Performativities of Mediated Presence

by Eszter Rosta, 8 June 2020

Performativities of Mediated Presence:

In this material historical moment, we are perhaps at a point in which presence can no longer be defined in terms of physical and temporal relationships[1] of humans being before each other. With the global impacts of pandemic related restrictions on movement and the implementations of physical distancing, critical considerations of new forms of mediated presence are imperative. Performance documentation, the development of digital performative platforms, and social media livestream functions have been central in the shifting and reconceptualization of my practice as an emerging performance artist – they enabled me to both experience and perform mediated presence. Performing works on digital platforms, for instance livestreaming a performance on Instagram, allow for critical interventions and inquiries of what it means to perform presence and liveness in the current context. Along this line, performative digital spaces have emerged - such as whereabouts [Facebook][2], Bodily Response [M;ST][3], Pandemic Encounters [Third Space Network][4], and Mile Zero Dance [Edmonton]. Each is dedicated to programming and disseminating performative works that can be engaged with from home. In my view, however, ostensible claims for an authentic and ontological presence continue to pervade dominant apprehensions of performative aesthetic experience.

Situating an Aesthetics of Presence:

As a relational form, performance art aims for both a confrontation and intersubjective encounter, militating against traditional conventions of spectatorship and modernist-formalist aesthetic experience. Performance is most often privileged as delivering an authentic and ‘present’ body[5], whereby corporeality, bodily presence, and liveness are deemed fundamental. ‘Presence’ as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place[6]; what occurs in an action or performance happens hic et nunc[7]/ here and now. Peggy Phelan argues that “performance’s only life is in the present; performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”[8]. In effect, performance generates an ontological presence through the nonreproductive conditions of an embodied encounter with the spatio-temporal event. To the degree that performance attempts to exist as representational, “it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology”[9]. In a performative aesthetics, the embodied presence[10] and flesh-to-flesh engagement[11] of performer and spectator materialize a process of collective becoming through affective and transformative energies.

Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics crystallizes the privileging of authentic corporeal and embodied presence. Fischer-Lichte argues for an aesthetics of presence - rather than of presence effects. The presence effects created by technical and electronic media produce the impression of presentness without actually bringing forth bodies or objects as present[12]. I follow Fischer-Lichte’s account of technological and electronic - or as I am suggesting, mediated presence:

“Human bodies, their fragments, objects, and landscapes are made to seem present in a particularly immediate manner, but they remain constituted of moving lights or pixel arrangements on a screen. Real human bodies, objects, or landscapes actually remain absent. [Technical and electronic media] approach is diametrically opposed to generating presence. While presence brings forth the human body in its materiality, as energetic body, and living organism, technical and electronic media create the impression of human presence by de-materializing and disembodying it”; the effect and impression of presence rather immaterializes the performers’ actual physicality and disembodies them[13] (Fischer-Lichte 100-101).

Fischer-Lichte’s performative aesthetics reproduce Kantian and formalist value judgements, demanding a moment of encounter wherein the work of art can be apprehended and judged[14]. Thus, the intelligibility of a performative aesthetics of presence is dependent on the hierarchal disposition of the performative art object; its authentic form is marked in the immediacy of presence and material physicalities of the live body.

Towards a Performative Aesthetics of Mediated Presence:

My investigation has a phenomenological basis. It does not aim to negate or undermine the practice of artists who choose not to engage in mediated performance, but rather to call attention to the limits of what we know about liveness and presence. What exactly is at stake in claims of authentic presence in performance art? Can presence exist in mediated performance and representation? Is our experience of performance devalued if we do not have direct access to the physical presence of performing bodies?

Performance discourses claim that performance acts and events are authentic because they are temporal and seemingly immediate; the body is presented directly to spectators via actions that are ephemeral[15], such as raw action art and performance of the mid-seventies, or the recent spectacle of Marina Abramović’s ‘present’ physical body and durational gaze in The Artist is Present [2010]. However, ontological presumptions of an immediate and ephemeral performative aesthetics are largely ideological, and reinforce, as Amelia Jones argues, untenable claims for the authenticity and presence of live art[16]. My view, here, suggests that all experiences in our contemporary culture, performative or otherwise, are inexorably mediated, for instance, with the use of electronic devices, social media, video recording, surveillance, etc. Therefore, there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including performance art[17]. While ‘live’ presence in performance undoubtedly differs from mediated presence, “neither has a privileged relationship to the [historical] ‘truth’ of the performance” (Jones 11). To the extent that mediated technologies and virtual constructions respond to us in real time, they feel present[18]. Mediated presence can afford a new way of experiencing affective and intersubjective encounters.

