Abstracts - York St John University

Introduction: Nomads, Hybrid Spaces, Liquid Architectures, And Online 

Domains 

Eirini Nedelkopoulou (York St John University)& Maria Chatzichristodoulou (University of 

Hull) 

Eirini Nedelkopoulou is Lecturer in Theatre at York St John University. She has published 

on digital practices in performance, participation and new media theatre through the scope 

of phenomenology and theories of perception and embodiment. Eirini is co-‐editor of a 

forthcoming special issue of International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 

(Intellect Press) on “Hybridity: The intersections between Performance and Science”. She is 

currently working on a co-‐edited book project, which explores the interventions between 

phenomenology and performance. She is co-‐convenor of TaPRA’s Performance and New 

Technologies Working Group. 

Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] is a cultural practitioner (curator, performer, 

producer, writer) and Lecturer in Performance and New Media at the Department of 

Drama and Music (Drama), University of Hull. Maria worked as a Community Officer at The 

Albany in South London. She was co-‐founder of the international media art festival 

Medi@terra and co-‐director of Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (1996-‐2002, Athens, 

Greece); co-‐director of the festival and symposium Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital 

Performance (London, 2007); director of the symposium Black Box to Second Life: Theatre 

and Performance in Virtual Worlds (Scarborough, 2011), and co-‐convener of the 

conference Live Interfaces (Leeds, 2012). Maria is co-‐editor of the volumes Interfaces of 

Performance (Ashgate, 2009) and Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance 

(Palgrave MacMillan). She has lectured and published widely, including journal articles, 

book chapters and invited lectures at MIT, Yale University and Georgia Institute of 

Technology (USA). She is currently working on a monograph which explores performance 

practices that develop within networked environments. 

Keynote Address: Becoming martyr in the age of digital technology 

Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) 

The global emergence of technological media and electronic networks has caused an 

epochal shift in the citational network of discourses and turned Derrida´s iterability into a 

condition of life. As Jon McKenzie (Perform or Else, 22) puts it: ` Highly localized ensembles 

of words and gestures can now be broken apart, recombined and hyperlinked to different 

ensembles in ways unlike anything in the past at speeds incredible from all perspectives 

except those of the future.` These perspectives from the future will be my concern, and how 

they are part of the ‘becoming nomad’ of subjects, bodies and ideas that occurs within our 

contemporary globalised, mediatised, augmented and distributed environments. Such 

becoming nomad, I will argue, is not merely a matter of freedom and liberation but also, 

and at the same time, ńecessarily implies a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be 

operational (that is: commensurable) or disappear´ (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 

xxiv). 

I will approach this subject and the questions it raises from a work by Lebanese 

performance maker Rabih Mroué, titled On Three Posters. Reflection on a video-performance 

by Rabih Mroué. In this video lecture Mroué reflects on an earlier work he created together 

with Elias Khoury, titled Three Posters. This performance in its turn presented an embodied 

reflection on the video tapes left behind by a Lebanese freedom fighter. These tapes, as 

Mroué observes, present the freedom fighter as the martyr he would become and thus 

produce the proof of something that had not happened yet at the time of the recording. 

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This potential of video recordings to perform something that was not yet there would later 

be the reason that Mroué decided to stop performing Three Posters when after 9/11 the 

audience started to see the video testimonies in a different way. This potential however, I 

will argue, is characteristic for how in a situation of íncredulity towards metanarratives´ 

(Lyotard) performativity replaces traditional goals of knowledge, truth and liberation. In 

this situation, the performance of the freedom fighter trembling in the face of the camera 

that will challenge him forth as martyr, is the example par excellence of the terror observed 

by Lyotard, the terror described by McKenzie as the pressure to perform-‐-‐or else. 

Maaike Bleeker is a professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University. She graduated in 

Art History, Theatre Studies and Philosophy and received her PhD from the Amsterdam 

School for Cultural Analysis. She combines her academic work with a practice as 

dramaturge in theatre and dance. She is the author of Visuality in the Theatre. The Locus of 

Looking (Palgrave MacMillan) and editor of (among others) Anatomy Live. Performance 

and the Operating Theatre. She is President of Performance Studies international (PSi). 

Panel 1. Liquid Spaces, Performative Architectures 

Concepts towards the realisation of the Technophenomenological Being: the liquid 

dimensionality of kinaesthetic self and immersive worlds 

Craig Vear (De Montfort University) 

This paper will discuss current research in the development of a performance concept of 

the Technophenomenological Being; a theoretical concept inspired by Amelia Jones’ notion 

of the ‘metaphysical transcendence of mind-‐expanding machines’ (Jones 1998: 205). It will 

discuss this concept from three perspectives: 1) the development of a technically mediated 

environment using immersive VR and binaural sound image; 2) Natural Interfaces for fluid 

immersion, and 3) a framework for the cognitive-‐creative development of the performer. 

It will draw together seemingly disparate discourse from audience modalities of Digital 

Opera, performance practice of hyper-‐instruments, fluid immersion in online gaming and 

McGonigal’s notion of the gaming Gesamtkunstwerk, linking into philosophical frameworks 

from Antonio Damasio’s work into consciousness and Merleau-‐Ponty’s phenomenology 

including the question ‘where are we to put the limit between body and the world, since 

the world is flesh?’ 

Drawing these together with current practice-‐as-‐research from the Intermediality and 

Performance Research Group (De Montfort University), I aim to articulate my imperative 

and arrive at the concept of the Technophenomenological Being that is not dwelling “within” 

the relationship between technology and human performer (such as juxtaposition) or 

“among” this relationship (such as a second skin) or even the “prosthetic God”; but is rather 

as. 

Craig Vear is a senior lecturer in Performing Arts specialising in music and digital arts 

within the School of Art. He is an internationally recognised composer working within 

performance and technology. He is chair of the Intermediality and Performance research 

group and full member of the DORG: Digital Opera Research Group, and MTI: Music, 

Technology and Innovation. He won an Olivier award in 2012, went to Antarctica as 

composer-‐in-‐residence with the British Antarctic Survey (2003-‐4), and sold over 350,000 

albums with his band Cousteau. 

Cartesian Bodies and Euclidean Spaces 

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Sita Popat (University of Leeds) 

This paper considers how the use of screens within dance performances and installations 

affects the ways in which audiences and participants experience bodies in space. The 

discussion references mixed reality in recognition of how digital technologies are becoming 

increasingly embedded in our social and cultural experiences. The question is not what is 

virtual and what is physical, but rather how do combinations of light and flesh engage us in 

mixed reality experiences and what might be the inherent spatial narratives that underpin 

that engagement? 

