Affiliated issue with 2020 College Art Association Annual Conference, ‘flesh and circuit: rethinking performance and technology’ (Chicago, IL, USA)

Abstract

The live, embodied, material, and interactive qualities of performance have made it a notable means of exploring the creative potential of technological engagement, acting as a critical vector for revealing and resisting the technological colonisation of everyday life. The innovative collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) during the 1960’s with artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg, Stelarc’s extreme body modifications, Dumb Type’s intermedia performance, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra’s poetic and speculative imaginings, have mapped the advances in technology and opened new creative fields to explore embodiment. However, there are still some significant oversights in regard to the pervasive and intimate nature of technological mediation, surveillance, and behavioural modification. Currently, technological embodiment assumes new forms tied to data assemblages of unprecedented scope and granularity. The body is commodified as data to be exchanged, controlled, and influenced in algorithmic regimes of governance and as raw material for machine learning and AI. Artists working with performance and technology are engaging with these exclusions, rethinking the intersection of performance and technology, and re-defining embodiment for the twenty-first century. The following articles start to fill these gaps in the literature on art, technology and embodiment through the lens of performance. While much remains to be written on the topic to account for current artistic practice and the changing nature of digital platforms and ubiquity of algorithmic governance, these articles point to new ways of thinking on issues around the intersections of flesh and circuits. Technology, in a broad sense of the term that includes but is not limited to the digital, alters experiences of embodiment. Philosopher Bernard Stiegler describes how humans and technology have co-evolved as technology extends the capacities of human memory and technologies are developed to accommodate human needs. (Stiegler 1998) Gilbert Simondon articulates how technology and living beings share a milieu that influences processes of becoming, or what he refers to as individuation. Such processes involve a rapport between humans and technical objects where there is a ‘coupling between the living and the non-living’ (Simondon 2016, xvi). Bringing together Maurice Merleau-Ponty with John Dewey, philosopher of technology Don Idhe argues that the experiences afforded through technologies are post-phenomenological, extending human sensory capacity beyond corporeal limits (Ihde 2002, 2017). Moreover, the relational existence of humans and technology is richly intertwined. Drawing from Karen Barad’s agential realism and theories of diffraction (Barad 2007), Chris Salter describes how these entanglements are realised and revealed through performance (Salter 2010). Performance elucidates the relational characteristic of human engagement with digital technologies, which Simondon eludes to when he states: ‘what resides in the machines is human reality, human gesture fixed and crystallized into working structures’ (Simondon 2016, 18). Technology changes what it means to be embodied, while introducing new types of corporeal and affective experience.