such artworks, for how can they exist beyond the moment of making if not recorded, in order to map their histories? This essay interrogates the critical, sensitive and individualized distance necessary to archive transient artworks. Moving beyond the disciplinary ghettos of event and documentation, it interrogates how divergent and sympathetic modes of practice allow for a greater level of sustainable critique. This complex and problematic terrain is analysed in response to The Alternative Document, an exhibition I curated on the subject in 2016, and suggests archival possibilities beyond formal academic, artistic and museological conventions.University of Derb

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective

A future for Hashima: pornography, representation and time

This article sets out to investigate the relationship between ruins, futurity, and ‘ruin porn’ - a visual mode of representation that all too often seeks to fix post-industrial ruins as mere aesthetic objects, devoid of history and/or temporality. It does so by focusing on performance, which, in this context, is understood as a processual mode of art-making that provides spectators with an experience of time. In this expanded definition of performance, as one may perhaps expect, the performativity of the object is not limited to the theatrical event alone; rather, it now inheres in sometimes uncanny durational aspects of both still and moving images. The essay proceeds in three stages. Part one provides a historical and theoretical overview of the type of performance inherent in ‘ruin porn’; part two critiques two images from Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's Gunkanjima (2013), a photo album that attempted to document the ruins of Hashima, an island situated 15 kilometres from Nagasaki City in the East China Sea; and part three investigates the very different aesthetic at work in Lee Hassall's film Return to Battleship Island (2013) which was made in response to AHRC- funded project, ‘The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island’ (2013). In this reading of Return to Battleship Island , the onus is on showing how Hassall's film, in its representation of Hashima's crumbling apartment blocks and industrial buildings, intentionally sought to contest the atemporal logic of ‘ruin porn’ by attempting to endow the viewing experience with a sense of futurity. Crucially, this does not mean that film represented the future as an object, but, on the contrary, tried to make it palpable, as something one undergoes physically in the very act of reception