Three dance or dance-‐related examples are examined in detail: Cunningham’s Biped 

(1999), igloo’s SwanQuake: House (2008) and Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1994). In each 

case, the virtual reality of screen space is not independent of the physical reality of the 

dancer or the spectator. Biped presents a stage world in which physical and virtual dancers 

appear to co-‐exist in a single mixed reality space. In SwanQuake: House, the visitor is 

invited to explore virtual and physical environments that intersect and overlap. In the 1994 

version of Telematic Dreaming, performer Susan Kozel extends her body in virtual form to 

dance with spectators via a projection onto a bed within a gallery space. These pieces use a 

range of approaches to the body and the screen that highlight particular relationships, 

employing and sometimes challenging Euclidean and relational space and Newtonian 

physics. It is proposed that there tend to be two ways of designing virtual reality – a realist 

perspective that aims for an environment that is comparable to the physical world and an 

alternative mode that highlights things that can only exist in the virtual world – yet both of 

these can easily create binaries that disrupt embodied experiences. The paper concludes by 

suggesting that dance has much to offer in developing understandings of how the body and 

technology can manage existing binaries to co-‐habit within a mixed reality environment. 

Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds. She 

came into academia through dance, and her research focuses on the body and digital media 

in performance. She is the author of 'Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and 

Internet Communities' (Routledge 2006) and co-‐editor of 'Performance Perspectives: A 

Critical Introduction' (Palgrave 2011). She is Associate Editor of the 'International Journal 

of Performance Arts and Digital Media'. In her spare time, she enjoys playing World of 

Warcraft with her sons. 

Architectures of Youth: Visibility, Agency and the Technological Imaginings of Young 

People 

Helen Thornham (University of Leeds) 

Drawing on audio-‐visual data from a research project, this paper explores the constructions 

of a particular local environment by young people as it emerged in our research project, and 

how this relates to wider conceptions of youth as, and within, a particular kind of ‘space’. 

Utilising arguments from cultural geography, youth, education and media theory, we argue 

that the audio-‐visual material produced through our research plays a key role in the 

productive generation of meaning for the school. In turn, this introduces a further set of 

critical issues. First, the role of technology in generating meaning needs attention, 

specifically in terms of the forms/modes of intervention facilitated by audio-‐visual 

technology, and how we might interpret this in relation to young people. Second, the 

technology and the architecture of the school support and produce the visual as the 

powerful force that facilitates and curtails certain behaviours and performances. This has a 

range of wider social and cultural implications that need addressing, not least in relation to 

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how it constructs and produces certain modes of behaviour. Finally, the visual recordings 

produced by the research participants demonstrate that the behaviours and performances 

are part and parcel of complex, routine and routinised engagements with the building. 

These performances are shaped by a range of factors including place, space, mobility, 

agency, power and the visual, and are constantly rearticulated and reimagined in ways that 

suggests we understand such buildings and the relations within them, not as static or fixed, 

but as ‘events’ (Rose et al 2010: 346), as ‘mobile’ (Grosz 2001:7) or as ‘process’ (Burke & 

Grosvenor 2008: 185-‐6). 

Helen Thornham is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, University 

of Leeds. She is the author of Ethnographies of the Videogame: Narrative, Gender and Praxis 

(2011) and co-‐editor of two volumes out in 2013: Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, 

Futures and Fantasies in Media Studies (with Elke Weissmann, Edgehill) and Content 

Cultures: Transformations of User Generated Content in Public Service Broadcasting (with 

Simon Popple, University of Leeds) Her research focuses on gender and mediations, 

narrative, discourse and power and she is currently leading a Network+ within the Digital 

Economy theme (EPSRC/RCUK) investigating the digital transformations of communities 

and culture. 

Performing Lost Space: discussing an exercise in recording architectural detail with 

the performing body 

Angela Bartram & Douglas Gittens (University of Lincoln) 

The interior of the contemporary art space provides its users with a sterilised laboratory 

for the placement and experience of art. Increasingly, its bleached interior presents an a 

priori condition for the legitimate assignment of artworks within the complex milieu of the 

contemporary city. Such interiors have become an architectural typology, a predetermined 

homogenous non-‐place within which artworks reside. In this sense we can look to Lefebvre 

to understand the condition of the gallery space for ‘inasmuch as abstract space tends 

towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a 

new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.’ (Lefebvre: 1991, 

52) The work of the artist, by contrast, liberates difference. More specifically, the art of 

performance simultaneously generates and exposes marginal space within the gallery 

interior; a corporeal action that deposits residual stains and blemishes across the galleries 

internal skin, leaving marks and traces that resist homogeneity to create a temporary site 

of differential experience. The lost, forgotten or overlooked marginal zones and 

irregularities of a gallery space become a point of ephemeral spectacle and this paper 

addresses the impact of this spatial and corporeal collision. 

The research that informs and situates these phenomena traces the irregularities, 

blemishes and scars that resist conventional mapping; marks that exist within an 

alternative, unconventional and unbleached space before, during and after a performance 

act. Recorded through orthographic drawing conventions, the research generated a 

narrative cartography of corporeal intervention within the interior of X Church Slumgothic, 

a heavily used semi-‐decayed community art space in Gainsborough. The co-‐authors of this 

research formed a practical collaboration that fused the dynamics and complexities of the 

performer’s body with the fixed conventions of architectural drawings. The discussion in 

this paper between performer and draughtsman explores how the body becomes an 

instrument to record and describe an arts interior beyond, yet from within, traditional 

architectural systems of representation. 

Douglas Gittens is an architectural designer and senior lecturer in the School of 

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Architecture at the University of Lincoln. ‘Liminal’, ‘absurd’, ‘differential’ and ‘marginal’ 

space are terms that are often attributed to interstitial domains where spatial codifications 

merge, slip or distort, and it is within this tradition that his research finds a conceptual fix. 

Angela Bartram is an exhibiting artist who also writes and publishes. This work concerns 

conceptual and physical thresholds and the notion of animality as acted and/or intuitively 

behaved by humans. She is a senior lecturer in fine art at the University of Lincoln. 

Panel 2. Dispersed Intimacies 

Dissolve 

Julian Maynard Smith (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) 

Dissolve is a telematic performance project led by Julian Maynard Smith, Research Fellow 

in Telematic Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. It proposes a 

performance space that achieves solidity only in its online manifestation – at any of its 

component, physical locations it is partial and transparent. Any performer appears as a 

transparent wraith in the space until they merge with a performer elsewhere, gaining 

solidity and agency through combination. Each performer inhabits the other’s image in an 

intimate sharing of a common fate. Until the spell is broken, a new, third person emerges, 

living entirely in the online space which itself consists of different spaces overlaid. The 

space itself is rooted entirely in the physical world but can exist only in an imaginary one, 

one which is ambivalent visually, apparently physical but breaking the laws of three-‐ 

dimensional space. Thus person, action and space no longer have a unitary, one-‐to-‐one 

relationship. 

The project is being developed with Florian Beigl (Berlin) and Blackhole Theatre 

(Braunschweig), using straightforward network technologies to achieve its 

phantasmagorical effect. This simplicity and affordability allows artists and performers 

around the world to join the project, with the aim of creating a community of inhabited, 

possessed spaces and people. The presentation at TaPRA would be a concrete step on this 

path, taking the form of an online gathering where both participants and audience share 

the merging and dissolving of the person/personality that the project generates. 

