How Can We Talk about Affect in Digital Performance?
- How Can We Talk about Affect in Digital Performance?
Click for larger view
View full resolution
MAI Prototype performance pavilions, located in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park, for the 2013 Luminato Festival.
As the central figure of Toronto’s 2013 Luminato Festival, Marina Abramović drew crowds to her stage production of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović and the immersive, interactive exhibit MAI Protoype. Abramović’s oeuvre is dominated by performance pieces that are highly interactive, specifically exploring body-to-body interaction of artists and spectators (which she uses to blur the boundaries of precisely these roles). At Luminato, Abramović’s interactive MAI Prototype installation in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park contained seven “chambers,” all of which included exercises and renditions of Abramović’s artistic process. Of note here are two chambers: the “eye gazing chamber” in which two participants sat across from each other, staring into each other’s eyes as an adapted re-enactment of Abramović’s The Artist Is Present; and the final chamber of the exhibit, where participants were told to record their reflections on the whole installation on a blank piece of paper, in any form (the results ranged from prose to drawings to thank you notes). Luminato has published a sample of these audience experiences on their website, many of which address the experience in the eye chamber specifically. The audience responses come together, digitally archiving the feelings and visceral reactions, [End Page 82] or affects, participants experienced in response to the exhibit. In her work “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” Amelia Jones argues that “history and even memory are themselves re-enactments, scriptings of the past (based on relics, documents, remainders) into the (always already over) present” (19). I would argue that in this sense, the written responses displayed on Luminato’s website are not only performative traces of the past exhibit but a fragmented re-enactment of the experience itself. The question then becomes: what effect does a digital stage (a computer screen) have when presenting a comment on a visceral experience to which a live body might seem integral?
Re-enactments of Abramović’s work present a generative avenue to follow and explore this question, as this expression in the virtual is a recent trend in reaction to her projects. People have responded to her performances through increasingly digital mediums, which creates an interesting tension with the bodily “presence” the artist herself wishes to explore. Abramović’s MoMA exhibit and re-enactment, The Artist Is Present (2010), had Abramović sitting silently at a table, while spectators could sit across from her and make eye contact for a self-determined amount of time. Jones argues against “the supposedly transformative effects” of Abramović’s “presence” in this piece when she explains that “the event, the performance, by combining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the fact that there is no ‘presence’ as such. I felt this paradox strongly as a visitor at The Artist is Present” (18). Jones’s disaffected troubling of the notion of “presence” aside, an archive full of human emotion in response to presence sprung up almost immediately after the show began. Photographer Marco Anelli took portraits of spectators engaged in the exhibit, and one especially keen blogger, Katie Notopolous, compiled portraits of people who began to weep while seated across from Abramović on a Tumblr website titled “Marina Abramović Made Me Cry.” Anelli’s portraits became compelling performances themselves but without the embodied, bidirectional element that had elicited the emotional responses the portraits depict.
In looking at the digitized portraits, all of whom are staring back at me as a spectator, I realized I had effectively become part of another re-enactment of The Artist Is Present, without the “live” element of the embodied encounters that happened at MoMA. No one has made claims that looking at these portraits is “transformative”; there are no blogs documenting the affective responses people have to these portraits. What is different, then, about the digital medium in terms of affective response...
