This is the abstract of a book chapter accepted for 'Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance' edited by Stefano Boselli and Sarah Lucie for Routledge, which discusses my current practice research and performance project in two of its iterations: Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose, high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for proximal and online spectators. The essay investigates the notion of posthuman assemblages as a practice for engendering hybrid identities and liminal performance situations, which I propose constitute an 'ecology of becoming' through our entanglement with new technologies and private/public spaces.This essay analyses and discusses digital and hybrid performance practices created in response to the
online shifts driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on an emergent theoretical framework
which seeks to define the relationship between human and non-human as an ‘ecology of becoming’,
using as a case study a 2-year practice research and performance project developed in two iterations –
Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and
Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose,
high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for
proximal and online spectators. The aim is to offer a critical perspective of the transition from a
digital to a hybrid performance space, which intersects and identifies the liminal and interdisciplinary
areas of creativity and processes that allow performers and technologies to enmesh, thus reconfiguring
and repositioning performance practices in a posthumanist context. While the technologically
saturated environments can be seen as influencing and enriching the agency of the non-human on both
performers and spectators, through the support of technological devices in the digital home
performance and its migration onto the screen technology at Sook, I argue that both processes and
performance outcomes engender a posthuman assemblage which diffracts the performers’ identity and
the perception of the spectators. I then evaluate how the combined effect of intermedial performances,
social media interactions, original animations, digital cinema, hybrid use of screen technology and
online platforms build towards the in-presence reveal of the two digital performers in the pop-up
shop. The conclusion draws attention to the thresholds between material and immaterial, and the
entanglement between the techne of the performer’s body and that of the technology, in a quest for
soft boundaries between the post-pandemic human and non-human interaction.ASSaM Research Fun
