Fear of Missing Out: Performance Art through the Lens of Participatory Digital Culture

How does our use of digital and social media technologies trigger the emotional flesh of the body? With a pervasive and instant ability to image and track the body, share and consume the self and others, the embodied subject is increasingly produced through the use of technology. With modes of performance and spectatorship evolving through digital technologies, and the insidious co-option of emergent participatory cultures by powerful multinational companies, come new ways in which the body is commodified in late-capitalist economies. It can be argued that performance art practices might resist or intervene through a powerful ability to re-establish human connection through a live and affective performing or spectating experience. However liveness, affectivity and human connection are themselves enmeshed in digital cultures. For instance ASMR videos that are created in order to elicit an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, through whispering and gestures that position the viewer as the object of care through the camera. The physiological and affective response these videos claim further impinges on and challenges strategies of performance practice. In this context, this paper will ask how can performance art practice reclaim the affective body? How can performance think through how the body is produced in and by cultures emergent from digital technologies? How have modes of performance and spectatorship shifted and how might these be addressed in performance art practices?