Performing the Digital brings together fourteen essays on digital culture and performance studies from scholars and practitioners across a wide range of disciplines, such as theatre, media studies, the fine arts, digital cultures and even business and management studies. The result is a rich, if sometimes sprawling, exploration of the many points of connection between digital experience and performance practice in the twenty-first century.
The collection begins with a co-authored introduction by the editors, which briefly outlines the field and identifies the broad questions that unite the subsequent chapters: ‘How is performativity shaped by contemporary technological conditions? And how do performative practices reflect and alter techno-social formations?’ (p. 9). A ‘performative turn’ is identified in cultural studies and the social sciences, alongside a digital revolution in all aspects of contemporary life, not least the performing arts. The result is the possibility that all aspects of human interaction can be considered performance, and furthermore that ‘today's technological condition’ (p. 13) is constantly shaping what such performances of everyday life look like.
Such a proposition is helpful in that it acknowledges the porous boundaries between ‘real life’ and ‘art’, as well as the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’. But it also casts the net of discussion very widely, creating a challenge for the coherence of the collection as a whole. The editors forgo attempting to group the essays thematically, opting instead for what they call ‘a non-hierarchical and “flat”’ way of ordering the chapters (p. 14). Within this model, each essay becomes a stand-alone section in and of itself, preceded by a verb in its present progressive tense (‘Historicizing’, ‘Encrypting’, ‘Co-producing’). In this way, the unfolding nature of both digital culture and performance is emphasized, alongside the spreadable, summary-defying experience of networked life.
This means that the very fine series of essays that follow do feel like thirteen individual studies rather than a joined-up investigation. The brevity of the introduction, the lack of a conclusion, and most noticeably the absence of an index add to this impression. However, once this is accepted, a wealth of exciting and provocative case studies are to be found. Many of the chapters mix theorization with practice-oriented research, illustrating how individual and often very localized arts projects contribute to the wider theorization of the field. Imanuel Schipper's chapter on ‘The Performative Spectator’, for instance, in which he links the nineteenth-century flâneur to the twenty-first-century immersive audience member, explores how two very different, site-specific productions by Swiss/German performance groups test the different kinds of agency made possible by digital tools. Likewise, Susan Kozel's chapter, ‘Performing Encryption’, considers how her own experiments in movement and performance installations might create ‘noise in the system’ (p. 129) that can disrupt the pervasive, low-level surveillance that has become a worrying part of twenty-first-century life.
Indeed, though the collection makes no claim to an overarching argument, issues of agency and surveillance frequently surface throughout its essays. Martina Leeker, in ‘Performing (the) Digital’, warns that ‘Digital cultures are increasingly non-transparent, directing human agency on an affective level (affective computing), and are implemented for operations in the dark’ (p. 47). Sigrid Merx, in her ‘Mapping Invisibility’, focuses on how ‘surveillance art’ that documents the walking paths of excluded and dispossessed immigrants in Amsterdam might in fact ‘interrupt and counter our contemporary surveillance society’ (p. 161). In both cases these authors draw attention to the controlling aspects of technology, which may constrain us in ways that we do not fully understand, but that also might be used to subvert and redirect the seemingly all-knowing gaze of digital surveillance systems.
Another point of convergence across the collection is an interest in the affective potential of such technologies and the experiences they produce. Oliver Leistert, in ‘Mobile Phone Signals and Protest Crowds’, considers how an understanding of ‘affect as the base of all sociality’ (p. 145) might help us theorize the nature of group experience as mediated through phone technologies. Marie-Luise Angerer, in ‘Speculation about 1:0’, reflects in turn on ‘how digital technologies enable new affective performances’ (p. 83), especially within the new intervals of time that such technologies expose. As digital culture changes the way we relate to each other and to ourselves, new forms of emotional and embodied experience necessarily emerge.
Overall there is much to admire in this collection, which illustrates well the many entanglements produced by digital technology, the performing arts and twenty-first-century life. A clearer guide to the shared points of emphasis in the volume would be helpful, as would a stronger steer away from academic jargon in some chapters. Still, this is a valuable and impressive book for both its interdisciplinary coverage and the theoretical insights arising from its creative case studies.