Julian Maynard Smith is the founder and artistic director of Station House Opera, which 

since 1980 has produced 35 productions around the world. Commissions have marked the 

centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), the Bicentenary of the French Revolution (1989) 

and the Allied bombing of Dresden (1996). In 2004 the company began a series of telematic 

productions linking performance sites around the world. Recent productions include 

Dominoes (2009-‐13), an Olympic commission and now being produced throughout the 

world; and Mind Out (2009-‐11). The company’s next piece is Dissolve, in 2013/14. He is 

Research Fellow in Telematic Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. 

Visual interaction among families with an element of dispersion: generating spaces 

of intimacy between ‘here’ and ‘there’. A case study of Spanish-Irish families living in 

Ireland. 

Patricia Prieto Blanco (University of Ireland, Galway) 

When we link the digitization of photography with the development of 

telecommunications, we have a new scenario where concepts of distance become obsolete 

(Manovich, 1996). Nomadic world-‐citizens (Belting, 2001: 39-‐41) engage differently with 

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the physical world as a result of their loss of permanent and tangible links with their 

environment. They inhabit both physical non-‐places (Auge, 1995:70-‐98), which are 

surrendered to the temporary and ephemeral, and also telecommunicative virtual spaces 

(Villi, 2011: 126-‐8), which remain as a constant due to their ubiquity and immediacy. Their 

proliferation responds to the need of nomadic world-‐citizens of communicating in time 

rather than over time. 

The steady betterment of technological conditions has greatly contributed to the rise of 

visual communication in these telecommunicative virtual spaces: camera-‐phones, 

webcams, point-‐and-‐shoot cameras. Photography becomes interpersonal and intimate 

(Villi, 2011: 79) because it is being used as medium of communication (Villi, 2011:60) 

rather than as medium of representation. We have moved from talking about photographs 

to talking through photographs. 

Transnational, nomadic world families use photography to share certain spaces devoted to 

intimate engagement. At the same time, their spaces of familial intimacy are reconfigured 

through the digital photographic practice. An open and constant negotiation of intimate 

spaces takes place. It will be argued, that as a consequence of the digitization process, 

patterns of image production and consumption have fundamentally changed. This situation 

has highlighted the role of the digital photographic practice towards a construction of 

mobile familial homes that overcome physical dispersion of family members. 

Patricia Prieto Blanco is a videoartist, photographer and PhD media-‐researcher based at 

the Huston School of Film and Digital Media (NUI Galway). She investigates contemporary 

image uses from the interplay between theory and praxis, using photography and videoart 

as part of her investigations. Specifically, she is interested in how the digital photographic 

practice re-‐configurates spaces of home, how it enables to overcome distance, and how 

photography is used today to communicate rather than to represent. Her theoretical work 

has been published in the UK and in Germany, while her practice-‐based research has 

recently traveled to Kobe, Bradford and Bucharest. 

The Urban Emotional Antenna: ‘Tuning’ metaphors and actions of the walking 

artist/flaneur 

Bill Psarras (Goldsmiths University of London) 

This paper explores the concept of walking as an aesthetic and embodied media art 

practice in the 21 st century city. It draws connections between metaphors and actions; 

between the real and the virtual; between the inside and the outside; between the personal 

and collective emotion. It focuses on the contemporary walking artist of the city and the 

interconnections with the concepts of flaneur and psychogeography by presenting 

interrelations between such concepts and current media art practices. Having them as 

starting points, this paper aims to explore a sensorial dialogue between metaphors and 

actions of walking and perceiving the city [spaces of movement] in search of emotions, by 

emphasizing the notion of in-‐betweeness as potential catalyst for this dialogue. 

It has been argued that metaphors constitute strategies that people try to understand a 

world ‘where what is known and unknown is constantly changing’ (Larsen, 2004:30). The 

ongoing spatial transitions and social stimuli set the contemporary city as a core metaphor 

to approach personal and collective emotional changes. Such richness in stimuli, situations 

and data forms a significant palette for the artist to engage with and experience the urban 

fabric. Throughout the 20 th century, a trajectory of artists and cultural theorists understood 

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walking as a cultural act. Since then, an ever-‐growing sensorial interest in the city can be 

found in later walking-‐oriented artworks such as audiovisual pieces, performances, various 

maps and integrated technological elements such as geo-‐data and bio-‐data. 

Walking always entails a potential method for an urban immersion. Departing from 

metaphors such as the ‘botanizing on the asphalt’ (Benjamin), the ‘tuning’ (Schafer) and 

‘the artist is the antenna of the society’ (McLuhan), this paper reflects on the potential ways 

the conceptual schemas of metaphors can be applied in the actual process of walking and 

embodied media practices. 

Bill Psarras is a Greek artist and musician. After BA and MA studies in audiovisual and 

digital arts, he is currently pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths University of London, doing 

practice-‐based research on the emotional geographies of urban spaces of transition 

through artistic walking and embodied media art practices. He has exhibited his work in 

international video festivals & group exhibitions including the Royal Academy of Arts 

Summer Exhibition and the annual Group Exhibition of Contemporary Art ‘ROOMS 2013’ 

for Greek emerging artists. His publications and talks have been presented in international 

conferences and journals. Website: http://billpsarras.tumblr.com/ 

‘The place where we were last together’: practice as research exploration of the 

screen as a site of encounter 

Elena Marchevska (London South Bank University) 

Anne Friedberg argues that: “the limits and multiplicities of our frames of vision determine 

the boundaries and multiplicities of our world“ (2009:7). It is incumbent to theorize, 

practice and construct our interaction with screens as conscientiously as possible. Art 

practice that is cognizant of the interimplicated relationship between screen objects, 

screen spaces, and viewing/acting bodies is better prepared to confront the challenges 

(artistic, ethical etc.) of the shifting connections among them. The work in this paper is 

grappling with exactly this intrinsic relationship. With the fact that something exists in 

between the theory and practice, the screen and the reality. This thin screen border can be 

easily overlooked. It points to us the impossibility for closure, but, also it enables 

encounters with the deepest aspects of borderspace as condition of existence in the 

twenty-‐first century. 

