Performance and Posthumanism: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies

✍ Scribed by Christel Stalpaert (editor), Kristof van Baarle (editor), Laura Karreman (editor)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 360
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Recent technological and scientific developments have demonstrated a condition that has already long been upon us. We have entered a posthuman era, an assertion shared by an increasing number of thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Grusin, and Bernard Stiegler. The performing arts have reacted to these developments by increasingly opening up their traditionally ‘human’ domain to non-human others. Both philosophy and performing arts thus question what it means to be human from a posthumanist point of view and how the agency of non-humans – be they technology, objects, animals, or other forms of being – ‘works’ on both an ontological and performative level. The contributions in this volume brings together scholars, dramaturgs, and artists, uniting their reflections on the consequences of the posthuman condition for creative practices, spectatorship, and knowledge.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Performance and Posthumanism: Co-Creation, Response-Ability and Epistemologies
A Genealogy of Posthuman Research
Posthumanism Brings Two Tendencies Together
Does It Matter?
On Things and Objects
Realigning Action and Movement on the Posthuman Stage
PART I: Co-Creation with Thingly Matter (Dramaturgies)
Contemporary Posthumanist Performing Arts
PART II: Response-Ability in Thingly Variations (Politics and Ethics)
PART III: Posthuman Epistemologies: The Politics of Knowledge Transmission
Coda
Works Cited
Co-creation with Thingly Matter: Dramaturgies
9 Variations on Things and Performance
The Apparatus Variation
Variation on the Apparatus Variation
The Commodity Variation
The Dispossession Variation
The Decolonizing Variation
The Ethical Variation
The Anti-Personhood Variation
The Lines-Of-Flight Variation
The Final Quote Variation
References
Does the Donkey Act? Balthazar as Protagonist
The Modern Human-Animal Divide
The Balthazar Project
The Pragmatic Individuality of Organism and Umwelt
Performance Ethology, the Specificity of Donkeys
Interspecies Identification in Theatre with Humorous Results
Whitehead’s Cosmology of Action
The Ontogenetic Dimension of Interspecies Performance Action
References
Latent Performances. Conditions for Some Things to Happen
The Latent Performance Lexicon
References
Aesthetics of Mykorrhiza. The Practice of Apparatus
Against Aboutness
Mycorrhiza: An Apparatus
Mycorrhiza: An Aesthetic Following Mushrooms
References
On Composite Bodies and New Media Dramaturgy
Introduction
References
Response-Ability in Thingly Variations: Politics and Ethics
Decoding Effet Papillon, a Choreography for Three Dancers Inspired by the World of Video Games
Contemporary Bodies
Effet Papillon—Creation Process
Sensors and Computer Programming: Towards a Dramaturgy of Simulacra
On Their Wings
References
The Refrain and the Territory of the Posthuman
Conclusion: The Climate Crisis and the Precarious Creation of the Unknown
References
The Right to Remain Forgotten and the Data Crimes of Post-digital Culture: A Ceaseless Traumatic Event
The Rights of the Data-Subject
Within the Internet Folds of Social Media
Droit à l’oubli (The Right to Be Forgotten)
The Authenticity of the Virtual (The Techno-Memory of Drones and the Selfie)
Image Crimes
Conclusion
References
The Biography of a Digital Device: The Interwovenness of Human and Non-human Movements in Production and Distribution Processes as Thematized in the Artwork Rare Earthenware by Unknown Fields
Reconfigurations of the Real and the Possible
Emerging Landscapes at the Point of Intersection of Terraforming and Material Autonomy
The Biography of Things
The Material Backbone of Digital Culture
References
Tentacular Thinking-With-Things in Storied Places. Parliament of Things (2019) by Building Conversation
Facilitating Conversations and Co-creating Conversational Performances with Building Conversation
Resurging9 ‘Lost Words’ in Conversational Practices/Performances
Developing a Grammar of Animacy in the Wood Wide Web
Animating a Grammar of Animacy in Conversational Practices/Performances
Resurging Knowledge Through Tentacular Thinking-With-Things
Things Emerging as Mediators in a Parliament of Things
Tentacular Thinking-With-Flora in the Storied Place of the Botanical Garden
New Modes of Activism: Silent Revolt of Interconnectivity Through Art-Science-Activist Worldings
References
Posthuman Epistemologies: The Politics of Knowledge Transmission
The Point of the Matter: Performativity in Scientific Practices
Introduction
The Problem of Knowledge Production: Finding or Constructing Proof
The Problem of Knowledge Production: Making Matter Perform
Re-Imagining Knowledge Transmission: From One-Way Channels to Open-Endedness
Re-imagining Knowledge Transmission: Re-enactment as a Non-representational Approach
Knowledge Production in Practice: What Mathematicians Do
Knowledge Production in Practice: Collaborations Between Technological and Human Agents
Some Further Thoughts, Rather Random, yet Organized
More Thoughts Again, Rather Abstract and One After Another
References
Music Notation and Distributed Creativity: The Textility of Score Annotation
Case Study 1: To My Father for Clarinet and Piano
Case Study 2: The Instant Composers Pool Orchestra
Itinerary (An)notation
Conclusion
References
Spectators in the Laboratory: Between Theatre and Technoscience
Artists and/or Scientists
Experiments and Experiences
Laboratory of Social Imagination
Conclusion
References
A Hybrid Device to Choreograph the Gaze: Embodying Vision Through a Historical Discourse on Optics in Benjamin Vandewalle’s Peri-Sphere
Investigating Vision
Exploring Parameters of Perception
Different Angles
References
Index