Goldsmiths - University of London

Ponton, Anita. 2005. Vertigo (the technophenomenological body in performance). PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London. [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

My project is a consideration of how new technologies impact on the body in performance. The affect of digital media and virtual reality on conventional notions of physicality and representation is initiating a radical rethink on how we define and understand body/performance art. The question of how and where we locate the internal and external self, an issue that is crucial for artists who use their bodies, is further emphasised through new technological mediation. This signals the possibility of new thinking about presence and exchange within body/performance art. I am primarily interested in how new technologies facilitate different sorts of exchange between artwork/artist and audience. I contend that when the performing body is immersed in new technologies it’s desires and anxieties are exposed. The intersubjective relation generated between the work and audience – the phenomenological experience of a public performance of self – is consequently revealed as erotic.

I aim to reconfigure contemporary ideas of performance as dependent on immediate presence (liveness). In the performance of self, as embodied by the artist in performance, the conventional distinction between fixed notions of subject and object is collapsed into an intersubjective dynamic. My analysis of this relation is informed by Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the relationship between the visible and the invisible as a ‘chiasmic intertwining’. Accordingly, rather than proceed from the idea of a split between artists and viewer/s, I examine the intersubjective dynamic as an exchange of flesh.

I use the term ‘technophenomenological’ to describe the enworlded nature of the relationships between bodies, machines and media. I extend this understanding by drawing on psychoanalytic concepts of incorporation and narcissism, on cinema and media theory and on theories of excess and waste. I endeavour to ‘write through’ my practice, sometimes anecdotally and sometimes intuitively, to evolve a dialogue between my practice and theoretical concerns. (A. Ponton, Abstract)

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