The Transtemporality of Online Performance

Abstract

This article examines notions of temporality of online performance as a way to rethink earlier debates about performance ontologies. Today, online, and increasingly mobile, technological activities such as photo and video sharing, instant messaging, blogging and social networking organise around performance practitioners’ day-to-day existence. In this networked society, performances are constantly mediated through the prism of myriads of digital platforms. Because performances are enacted within or supported by digitally mediated networks and, this is crucial, they incessantly expand temporally, I will refer to online performance in terms of transtemporality, rather than depend on an ontology of unmediation and presence. I depart from Rebecca Schneider's Performance Remains (2011) where she argues how notions of performance, reiteration and documentation are intertwined and contingent, and from the recent performative answers to the logic of the archive found in Amelia Jones's and Adrian Heathfield's anthology Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012). I argue, by illustrations of Adam Weinert's performance work (2013–2014) as well as my own (2010–2012), that online performance is never fully present but immanently distended through remediation. Performances participate in inherently ruptured transtemporal networks (tweets, reperformances, blogging, video sharing) through which they are continuously remediated and transformed. I propose that online performance even might suggest that performance continuously escapes a sense of Being. Performance's ontology, or rather its ontogenesis proposed by Heathfield (2012), resides with the elements of transformation inherent in its online remediations.