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will turn and walk fast directly away from them as soon as they start to approach the bank. Use your judgement. Keep an eye on them and take your chance to get away without being seen. Just act as if you’re getting exactly the same call as your partner. If they press their keypad, just pretend to press your keypad too. They don’t know a thing and they don’t need to know. (Blast Theory, 2011a ) City actants: urban furniture and performance art props The city actants include urban furniture and performance art props situated in urban space. While Blast Theory
The machinic city investigates the role of performance art to help us reflect on contemporary urban living, as human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban fabric. This is illustrated by several case studies on performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future. As cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, the performative potential of the aesthetic machine is analysed, as it assembles with media, Capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is analysed through its different – design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines. The machinic city pays particular attention to participation, describing how digitally mediated performance art interventions in urban space foreground different modes of subjectivity emerging from human and machine hybrids. This highlights the importance of dissensus as a constitutive factor of urban life and as a means of countering machinist determinism in present and future conceptualisations of city life.
, and how they assemble with other machine-actants, steering the narrative of everyday life towards unpredictable outcomes. These performative machinic assemblages are representative of the potential of performance art to probe, reconfigure and enable reflection on the social and spatial exchanges in the machinic city. No matter how controlled (or not) your experience of the city turns out to be, your mode of engagement with it is a unique performance and an interpretation of it. This performance consists of an assemblage where agency is distributed across its
man in Bangladesh. Gibson’s argument suggests that we should consider how certain practices, territorial arrangements, technologies, biotechnological developments, visionary concepts and alternative modes of living can provide us with a fragmented vision of the future and unequal access to its potential benefits. Many of the performance art projects that I have analysed so far reflect on how digital communication technologies are reconfiguring current modes of social engagement with the machinic city. However, an important role that performance art can fulfil is
Participation in digitally mediated environments In order to analyse how participation unfolds through digitally mediated performance art events, I turn back to Dixon’s argument (discussed in Chapter 1 ) about the introversion of the computer paradigm. In his comparison of the Futurist movement and contemporary digital performance, Dixon ( 2007 : 64) highlights the futurists’ extreme enthusiasm for the technologies that were emerging at the time. As he points out, the futurists appropriated them in expressive performances, as they singled out machines
A participatory account of performance art in the city Walking through the city, your mobile rings. You pick up your phone and answer. You are expecting this call, but the voice on the other side is unfamiliar. It is unclear if it is a recording or a real person, yet it is reassuring. It prompts you to partake in an experience that you earlier consented to, although you are not sure about the aim or the outcome. The voice tells you to remain alert, to avoid talking to anyone and to go to a specific location in a few hours’ time. The voice is intense and
Another type of machine I have argued for the importance of the aesthetic machine – in particular digitally mediated performance art – as a form of deliberation on contemporary urban living. This type of aesthetic machine is not situated in opposition to technical machines, nor does it confer a higher degree of agency to its technical components. The aesthetic machine is assembled from several other machines as it traverses other ‘Universes of value’ (Guattari, 1995 : 105). In this chapter I analyse these machines to understand how they operate and how they
utilitarian theatre’ (in Bordwell, 1993 : 115). Nevertheless, the aim in these performances to incorporate machinist techniques with specific participatory outcomes in mind precedes contemporary digitally mediated performance art. According to Eisenstein, the spectacle ‘subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator’ (in Bordwell, 1993 : 116). This is achieved by resorting to attractions, described as techniques ‘to stimulate strong perceptual and
digitally mediated performance art as a form of aesthetic machine that can generate spaces of deliberation on our role as an actant within the assemblage that constitutes the machinic city. Mediated performance art overlays artistic narratives onto urban space, which are mediated through innovative technological assemblages and that demand participation and reflection. This unusual assemblage generates performative events in urban space where stage and audience are combined. Other aesthetic machines also have the ability to generate spaces for deliberation on
Robinson/Timothy Drever 16 Robert Ballagh, ‘A Sense of Ireland’, unpublished Arts Festival Catalogue, ed. Simon Oliver (London, 1980), 50. 17 Paul Henry, An Irish Portrait (London: B.T. Batsford, 1951), 98. 18 See J. Crampton Walker, Irish Life and Landscape (Dublin, Talbot Press, 1926), n.p. 19 Caroline McCarthy, Greetings (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1996). 20 Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Dublin: Penguin, 2006), 3. 21 Robinson, Setting Foot, 77. 22 For more on map-making as a form of performance art, see Derek Gladwin’s essay in this