Peter Dickinson

Simon Fraser University

Thinking of performance in the expanded field of the electronic paradigm requires that we reconsider the terms that have been at the contested center of performance studies for the past decade: simulation, representation, virtuality, presence, and above all, the slippery indicative "as if." [...] Performance studies ... is alert to the Net's potential to flatten and screen that which we might want most to remember, to love, to learn. We have created and studied a discipline based on that which disappears, art that cannot be preserved or posted. And we know that performance knows things worth knowing. As the electronic paradigm moves into the center of universities, corporations, and other systems of power-knowledge, the "knowing" that cannot be preserved or posted may well generate a mourning that transcends the current lite Luddite resistance to technology.
~Peggy Phelan

[O]n the one hand digital media seems to promise (or threaten) the erasure of the traces of labour. In this sense (probably a fantasy) digital objects are all "perfect" and don't bear marks to show the strains, efforts, history or process of their creation. Somewhere after Marx, Brecht, and Structuralism, performance has often strapped its conception and articulation of politics to the exposure and examination of exactly these traces--labour, attempt, failure, versions--all of which are presented side by side or in dialogue with the "image" conjured in a work.... The instantaneousness of digital media and its propensity to hide or erase the processes of its own construction seem at first glance to help it evade the radar of the aesthetic--creating spectacle and surface in the place of a politicised exposure of mechanics, process or workings.... But on the other hand we find reminders every day that the digital world continues to contain footprints, traces, history--that the idea of a supposedly pure surface is a fallacy, an illusion. Indeed, the era of this possibility (or fantasy) of erasure also brings the possibility for the massive and speedy proliferation of information, even new kinds of information that were never visible before... I guess every recording and distribution technology promises to create a new balance of the visible and invisible, the present and the absent, that wich is "permanent" and that which can be erased or hidden.
~Tim Etchells

On this page you can find some links to performance work--academic, creative, and community-based--that I have been involved in.