Experiments in art : digital : life

We just got word that we’ll be presenting a performative talk at PSi #16 Performing Publics in Toronto, 9-13 June 2010.

The talk will focus on our life in the Fishbowl – if you’re up north, hope to see you there!

A lot of our work lately has been involved with looking at the human:digital interface. Is that the same as the human:machine interface? What are the differences that I am interested in exploring? How does our work in Performing the Self (the avatar as the real), as well as our work with the digital (trying to perfect our way of speaking to a camera by interviewing ourselves, editing, memorizing and repeating), etc. open up these ideas – but on the other side of the machine equation?

So this is a new idea: re-performing objects. We started with Longo sort of arbitrarily – we love his work, but probably wouldn’t have chosen it as a beginning for our investigation of material culture through performing the objects of that culture.

We’ve worked for a long time around the idea of object/surroundings informing identity. For instance, the image above, taken during the project being:paulandkate, captures a system of uniform objects that we created and built as our domestic environment.

But how does using the body to interpret images of the body (or even further: what about sculpture, Earthworks, Conceptualism…) work differently that the re-performance of actual “Performance Art” – or what we are attempting with the Cover Artists?

Part I: What is performance studies?

p5: “Self consciously positioned as liminal…between two states of being and belonging to neither.”

Essay 1: “Performance Studies, the broad spectrum approach” by Richard Schechner. pp 7-9.

• A working relationship must exist b/t teachers and professionals in the field
• Performance is a broad spectrum of activities including at least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life.
• “Broad spectrum approach”: treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as a subject for serious scholarly study
• “Performance quadrilog”: author, performer, director, spectator
• “Performative thinking must be seen as a means of cultural analysis” p8

“I believe that if the study of performance does not expand and deepen, going far beyond both the training of performance workers and the Western tradition of dram and dance, the whole academic performing arts enterprise constructed over the past half-century or so will collapse.” p9

<<This essay seems like a good place to look to for teaching philosophy.>>