[-empyre-] welcome to Ashley and Sabine

[Kettley, Sarah]

Hi All,


I have been very interested to read the discussions so far and am sorry for not getting involved earlier with the materiality topic. Still, this question of the performer/audience divide seems to be closely connected with that of performance and performativity, and of the spectacle and the mundane.

I would suggest that in maintaining culture we seek to construct a rhythm of mundanity and festival, of our own everyday performativity in the social milieu, interspersed with the spectacular performance. Artist Adam Chodzko showed a series of masks at the Tate St Ives a few years ago which played with this rhythm – the ‘masks’ were made from collections of carefully arranged everyday materials, such as straws and model airfix kits, and acted as lenses on the world to transform the mundane into carnival.

John Dewey in Art as Experience (1934) made this observation as he sought to explain art’s role in society – in contrast to the concentrated experience of the performance, everyday action can become dispersed and miscellaneous. With our habitual focus on technology as useful as opposed to expressive, the inherited ideal for wearables clings on as being similarly dispersed in the everyday – using them in performance of course can challenge that assumption or work with it….

In recent collaborative work, I have just started to think about performance as a platform for exploring wearable technology, and have some broad questions to add to the discussion…

Does using technology in performance present models for potential everyday performativity? Or does it tend towards spectacle whether we like it or not? Is the point to work with the technology as another material or concept with the same awareness brought to ‘traditional’ techniques? How does it fit into the history of theatrical technologies (deus ex machina)?

Apologies for any naivety with this topic,

All best wishes,
Sarah

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