This paper is a practice-‐based exploration of the screen as a border site, where the 

concepts of division and encounter are performatively examined. My research strategy is 

shaped by applying autoethnographic performance strategies to the mediated space of the 

screen. I will talk about the performative installation piece ‘The Place where we were last 

together’ (2011) and will try to negotiate connections that lie in the spaces between, those 

of time, intention, media and process. These spaces are defined as a site of knowledge 

making, addressing the personal political histories that are embodied in a wider approach 

to my current practice-‐as-‐research. This process is intrinsically transmedial and 

metaphorizes the meaning of the reflexive surface, the ‘screen’. As Ettinger concludes ‘the 

journey as an art event, is significant. It ties the beginning and the end, not in a repetitive 

cycle, but as a section of a spiral of transformation-within-repetition in a matrixial 

bordertime and borderspace.’ (Ettinger, 2005:692) 

Elena Marchevska is a performance artist and researcher and examines the peculiar inter-‐ 

relationships between public/private space, the screen and the female body. Her art 

practice is interdisciplinary and makes use of every media that best fits the subject and 

content of the project that she is developing. She works in many materials and formats 

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including writing, performance, video/film and electronic media. She is committed to the 

inclusion of diversity within her practice. Elena is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and 

Performance studies at London South Bank University. You can see more about her work 

on the following link: www.elenamarcevska.com 

Panel 3. Nomadic Communities 

Flash mobs as Performance: the re-emergence of creative communities 

Aristita I. Albacan, University of Hull, UK 

In spite of their very brief history (the first modern flash mob took place at Macy’s in NY, on 

the evening of 17 th of June 2003) flash mobs have rapidly and successfully spread 

throughout the Western world and developed into what can arguably can be defined as a 

fluid, nomadic and most of all novel mode of performance that aims to stimulate the re-‐ 

emergence of creative communities, foreground agency and direct address/response to a 

range of topics of societal currency (political, cultural, artistic, everyday life, etc.) via a 

performative act that becomes visible within the public sphere, and hybridize aesthetic and 

medial conventions of making and spectating in unexpected ways. Although fleeting and 

ephemeral in terms of its constituency, sometimes coming together just for one single 

event, these creative communities articulate quickly and effectively a mode of making and 

performing that blurs the boundaries between spectating and performing, and leads 

participants -‐ as a whole and through their act – to modes of expression that become visible 

both in the public space and the social media/ digital media landscape. Whether there are 

categorized/ acknowledged/perceived as street entertainment, performative activism/ 

actionism, or a mode of advertisement, the results of these ever so brief performative 

processes and events -‐ the flash mobs -‐ are most commonly perceived by both participants 

and onlookers as playfully ‘liberating,' and recuperating/ re-‐appropriating, even if 

momentarily, the public sphere for the sake of a 'better cause,' which explains their 

growing popularity and their ascending status within the field of the performative. Drawing 

on Howard Rheingold's theory of the 'smart mobs,' the performative avant-‐garde(s) and 

devising processes, this paper aims to introduce the idea that flash mobs hold the potential 

to propose a novel model for participatory performance in the 21st century, that merges 

digital and performative modes of making and production. 

Aristita I. Albacan is a theatre practitioner, teacher and scholar with research 

interests/specialisms in notions of intermediality, contemporary spectatorship, and 

contemporary performance making processes, Robert Lepage’s theatre work and applied 

theatre. She lectures in Theatre and Performance at School of Arts and New Media, 

University of Hull, where she also acts as Director of Studies for Theatre and Performance. 

In 2010, she has initiated and co-‐coordinates the Interdisciplinary and Collaborative 

Practices Cluster (ICP Cluster link: http://icpcluster.org/index.php). As a 

practitioner/theatre director she has developed contemporary work in various settings in 

the past 15 years in Romania, Germany, US and UK. 

Ultra Gypsy: Post-identiterian Subjects on the Trail of Dis-Orient Express 

Edina Husanovic (University of Reading) 

This paper will present some findings from my recent research Dis-‐Orient Express, a 

journey down the Orient Express route (London, Paris, Vienna, Belgrade, Istanbul etc) 

during which I interviewed belly dancers, orientalist scholars and the general public. These 

dialogues about contemporary belly dance practices in Europe, on trains, in cafes, 

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nightclubs and dance classes, were centred on the subject of contemporary re-‐enactments 

of orientalism and mythologies around ‘Oriental woman’ as one of ‘the Other of Europe’. 

Belly dancers, or oriental dancers who I interviewed in these different locations are 

‘nomadic subjects’, whose identities are multiple, imagined, and performed, featuring 

elements of orientalist fantasy, and often incorporating potentially empowering symbols of 

Mother Goddess. They are subaltern subjects who find ways to speak through their dance, 

online domains and their women-‐dominated belly dance subcultures. Romantic 

connotations with ‘all things Gypsy’, nomadism and travel are abundant in contemporary 

belly dancing troupes and identities. But the ‘Gypsy-‐belly dance’ spectacle of mystery, 

exoticism, freedom and abandon by transgressive outsiders clashes with the harsh 

experiences of European and Turkish Romani peoples, as well as many other migrant 

groups. 

By presenting a case of a Turkish Romany performer from Istanbul, I will focus on the 

responsibilities of (eastern and western) performers in becoming the ‘Other’ in a 

contemporary globalised world. I will explore the complexities of belly dance as a trans-‐ 

national globalised dance practice that has been highly altered by digital media. My paper 

will also explore the potentials of my nomadic political performance practice and dynamic 

alliances between dancers and performers of different and multiple backgrounds. 

Edina Husanovic was born in Bosnia where they know something about having fun with 

absurd situations. She is a multi-‐media performance artist resident in Brighton and 

studying for PhD in theatre at the University of Reading. She is also known as Lily Lazuli in 

the weird and wonderful world of belly dance, and has been called ‘a political belly dancer’ 

as in her performances she prayed to the temple of Angelina Jolie, hand-‐stretched an Axl 

Rose filo pastry pie, and belly danced as David Cameron. Little wonder that reviewers were 

left ‘bewildered’, and saying: “Orientalists will be disoriented and Disorientalists 

reoriented. Her mystical eyes are full of irony so beware!” 

Re-imagining Social Space through an openness to the Becoming of Place 

Steve Fossey (Middlesex University) 

One of the challenges that makers of site specific performance face is how to qualify and 

articulate site specificity, in era where prevalent discourses and practices argue less for 

substantive and fixed understandings of location, and more for fluid and mulitiplicitous 

senses of place. As a maker of site specific performance I find myself embracing the idea 

that our senses of place, and in turn our identities that are affected by the spaces we 

encounter, are in constant states of becoming. This acknowledgment liberates our 

imaginings of place from the hegemonic clutches of received tacit agreements, and opens 

them up to creative spatial possibilities. 

Rather than accept the negativity of Marc Augé’s observation that we spend more of our 

time in non-‐places and states of transit, I am interested in exploring the positive potential of 

a closer inspection of the specifics of these fluid states, positioning site itself as the 

transitory process, which is in turn productive of culture and identity. I would argue that by 

composing situations that combine performative approaches to dialoguing experience, with 

everyday modes and technologies of communication, a re-‐imagining of social space can 

occur. 

In For Space Doreen Massey argues ‘not just for a notion of becoming’ but instead ‘for the 

openness of that process of becoming’ (Massey 2005: p21). This paper will discuss the 

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methodologies and findings of a research practice that seeks to explore how form might be 

made from an openness to processes of becoming, asking how, by perceiving place 

nomadically, the performative potentials of place might be revealed. 

Steve Fossey is an artist and lecturer based in the East Midlands. He holds a BA in 

Contemporary Arts and an MA in Performance and Live Art undertaken at Nottingham 

Trent University. He is currently working on a mixed-‐mode PhD exploring contemporary 

post-‐substantive site-‐specificity. The research investigates how social space and everyday 

spatial production might inform a performance practice where the stable location of place, 

and identity of the subject in space, are brought into question. This research is supported 

by Middlesex University, London as a fully funded research scholarship. Fossey has shown 

work nationally and internationally at academic conferences, art galleries and performance 

festivals. 