The rapid evolvement of COVID-19 has effectively turned the concept of presence on its head, abstracting constitutive relationships between art object and performer, and between spectator and paradigmatic aesthetic experience. My quest to investigate mediated presence has been more difficult than imagined. I have been confronted with the scarcity of discourses regarding mediated and digital performance and liveness, specifically in a performative aesthetics and art historical framework. I would like to acknowledge that there have been new media artistic movements that primarily focused on fetishisms of network culture[19], utilizing the internet to mediate aesthetic experience – namely net.art in the early nineties. COVID-19 changes the parameters, however, and I am specifically interested in what it means when the internet is no longer an object of technological and artistic fantasy. What does it mean when physical presence is controlled and restricted, and mediated presence is the only form of presence allowed? Although significant and considerable critical research has been attended to presence and liveness[20] - for instance of performance documentation, performance re-enactment, performance re-presentation, and digital liveness, I struggled to find anything concerning the emergent phenomena (and my arguably particular research-creational interest) of livestream and mediated presence in contemporary performance art practices. This is presumably due to the rapid development of the pandemic, whereby performative practices have axiomatically mutated, shifted, and adapted in response to supervening social restrictions; the definition of what ‘counts’ as present has expanded beyond persisting compulsions of presence as located within the live body and technological fantasies.

Philip Auslander’s articulations of the concept of liveness in Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective serves as my guide: “the way that the idea of what counts culturally as live changes over time in relation to technological change”; “new ways of thinking and talking about a new medium will not arise until there is a social need for them” (Auslander 3-4). I parallel Michel Foucault’s of “dispositif” [apparatus], according to which “discourses, institutions, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions […] are the elements of the apparatus” (Foucault 194). Foucault’s dispositif “has at its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” (Foucault 195). It is through the heterogeneous institutional structures and discourse - established and re-established over time - that discipline the social body. Presence as dispositif may help us reveal hierarchical structures reflected in the value judgements of traditional performative aesthetics. I suggest that digital performative platforms can offer mediated potentialities of affective presence if we are willing to engage with them as present and experience it as contemporaneous[21]. It is my premise then, that a dispositif of presence is necessary to reconsider the heterogeneous ensemble[22] of performative aesthetics and affordances of emergent material formations, practices, and discourses of mediated presence.

Following Auslander, liveness as a historically variable effect permits our experiencing of digital technologies as a live function[23], the concept of the live being historically contingent. Positioning presence as historically and socially contingent makes us realize that conceptualizations of presence have been resistant to development until now. Our current material historical moment brings a supervening social necessity[24] of a new form of mediated presence articulated through the continuous development of emergent technologies. Nick Couldry proposes a form of ‘online liveness’, defined as social [emphasis added] (Couldry 356) co-presence made possible by the internet as an underlying infrastructure[25]. In this sense, online liveness, and thus mediated presence, becomes antithetical to a performative aesthetics of presence. The experience of an authentic presence cannot be limited and privileged to ontological performer-spectator physicalities of the temporal and ephemeral event. Rather, the embodiment of presence can extend to a social and phenomenological “sense of always being connected to other people of continuous, technologically mediated [temporal] co-presence with others known and unknown” (Auslander 6). How can presence “be [emphasis added] our [affective] relationship with others?” (Thera 2020).

Where do we go From Here?

The aestheticization and privileging of a ‘real’ presence highlights the unbridgeable chasm between performance and hierarchical art object that performance art originally intended to resist. In the pandemic’s radical dislocation of realities, we are forced to negotiate a mediated semblance of presence through indeterminate digital space, where we must “squeeze, shift, constrain, or release” (Oliver 2020) our praxes.

In my own practice, I have been investigating the contingencies and affordances of mediated presence. In my reconsideration of the relationship between bodies and technologies during a global pandemic, I have made humble efforts in subverting paradigmatic performative experiences. Following the onset of COVID-19 and the cancellation of the Dyscorpia pop-up exhibition, my collaborator Matthew Lapierre[26] and I performed a mediated iteration of our proposed performance on whereabouts [curated by Stephanie Patsula]. As digital performative platforms develop so quickly, mediated presence was and is a new form that proves necessary to shift the direction and future of performance art. Following the whereabouts livestream performance event, I recognized the potentialities and aesthetic merit of mediated performance; performing on digital platforms, such as Instagram, has allowed me to expand my practice in ways that were once unimaginable.

In some ways, I would argue that I prefer mediated performance to ‘live’ performance. Mediated performance minimizes the anxieties surrounding performance and the confrontational gazes of spectators (though I have found these anxieties to be integral to my performance practice). Yet, I cannot deny that it is a strange and surreal space to navigate, where I oscillate between performing for no-one and everyone. Rather than the encounter with physical bodies in space, I am confronted with anonymized spectators. I can see the usernames of people that have joined the livestream, I can see ‘likes’ and comments, I can see the number of people viewing. In my view, however, spectators are still present (even if mediated) in a particular time and indeterminate space. I am currently working on a durational, physically mediated public performance for Dyscorpia 2.1. Referencing Marina Abramović’s ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010) and Amelia Jones (2011), I aim to reframe ontologies of performance by questioning what it means to perform with and through mediated presence while simultaneously being physically present with other bodies.

