March 18, 2005
Postdigital Remix Culture and Online Performance
The Ends of Performance
"Peggy Phelan writes on the intersection between knowledge and the medium of the Internet in her introduction to The Ends of Performance [Phelan and Lane, eds. 1997]. Reading and thinking about some of her ideas there started me on a trajectory of thought about performance in cyberspace which has culminated in this website.
The electronic paradigm as an epistemic event represents something more than a new way to transmit information; it redefines knowledge itself into that which can be sent and transmitted… Performance studies, precisely because it has struggled so rigorously with the perils of preservation and the treacheries of transmission, is alert to the Net's potential to flatten and screen that which we might want most to remember, to love, to learn [Phelan and Lane, eds. 1997, p. 8].
On the surface, Phelan's point here seems valid -- many important performative dimensions of human communication are lost in network transmission. Eye contact and body language, for example, are not readable through email, and listening to a webcast is clearly not the same experience as being at a live concert." Continue reading >> [from Postdigital Remix Culture and Online Performance by John von Seggern]
Posted by jo at March 18, 2005 05:56 PM