Performing the Affective Archive 

Erica Scourti (Central St Martins College of Arts and Design) 

In the ‘free’ Web 2.0 economy of what Boltanski and Chiappelo call networked or 

‘connexionist’ capitalism, it could be argued that everyone is performing, not simply 

through participation in social media sites like Facebook, but also through their Google 

search inputs, URL history, and clickthroughs. The information individual users generate in 

this state of ‘general performance’ (Sven Lutkken) is constantly being recorded and 

statistically aggregated, creating what Ann Cvetkovich has called the ‘affective archive’, 

which captures our moods, feelings, sensibilities and consumer desires, harnessing 

affective potential as a conduit for capital. How can artists intervene in this flow, perhaps 

by re-‐appropriating the appropriation of personal info and affective labour that Web 2.0 

corporations enact, and how can they address the endless self-‐documentation that these 

sites encourage and employ it as a critical strategy? 

As a partial response, I propose a presentation of two video projects: Facebook Diaries 

(2008), in which friends’ status updates were used to create ‘diaries’, which were recorded 

to webcam and posted on Youtube; and Life In AdWords (2012-‐ 2013), where my daily 

diary was emailed to my Gmail account and the AdWords generated are spoken to webcam, 

creating a portrait of the artist through Google. Both projects utilise found text which is 

intrinsic to the internet, and contingent upon the artist’s affective input through the 

maintaining of relationships to friends, colleagues and family, and personal reflection in 

journal writing; both projects foreground the ‘oscillation between distance and intimacy’ 

(Claire Bishop) of online space. 

Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece and now lives in London, where alongside her 

practice working with video, text, performance and online, she is enrolled on a MRes in 

Moving Image Art at Central St Martins in conjunction with LUX . Using autobiographical 

source material as well as found text, her work addresses the mediation of personal and 

collective experience through language and technology in a digital paradigm. Her work 

humorously fore-‐grounds various roles available to the artist, including activist, ‘always-‐on’ 

freelancer, and documenter of quotidian experience. 

Panel 4. Nomadic Subjects/Bodies 

‘Lines of Flight’: Conditions of precarity in live media performance 

Jo Scott (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) 

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The proposed practical presentation enacts and interrogates Braidotti’s ‘nonunitary and 

multi-‐layered vision’ (2011: 5) of the subject through the lens of the live media performer, 

who activates onstage technical mediums live and in response to the moment of 

performance. In so doing, she constructs her subjectivity in a number of layered and 

concurrent mediatised modes, enacting these layers live and existing in a discourse 

between the controlled activation of media and the mediatised representations generated; 

a precarious condition. 

Nicolas Bourriaud defines the precarious object as having ‘no definitive status and an 

uncertain future or final destiny: it is held in abeyance, waiting, surrounded by irresolution’ 

(2009). Through self activation of a layered representation of her own subjectivity, which 

constantly elides and eludes her control, the live media performer enters into discourse 

with the conditions of precarity cited by Bourriaud, namely ‘flickering’, ‘the indiscernible’ 

and ‘nomadism’, through the perpetual ‘transcoding’ of form (2009). 

The ‘lines of flight’ (Braidotti 2011: 7) represented by the diverse gestures constituting 

both the creation of and manifestation of the subject in this form of performance represent 

a ‘nomadic intervention’ (9), which though it may be characterised as ‘a creative alternative 

space of becoming’ is also problematic in terms of the nature and significance of the actual 

and virtual ‘emerging subjects-‐in-‐process’ (8) it generates. 

Jo Scott is a teacher, practitioner and researcher whose PhD study involves an 

investigation of live intermediality in performance. As an international school educator, Jo 

has taught all over the world and in a variety of contexts, from Singapore to the UK and 

many places in between. On returning to the UK, Jo undertook an MA in Performance 

Practices and Research at CSSD. This was the starting point for developing the live 

intermedial performance practice, which is now the subject of and vehicle for her practice 

based PhD thesis. 

Disseminated Choreographies, Nomadic ‘Body-Archives’ 

Annalisa Piccirillo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”) 

My paper relies on the theoretical debate about whether/how a dancing event, the 

ephemeral trace of a ‘virtual’ body gesture, transforms and destabilizes the archival culture 

(A. Lepecki: 2008; R. Schneider: 2011; D. Taylor: 2012). I will propose the creative and 

critical concept of the dancing body as a living ‘archive’: the reality that saves, embodies, 

stratifies, and, at the occurrence, consults and re-‐activates a specific choreographic 

knowledge. My contribution will focus specifically on the technè of antigravity, a corporeal 

practice that is ‘lost’ and ‘re-‐found’ throughout the performativity of dance history, a 

choreographic language that is ‘differed’ and ‘displaced’ – disseminated across temporal 

recurrences and spatial displacements (J. Derrida: 1972). 

The creative and critical ‘dissemination’ of the anti-‐gravitational gesture will be presented 

as an effect of the ‘becoming-‐nomad’ subjectivity of the dancing body. This contemporary 

body, which can be associated to the nomadic subject “who has relinquished all idea, 

desire, or nostalgia for fixity” (R. Braidotti: 19949), abandons patriarchal/patri-‐archival 

pre-‐established norms, subverting the fixed body-‐codifications of time and space. 

The choreography by Erika Janunger, disseminated on the digital web-‐screen, and later on 

the liquid urban architecture of Time Square in New York, exemplifies the becoming nomad 

of the ‘body-‐archive’, re-‐negotiating the female subjective and corporal belonging of the 

dancer into a ‘Weightless’ spatial context. 

11

Annalisa Piccirillo holds a Ph.D in “Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone 

World” from the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy. She is a research fellow 

at the Department of Human and Social Science and is currently working on a project 

untitled “New Practices of Memory: Mediterranean ‘Matri-‐archives’”. Main areas of 

research: contemporary theatre/video-‐dance, performance art, theory of choreography, 

gender studies, postcolonial studies, disability studies, deconstruction. 

Improvisational relations: Interactive screen practices, refiguring subjectivities 

Vida L Midgelow (University of Middlesex) 

This presentation will share some early explorations of a new work in progress by dance 

researcher Vida L Midgelow (http://www.choreographiclab.org/ & 

http://danceimprovisationpractice.blogspot.co.uk/) and digital installation artist Nic 

Sandiland (http://www.nicsandiland.com). Their new collaborative work, generated 

within the framework of improvised practices, seeks to find modes of interaction and 

screen image that evoke nomadic subjectivities in the audience/participant. This new 

interactive screen work is founded in Midgelow’s thinking around improvisation as a 

nomadic practice. Like nomads, Midgelow has argued, improvisers are comfortable with 

transitions and change, they do not cling to illusions of permanence and stability in their 

dance. Improvisation enables subjectivity to be unfixed and deterritorialized, whilst being 

grounded and located in the materiality of the body and the places in which we dance. This 

presentation explores the ways it may be possible to extend these ideas, and the ethical 

relations between dancers evident within improvisation practices, through screen to/with 

audience. 