We are navigating a precarious moment in time that marks tangible restrictions of presence and near-impossibilities of flesh-to-flesh contacts. On this basis, digital performative spaces afford the conditions possible to perform and engage a mediated presence that, I suggest, can be as affective and intersubjective as the live event. Experiences of mediated presence result from our contemporaneous acts of grasping virtual entities[27] as present. Performance art is always in motion, existing beyond a specific material confine, its definition perpetually shifting and changing through time[28]. How can we move beyond the material confines of presence? To conclude, I quote Amelia Jones: “rather than clinging on to an outdated modernist notion of presence that relies on a mystified notion of artistic intentionality” (Jones 28), the best we can do might be to simply acknowledge where we go from here, and what it means to be present.

Notes:

[1] Auslander on liveness as technologically mediated relationships among human beings permitted by the machine. Auslander, Philip. ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Vol. 34, no. 3. MIT Press, 2012. 6. 

[2] Patsula, Stephanie [curator]. ‘there but not here’. whereabouts [Facebook]. https://www.facebook.com/whereabouts.live/

[3] M;ST. ‘Bodily Response’. Mountain Standard Time Performative Art. https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/bodily-response

[4] Jones, Amelia. ‘Introduction: Performance, Live or Dead’. Art Journal. Vol. 70. no. 3. CAA, 2011. 33.

[5] Jones, Amelia. ‘The Artist is Present: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’. TDR. Vol. 55. no. 1. MIT Press, 2011. 18.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Jain, Saskya Iris. Routledge, 2008. 99.

[8] Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Psychology Press, 1993.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, 2008. 99.

[11] Jones, Amelia. ‘Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’. Performance Art: (Some Theory) and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century. CAA, 1997. 12.

[12] Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, 2008. 100.

[13] Ibid. 101.

[14] Jones, Amelia. ‘Introduction’. Art Journal. Vol. 70. no. 3. CAA, 2011. 35.

[15] Ibid. 33.

[16] Jones, Amelia. ‘The Artist is Present: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’. 2011. 31.

[17] Jones, Amelia. ‘Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, 2011. 18.

[18] Auslander, Philip. ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’, 2012. 10.

[19] Loveless, Natalie. 16 June 2020. Zoom Meeting.

[20] I owe gratitude to Amelia Jones’ ‘Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’ (and writings on presence and performance documentation) and Philip Auslander’s ‘Digital Liveness’ as formative to my thinking. As significant as these works are to me, they were written in 2011 and 2012, and effectively cannot speak to the radical [performative] technological advancements that have emerged in the past decade.

[21] Gadamer argues that the work of art presents itself to an audience and in effect constitutes a claim, “concretized in a demand” that is fulfilled when the audience accepts and responds to it. Gadamer borrows the term ‘contemporaneous’ from Søren Kierkegaard, whereby it is through this contemporaneity that the work becomes meaningful and achieves full presence; it must be “experienced and taken seriously as present” (Gadamer, Hans-George 124). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed, trans. Weinsheimer Joel, Marshall G. Continuum, 2004. 123.

[22] Foucault, Michel. ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ [Interview]. Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Pantheon. 194.

[23] Auslander, Philip. ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’. 2012. 3.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Couldry, Nick. ‘Liveness, ‘Reality’, and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone. The Communication Review 7, 2004. 356-357.

[26] Matthew Lapierre, MFA Candidate [Painting]. University of Alberta.

[27] Auslander, Philip. ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’, 2012. 10.

[28] Thera, Becky. ‘Performance Art’ [Intermedia 337/439: Studies in Performance Art]. 26 May 2020. Lecture.

Bibliography:

Auslander, Philip. ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Vol. 34, no. 3. MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal Inc, 2012. 3-11.

Couldry, Nick. ‘Liveness, ‘Reality’, and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone. The Communication Review 7, 2004. 356-357.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Jain, Saskya Iris. Routledge, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ [Interview]. Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Pantheon. 194-228.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel; Marshall G, Donald. Continuum, 2004. 

Jones, Amelia. ‘The Artist is Present: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’. TDR. Vol. 55. no. 1. MIT Press, 2011. 16-45.

Jones, Amelia. ‘Introduction’. Art Journal. Vol. 70. no. 3. CAA, 2011. 33-38.

Jones, Amelia. ‘Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’. Performance Art: (Some Theory) and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century. CAA, 1997. 11-18.

Loveless, Natalie. 16 June 2020. Zoom Meeting.

M;ST. ‘Bodily Response’. Mountain Standard Time Performative Art. https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/bodily-response

Oliver, Marilène. ‘Dyscorpia 2.1 Call for Submissions’. Dyscorpia. University of Alberta, 15 May 2020. 

Patsula, Stephanie [curator]. ‘there but not here’. whereabouts [Facebook]. https://www.facebook.com/whereabouts.live/

Phelan, Peggy. ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Psychology Press, 1993.

Thera, Becky. ‘Performance Art’. University of Alberta [Intermedia 337/439 Studies in Performance Art], 26 May 2020. Lecture.