Reprogramming the Stage: A Heuristic for Posthuman Performance

Abstract

In this essay, we expand upon scholarly conversations concerning digital performance to demonstrate how performance studies’ current, primarily humanistic, paradigm for theorizing digital performance is due for an upgrade. We review how rigorous articulations of digital performance disrupt a hegemonic struggle between liveness and virtuality and suggest that ontologies associated with posthumanism may better serve performers, theorists, and audiences interested in exploring a more relationally framed “technocorporeal performance.” Finally, we offer three concepts for theorizing digital performance—terminal, network, and index—as ways to talk about such performance, using the example of one author's work.

Keywords:

• Digital performance
• Posthumanism
• Terminal
• Network
• Index

Notes

[1] See Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's 1923 play, The Crazy Locomotive. Though he was likely not the first to do so, Witkiewicz experimented with the mediated movement of a speeding locomotive on stage through the use of kinoforms.

[2] Other examples of the overhead in contemporary performance from practitioners associated with the National Communication Association include The Life and Times of King Kong, directed by Tracy Stephenson Shaffer; Scotch & Soda, directed by John LeBret; and Athena & the Apple, directed by Nico Wood.