Performance, Technology, Intimacy

Edited by Caroline Wake (UNSW, Sydney) and Anna Scheer (University of New England)

Taking its cue from the title of Caryl Churchill’s recent play, this issue investigates the performance, politics and dialectics of “love and information”.

In his review of the play, Michael Billington observed that, “we live in a world where information bombardment is in danger of leading to atrophy of memory, erosion of privacy and decay of feeling.” Yet his criticisms are couched in binaries that the play itself, and contemporary performance more broadly, challenges, unsettles, disrupts and even refuses. In an age of big data, small screens, social media and algorithmic match-making, can we really separate liking and “liking”? Even if we could, are we comfortable with the implicit hierarchies of co-presence here? If technology has become, for better or worse, an “architect of our intimacies” how does performance respond to, reproduce or resist both those architectures and those intimacies?

This issue of Performance Paradigm builds on work done by Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (2012, 2009), Sherry Turkle (2011), Steve Dixon (2007) and Gabriella Giannachi (2006) among others, in order to examine the relationship between intimacy, technology and performance.

Possible themes might include, but are not limited to: 

• the politics and performance of big data
• the cultural performance of the whistleblower (Snowden, Manning et al)
• the aesthetics of surveillance
• economies and technologies of information
• public histories, private memories, semi-private platforms
• performance ‘apps’ and audio tours
• theatres of seriality and sequence
• performances of algorithm
• the rise of one-to-one performance
• ‘domestic intimacies’, technology and performance (Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan)
• intimate technologies and art practices
• intimacy and presence, connectivity and physical distance
• the rise of live-streaming and live-tweeting theatre and performance
• the rise of analogue and “steam-punk” aesthetics
• the limits and value of participation
• affective interaction with/and technological practices
• ‘alone together’, ethical issues, technologised performance and intimacy (Sherry Turkle)
• performance documentation in an age of ‘ubiquitous photography’ (Martin Hand)

Please email submissions (6000-9000 words) to both the guest editor Anna Teresa Scheer (ascheer@une.edu.au) and the editor Helena Grehan (H.Grehan@murdoch.edu.au) no later than 29 April 2016.