Vida L Midgelow is Professor in Dance and Choreographic Practices at Middlesex 

University and lives in Derbyshire. She has over 20 years experience facilitating and 

lecturing in performance. She is Co-‐Director of the movement research organisation 

'Choreographic Lab' and Co-‐editor of 'Choreographic Practices' (an internationally peer 

reviewed Journal). Her movement and video work has been shown internationally and she 

publishes her research in professional, online and academic journals. including recent 

essays in; 

‘Being’ and experiencing in between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of digital dancing 

Kerry Francksen-‐Kelly (De Montfort University) 

Addressing notions of embodied practice and the ‘unpredictable territory of corporeal 

perceptual processes’ or ‘perceptual performativity’ (Vaas-‐Rhee 2010), this scholarly paper 

builds on Erin Manning’s notion of ‘sensing bodies in motion’ (2007) in order to discuss the 

possibilities for creating intimate exchanges between live and mediated dancing bodies. 

Drawing on an understanding of the body as a sensory, intelligible, and emotional entity 

this paper will explore how a conception of a live-‐digital body as an ‘expression (that) 

happens in the in-‐between of bodies’ (Manning 2007) can offer choreographers and 

dancers, who are increasingly faced with having to negotiate both live and digital domains, 

a perceptual framework for understanding how best to develop their sensibilities as both a 

live and digital body. This paper will, therefore, foreground the dancer’s experience of 

moving in such environments in order to engage more critically with those ‘perceptual 

processes’ in order to consider what it means to ‘dance’ in mediated environments. 

Through an analysis of the author’s own embodied experiences the thrust of the discussion 

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will suggest that the potential for understanding a greater sense of intimacy comes from an 

engagement with the technology as a dynamic potential for a ‘sensing body’. 

Kerry Francksen-Kelly is an active practitioner, choreographer, artist and senior lecturer 

in dance at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has been working as a professional 

practitioner since 1997, making interactive installation art, live performance and works for 

camera. Kerry’s work has been performed and screened nationally and internationally and 

she has successfully received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as 

well as receiving independent commissions. Kerry holds a Masters in dance video 

installation and is currently researching for a PhD, which aims to investigate the 

interrelationship and potential synchronicity of live and mediated dance. 

Panel 5. Future Corporealities 

Super Intelligence and the Second Singularity – Performing the Future; a provocation 

Phil Christopher (Edge Hill University) 

This short paper or provocation will speculate about the supposed approach of the 

transhuman and posthuman eras and the ways in which imagining such a future can impact 

upon current contemporary performance practices. Ray Kurzweill’s notions of singularity 

will be considered in relationship to the concept of singularity (and other perspectives) in 

physics. In Kurzweill’s speculations about the rise, expansion and development of 

technology notions of what it is to be human and how self and identity are defined are 

significantly challenged. Whilst scientists need to consider sequentially the way in which 

present knowledge may lead us to new techniques or technologies for manipulating and 

investigating the world, the artist can leap forwards and imagine new contexts and 

relationships and make these present in the act of performance. The paper will consider 

how the singularitarian perspectives provide challenges to the artist and performance 

practitioner by considering blueprints for performance and the creative processes that 

might help us to understand profound changes in our relationship with technology. 

Phil Christopher has written and directed in the theatre for many years including 

community theatre, work with young people and disabled actors. He was awarded the 

Manchester Airport Commission for Poetry in Theatre in 2001 as part of the Manchester 

Poetry Festival. He was a SOLSTICE Fellow at Edge HiIl University in technology-‐enhanced 

learning as part of the university’s CETL and is now Head of Performing Arts at the 

university. 

Refolding (Laboratory Architectures Twins): Stitching, mirroring, doubling 

Kira O’Reilly (Queen Mary, University of London) 

This paper will introduce and discuss an ongoing collaboration between Canadian artist 

Jennifer Willet and myself on a series of photographic works; digital images that explore 

ideas of the construction of laboratory spaces and our occupancy within them, via 

manifestations and mutations that depart from the clear confines of human and enter into 

extended and excessive, abstracted forms and alterities. 

Including references from cinema, baroque clothing drapery, Japanese Kimono 

construction, and our own bioartistic practices we use a variety of media and methods. 

From mutated laboratory coats that depart from their function as straightforward 

utilitarian uniforms to performed physical dislocations with laboratory spaces and 

13

furniture, to obvious and not so obvious post production digital tricks of doubling and 

mirroring, cutting, stitching extending coats and spaces and bodies. We intend that our 

mingled real and digital physicalities within the photographic field both posit and 

contribute to a conversation on post biotechnical corporealisations. 

Kira O’ Reilly is a UK based artist; her practice, both willfully interdisciplinary and entirely 

undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, biotechnical 

practices, photography and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations 

around The Body. Since graduating from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in 1998 

her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, China and 

Mexico. She has presented at conferences and symposia on both live art and science, art 

and technology interfaces. She is currently an AHRC funded creative fellow at Department 

of Drama, Queen Mary University of London. 

Hacking the body 

Camille Baker (Brunel University) 

We will discuss at the technological practice of hacking and how choreography and 

participatory performance can be shaped by its ethos, methods and approaches. We will 

discuss our current research project that explores emerging technological tools and devices 

and used in our choreography and performance practices, to develop new techniques to 

devise engaging performances, and create immersive experiences for audiences and 

participants. 

Hacking is a much-‐misused term, typically connected to controversial computing practices 

(Levy, 1984; Jordan, 2008; Thomas, 2001). However, traditionally the ‘hacker’ sub-‐culture 

also referred to a technical elite whose prowess was displayed through the imaginative re-‐ 

purposing of consumer electrical equipment. Within this context, a 'Hack' is defined to be 

“a material practice that produces differences in computer, network and communications 

technologies” (Jordan, 2008:12), but must also display some degree of domain specific 

technical excellence. While hacking may be seen as re-‐purposing or subverting data, code 

or other information, it can also be seen as a re-‐understanding of what is possible and 

“...open up a vital window into possibilities, sensibilities and ethics of twenty-‐first century 

cultures and societies” (Jordan, 2008:15). Specifically, hacker ethics are concerned 

primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and engaging in the hands-‐on imperative. 

‘Hacking the Body’ uses the open, solution-‐driven, hands-‐on ethos as its main definition 

and driving principle of authoring creative works. 

