| Abstract-
Christopher L. Salter
(full paper) http://hdl.handle.net/10002/448
Unstable
Events: Performative Science, Materiality and Machinic Practices
It is increasingly accepted that, alongside cybernetics, computer science,
music and the visual arts, experimental performance practice is also essential
for an understanding of past and present media arts history. After years
of obscurity, for example, EAT’s Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering
is now held up by scholars as the quintessential event of art science
collaboration. Theoretically, the term performance appeared in the work
of anthropologists, sociologists and theatre makers such as Erving Goffman,
Victor Turner and Richard Schechner in the 1960s, who wanted to connect
the performing arts with the social sciences. However rich theories of
social dramas (Turner) or interaction rituals (Goffman) are for understanding
performance as a general cultural paradigm, however, these models are
proving inadequate for grappling with the complex human-machinic relationships
that mark contemporary artistic practices within techno-culture.
Now performance is migrating to the sciences, with increasing interest
from disciplines outside of artistic contexts, for example, science and
technology studies (STS) and Human Computer Interaction. As articulated
by scholars investigating how science constructs and disseminates knowledge,
“performance” is seen as a methodology for an understanding
of complex, dynamic phenomena and systems. Theorists like John Law, Karen
Baarad and Bruno Latour, for example, use performance to grasp the materiality
of fluid techno-scientific objects/processes that are produced in scientific
practice. The physicist Hans Diebner (2006) focuses on the characteristic
of unrepeatability central to the act of performance; something that contradicts
the well understood idea of reproducibility in science. Performance involves
“the moment of action, its continuity, inherent temporality and
relationship to the present.” Science and its by product, technology,
are performative in that they function as potentially unpredictable, material
acts that do something to the world we inhabit. This paper examines how
the migration/transfer of performance from the arts to the sciences can
then be used to understand the practices between humans and machinic systems
that mark performance in the artistic domain and how these ideas could
articulated to scholars/practitioners working in the design of complex,
pervasive computation systems that increasingly pose new kinds of performative
relationships between humans and machines in our everyday, quotidian world.
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