Performance, Technology, & Presence
Excerpt from MA Visual Culture Final Dissertation, The University of Nottingham, September 2013
Full Paper available on Academia.edu
The performance is really about presence. If you escape presence, your performance is gone. It is always you, the mind, and the body. You have to be in the here and now.1
Marina Abramovic
“The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising or in the high arts is towards participation in a process, rather than the apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt.”2
Recalling Marshall McLuhan’s words, this paper is an attempt to study the effects and consequences of technology and how it allowed performance artists greater flexibility in experimenting with space, time and representation, engaging in a social and institutional critique. The pertinent questions here are: how are performance artists reflecting upon our social and political structures today, and what would the role of technology be in such critique? If performance art, which is a time-based art that emphasizes interaction between artist and audience, is still concerned with keeping ‘art’ close to people, it will need to take into account the new spaces and times engendered by technology. Furthermore, it will need to devise its own space and time, fashioning its own modes engagement and perception, by questioning how the artist can still be present today in a world where we interact with screens more than people, where we broadcast our lives instead of living them.
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