We use the concept of ‘hacking’ to re-‐purpose and re-‐imagine internal signals from the 

body to: (1) explore how internal physiological data can be gathered and harnessed to 

‘hack’ the experiential states of the body; and then to inform, (2) how performers and 

artists can take this data to develop new methods for performance and choreography 

creation. The resulting works will be site-‐specific performances, mobile installations, and 

participatory performance experiences, using biofeedback sensing and actuating devices, 

smartphones, motion-‐sensing/ tracking interfaces (e.g., Xbox Kinect), audiovisual or 

gaming technology, and augmented reality (AR) tools, to develop ‘hacking’ software for 

interactive performances. The project involves three ‘hacks’, which each describe and apply 

aspects of capturing, exploring, and interpreting the inward unseen states of the body, 

further feeding them outward into public artworks. 

The project couples the distinct performance practices of choreography and participatory 

14

performance practices with hacking practices and ethos, resulting in practical ‘hacking’ 

tools and a ‘Toolkit’ for artists to implement in their performance creation process, 

especially when working with mobile and sensing technologies. We will use hacking 

culture and theory as a theoretical framework to connect technology and performance 

ideologies and critically examine key thinkers and practitioners from both domains, and 

offer a new slant on how ‘the body’ is a rich source of experiential knowledge to be 

harnessed for publicly shared interactive artworks. This not only informs our own practice 

and research, but may provide an alternate process for others attempting to bridge these 

fields. 

Camille Baker is a media artist-‐performer/researcher/curator working within various art 

forms: mobile media, participatory performance, soft circuits & e-‐fashion, interactive & 

video installation, live cinema, telematic performance and responsive environments. She 

has presented at the Exhibiting Performance Conference, University of Westminster, March 

3rd, 2013; Digital Workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London November 27th, 

2012; EVA Conference 2012 London; Art &ICT 2-‐day workshop at EU headquarters 

Brussels, Belgium April 26th & 27th, 2012; Future Fashion Panel for Better Fashion Week 

on Sustainability in Fashion, Dublin, Ireland, April 27, 2012; MINA Mobile Media Conference, 

New Zealand, November 2011; International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) 2011 

Istanbul, Turkey; Low Lives 3, telematic performance Salt Lake City, Utah, USA April 29, 

2011; Digital Stages Performance Festival 2011, London; EVA Conference 2010 London; 

TEXTURES, SLSAe 6th Annual Conference, Riga, Latvia, 2010; ISEA 2009 Belfast, Northern 

Ireland, MobileFest, Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 2008, and more. 

'Visual Moonbounce and the Cosmic Flaneur' 

Daniela de Paulis (Leiden University) 

Visual Moonbounce (VM) is an application of Moonbounce technology developed by visual 

artist and PhD researcher Daniela de Paulis in collaboration with CAMRAS (radio amateurs 

association) over her two years residency at Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. 

The artist applied this technology to several of her works, including the live performance 

OPTICKS and the film 'le Voyage dans la Lune'. VM allows sending images from a radio 

station on Earth to the Moon as radio signals. These are reflected back on Earth by the 

Moon's surface and received by Dwingeloo radio telescope, where the signals are 

reconverted into the original images. During each live performance of OPTICKS various 

radio stations on Earth collaborate for sending digital images to the Moon and back in real 

time, creating a network of adventurous communication where the people who submit the 

images for Moonbounce become virtual astronauts and space farers. In the live 

performance lecture, I will present the Visual Moonbounce technology in greater details 

and I will introduce the concept of 'Cosmic Flaneur' in relation to the OPTICKS project. 

Daniela de Paulis is a visual artist and lecturer living and working between Italy and The 

Netherlands. She works with video, installation, performance and has been an active 

practitioner since 2001, often collaborating with other artists, scientists and radio 

amateurs. She holds a BA from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Italy, and a Master 

Degree in Fine Arts from Plymouth University, UK. Since October 2009 she has been the 

first artist in residence at Dwingeloo radio telescope (NL) where she developed, together 

with the CAMRAS and ASTRON team, a technology called Visual Moonbounce, which allows 

sending images to the Moon and back as radio signals. She is currently a PhD student at 

Leiden University, developing her research on Visual Moonbounce and its links to 

Visionary Architecture and Space Research. Since 2010 she has been collaborating with the 

15

international collective Astronomers Without Borders (AWB), as the Project Chair for the 

AstroArt programme. More information on her work can be found on www.opticks.info and 

www.danieladepaulis.com 

Panel 6. Techno-textualities 

Time Ghost: A Memetic Application for the creation of Virtual and Live Performance. 

Towards a Postcultural approach to Narrative 

James Burrows (Edge Hill University) 

Time Ghost is a meeting place for concepts situated in terms of Cultural Theory and 

Memetics, and two component strands of practice-‐based research. Through investigation of 

conceptual, epistemological and theoretical notions of ‘technological interface’ relating to 

complex manifestations of human experience, or ‘human worlds’ (Benson, 2001), the 

proposed paper will discuss the nature and dynamics of narrative in Virtual and Live 

Performance practices. 

Setting forth the need for a paradigm shift, specifically with regards to how we approach 

the modes and function of narrative both critically and creatively within Performance; the 

original application of Memetics provides a new scientific ‘poetics’ of narrative-‐ a move 

towards a more objective scientific enquiry into the transmission, propagation and 

mutation of narrative structures that has previously been unrecognized within the 

discipline (Davis, C.B. 2007). 

Reviewing the interdisciplinary landscapes of Memetics, ‘technological interface’ and 

performance practice has enabled an original approach to the creation of virtual and live 

theatres, questioning notions of ‘self-‐agency’ and ‘virtual as temporal (dis)locator’. These 

developments produce fluctuations in the perspectives of the contemporary practitioner, 

interrogating the wider implications of practice (specifically the relationship between 

`performance’ and àrchive’) within a glocal environment. 

This paper presents an overview of the dual practical phases of the Time Ghost project as 

doctoral research, utilising existing social networking and wireless technologies to 

investigate the causatum of narrative function within the virtual manifestations of human 

worlds and the subsequent live re-‐presentation, transmission and mutation of the collected 

narrative structures by invited performance ensembles around the world. 

James Burrows is a PhD Student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Edge Hill University. 

James’ research praxis centres on the application of memetic science to performance 

theory in virtual and live domains. His thesis aims towards a neoteric understanding of 

narrative when re-‐conceptualised as a mechanism for cultural propagation -‐ leading 

towards a methodology for the creation of a performance/archive hybrid. As an early 

career researcher, he has a long-‐standing relationship with Edge Hill University; graduating 

from Drama, Physical Theatre & Dance in 2009. Since then he trained as a teacher of 

Performing Arts, and completed MA research in 2010. 

Transitional Materialities and the Performance of Javascript 

Nathan Walker (York St John University) 

“Codework makes exterior the interior workings of the computer” (Rayley 2002) 

sounding.js (2013) is a live performance that uses the voice to phonically sound the 

nonphonic code, symbols and alphanumeric programming language javascript. Using the 

16

written code as a score for vocalisation sounding.js will be performed live at the E-‐POETRY 

Festival 2013 and attempts to speak a nonverbal language through rehearsed and recited 

sounds-‐as-‐language. Influenced by F.T. Marinetti's concept of 'words in freedom' and 'the 

destruction of syntax', Steve McCaffery's 'Voice in Extremis', and Christian Bök's Cyborg 

Opera, the performance and its construction explores the materiality of electronic 

textuality as sound poetry. 

