Guest Column: Performances Of The Non-Human

Performative Ecologies by Ruairi Glynn

In our contemporary cultural Zeitgeist, performance is rampant. In discussing disciplines as diverse (and divergent) as anthropology, gaming, psychology, sociology, art, design or marketing, the use of the word performance is ubiquitous and increasingly gaining traction. But why the sudden, almost meteoric rise of this word now, given that there were already some substantial "performative turns" in the past, with anthropology and sociology in the 1970s and cultural studies in the 1990s? What does performance imply and what does it promise?

If we work on the stage (the traditional site where most people associate the word's origin), performance denotes the act of playing out or “re-presenting” something that occurs in real space and time—right there and then. In other words, a performance suggests a series of determined (and sometimes undetermined) actions that somehow miraculously unfold before an observer and just as miraculously, disappear without a physical trace into our memories. If we work with technology, however, performance describes how a particular device functions according to a certain set of technical-material standards. The device, of course, doesn't re-present or enact anything other than its own functional characteristics.

We might wonder what the big deal is. Performance as a concept seems simple—implying the way someone or something acts, behaves or functions in and over time. But the word's etymology—from the old French parfournir, meaning, “to complete totally, to furnish forth, to carry out thoroughly or to bring to completion” — suggests something slightly different and perhaps more interesting.

I recently published a large book entitled Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance for MIT Press. The book has been picked up by all sorts of people (which is what I wanted in the first place), from engineers and designers working on sensor-based interactive environments in Dubai to curators and museum directors and, of course, students and fellow artists in the visual, performing and technologically-based arts who are curious to know what lineages they come from and where they might take their own experimental work in the not so distant future. Entangled attempts to both disentangle the word performance from its convoluted histories while simultaneously, demonstrate that historically across the 20th and now 21st centuries, artists, designers and researchers who have created all kinds of "performances" in theatre, scenography, visual arts, sound, architecture and the electronic/interactive/digital arts have always been entangled, that is, enmeshed in, what 5th century Greek civilization called techne—literally, skill or making.

Of course, the word techne lies at the root of our contemporary term technology. Technology implies some set of connections between skill (techne) and order (logos). In an interesting book entitled Hands End: Technology and the Limits of Nature, the trained philosopher and musician David Rothenberg describes technology as that which extends human action out into the world. But forces beyond us are always thwarting this extension. In other words, there is a tension between us humans wanting to order the world through our "performative acts" (which suggest trying to complete something or carry through completely) while the world continuously eludes us and slips from our grasp.

This is not just an academic question that is the purview of philosophers. From the collapse of interdependent financial markets or the ecological catastrophes of Fukushima, recent events demonstrate to us the urgency of trying to understand a viewpoint beyond the human. So, what does performance have to do with this? Having worked in the performing, visual and technologically based arts for more than 1.5 decades now, I see an interesting sea change (or paradigm shift, as the great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called it) in artistic and design practice (particularly in the technologically inflected arts): a move away from the performative acts of strictly human bodies and towards an emphasis on environments or ecologies of techno-scientifically orchestrated things, transient objects and processes. Indeed, many artists and designers (not to mention engineers and natural scientists) are increasingly focused on the non-human. The Creators Project discussion with UVA about their stage for Coachella, for instance, discusses how to “make the stage (an assembly of metal and lights) a performer.”

Another example, which illustrates the current focus on what I call the non-human performative turn, is Translife, a large-scale media arts exhibition that myself and 79 other artists from the entire world will take place in this July-August at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. The exhibition explicitly attempts to shed light on the sensorial, the biological and the ecological issues that confront contemporary culture today. Indeed, if you look at the roster of fascinating artists and projects in the exhibition, you will get a quick sense of this new performative Zeitgeist—one which attempts to move beyond the anthropocentric stage and into lives and worlds beyond us which are themselves in the process of "furnishing forth."

_Chris Salter is an artist, Director of the Hexagram Concordia Institute for Research-Creation in the Media Arts and Technology, and Associate Professor for Design + Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in the areas of theater and computer-generated sound from Stanford University. He was also visiting professor at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the KhM in Cologne, Germany. After collaborating with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt, he co-founded and directed the art and research organization Sponge (1997-2003). His solo and collaborative work has been seen at major international exhibitions including the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica, Villette Numerique, EMPAC, Meta.Morf, Mois Multi, Transmediale, EXIT Festival, Place des Arts Montréal, Elektra, Todays Art, PACT Zollverein, Shanghai Dance Festival, and V2_, among many others. He is the author of _Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance_ (MIT Press, 2010)._