Invented in 1995, Javascript is part of the architectural framework of web browsing. The 

third level in what developers call 'The Separation of Concerns' which identifies HTML, css 

& Javascript to make possible the editing of a websites content, aesthetics and behaviour 

individually. Javascript is extra-‐textual, it is concerned with action, execution and cause. 

The 'separation of concerns' isolates the content from the behaviour, however, in this 

performance, the behaviour becomes the content, the code is executed as a sonic 

dysfunction. Attempting to bring the function and code of the computer to a visible and 

tangible aurality. 

Using Alan Golding's term 'transitional materialities', this paper will discuss the temporal 

and spatial textuality of new media poetics and how, by sounding the code, we can align 

digital writing practices with performance and sound poetry. Engaging in the theories of 

Giselle Beiguelman (2006), Rita Raley (2002) and what Ming-‐Qian Ma (2009) calls the 

'sound shape of the visual'. 

Nathan Walker is an artist and writer based in York. He is lecturer in Performance at York 

St John University and co-‐founder of arts organisation O U I Performance with Victoria 

Gray. His practice transforms the event of writing into performance, video and collage and 

has been shown both nationally and internationally in galleries, festivals and theatre 

spaces. www.nathan-‐walker.co.uk 

Digital Oedipus: de-structuring the theatre of the subject 

Hannah Lammin (University of Greenwich/Birmingham Institute of Art and Design) 

Studio for Electronic Theatre has produced a series of digitally-‐enhanced performance 

works (ACT Oedipus, 2011; Oedipus - Code Breaker, 2013) re-‐imagining the Oedipus myth in 

a virtual-‐reality age. These works combine physical performance with audio-‐visual feed-‐ 

back and augmented reality effects, with the aim of producing a new turn in the tradition of 

"total theatre" which transforms the experience of time and space, producing a non-‐ 

representational experiential form. 

Using the performance pieces as a starting point, this paper will examine the figure of 

Oedipus as a mythological foundation – both to our understanding of theatre since 

Sophocles' work was taken as the epitome of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics, and to modern 

conceptions of subjectivity, as rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis. I will argue that, by re-‐ 

staging the ancient tale in a near-‐future telematic environment and highlighting the 

disjunctures between the virtualized hyper-‐reality of the digital age and the brutalities that 

persist in the mundane reality of crisis spaces such as the war zone or refugee camp, SET's 

work figures something of the instability and indeterminacy that constitutes the identity of 

Oedipus, who is both foreign and native to Thebes, both husband and son to Jocasta. 

Drawing on Lyotard's libidinal philosophy, which takes the structure of the theatre as the 

paradigmatic form of subjectivity, I will argue that the non-‐linear, synaesthetic experience 

of SET's Oedipus generates an intensity that opens onto the fluid surface space Lyotard 

names the “Great Ephemeral Skin”, thereby energetically de-‐structuring the theatrical 

architecture of the subject. 

17

Hannah Lammin is a performer and researcher with the collective Studio for Electronic 

Theatre. Originally trained in dance at the London Contemporary Dance School and 

CalArts, she is currently an AHRC supported PhD candidate in Media Arts Philosophy at the 

University of Greenwich/Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. 

Performance: Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality 

Mark Jeffery & Judd Morrissey 

Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality is a durational live performance and installation 

that engages histories of forensics and anatomical science, placing the crudeness of early 

surgery in relation to the prevailing 21st century vision of a body enhanced by data and 

augmented by computation. The work's choreography, text, and overall form and structure 

are influenced by research into a range of historical archives including the history of 

anatomical theater, the deductive logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Glessner Lee's 

miniature crime scene re-‐enactments known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, 

and archives of personal evidence such as The Stud File, a methodical record of the sexual 

exploits of Samuel Steward, a 20th century tattoo artist, pornographer, and friend of 

Gertrude Stein. 

The core of the performance is an interactive operating table that generates screen-‐based 

content and distributes virtual overlays that can be viewed through mobile devices 

throughout the event. The hand-‐built operating table is potentially extended by four 

additional modular and mobile wooden leaves, eventually transforming into a 10'x16' 

assemblage that acts as a stage. The spatial choreography of bodies and objects enacts 

anatomy as both intact whole and distributed data-‐consuming system, as the elevated 

surface of the work shifts underfoot, fluctuating between references to surgery, torture, 

sex, solitary confinement, monastic behaviour and banquet. 

The work is partially supported by a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and 

commissioning support from the European research group ELMCIP (Electronic Literature 

as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice) in collaboration with Edinburgh 

College of Art and New Media Scotland. The piece has also been supported by artist's 

workshops at dance4, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and The School of the Art 

Institute of Chicago. The work is also supported by the National Museum of Health and 

Medicine Chicago. atom-r (anatomical theaters of mixed reality) is a provisional collective 

exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st century embodiment through performance, 

language and emerging technologies. Participants include Mark Jeffery (choreography), 

Judd Morrissey (systems), Justin Deschamps, Sam Hertz, Christopher Knowlton, & 

Blake Russell (collaborators/performers). 

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey are a collaboration merging live performance and digital 

literary practices. The work, which is visual, textual and choreographic, evolves through 

context-‐specific research and practice and always considers the constraints of a given 

venue or occasion. Site-‐specific considerations extend beyond the performance space to 

engage place as a living archive by incorporating online data available within a locale. A 

given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately 

presented as internet art, durational live installation, an ongoing activity, or a performance 

of fixed length. The two Chicago-‐ based artists are currently in residence at the National 

Museum of Health and Medicine, working with four male dancers, on Anatomical Theaters 

of Mixed Reality, a performance that examines the history of anatomy and forensics in 

conjunction with the 21st century vision of a posthuman body extended by computation. 

18

Recent works have included The Precession: An 80 Foot Internet Art Performance Poem, 

created for the exhibition space and 10-‐screen digital building facade at Hyde Park Art 

Center in Chicago. Jeffery and Morrissey have presented throughout the US, UK, and Europe 

with recent sites and venues including Edinburgh College of Art Sculpture Court, Inspace 

Gallery (Edinburgh), Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), Arizona State University Museum, Lincoln 

Cathedral Quarter (Lincoln, UK), Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery (Chicago), Museum 

of Contemporary Art Chicago, Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Bergen Art 

Museum, House of World Cultures Berlin, Chicago Cultural Center, Brown University and 

Firehouse 13 Gallery in Providence, RI. Both artists were members of the seminal 

performance collective Goat Island. 

Both artists also maintain individual practices performing and publishing in their 

respective fields, curating together and separately, and teaching at the School of the Art 

Institute of Chicago. Mark Jeffery is currently curating the city-‐wide In-‐Time international 

performance festival at 14 diverse venues throughout Chicago. http://www.in-‐time-‐ 

performance.org -‐ http://www.markjefferyartist.org and http://www.judisdaid.com 

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Abstracts - York St John University

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