Much of performance studies and theories of the later 20th and early 21st centuries continue to think of performance through paradigms of liveness, presence, and materiality. Today, as we peek into virtual worlds, with augmented reality, virtual reality, and performances on the metaverse and within the folds of the blockchain, Adham’s work raises questions such as: how do we think of performance in relation to data and the Web3.0 world? How can we articulate our understanding of performance as it intersects with futurist technologies, between the hope of decentralization that the blockchain offers to the arts from tools such as non-fungible-tokens to DAOs and DAPPS? And equally, how do we think performance will respond to a world headed towards more cyber-surveillance and conflicts over data sovereignty.
Focusing on data justice and cyber security, Anel’s paper looks into ontological assumptions of surveillance studies and art that come from epistemic choice to center around western notions of private life. Drawing from a western history of criminology and facial recognition, Anel looks at the works of artist Trevor Paglen and his attempts to present how the biases of modern training data, which are datasets used to teach the software and algorithm, repeat and reestablish the objectives of targeting deviancy. Her paper proposes to consider the Performance of Data as a process of coining data with truth through scientific, industrial, and political methods of knowledge production that establish mechanisms and ethics for its extraction, use, and interpretation. She situates her paper within the ongoing conversation about how data performs - participates in the making of our world - and how we can reconsider the characteristics centered in it. Anel’s work tends to focus on the violation of individual privacy and the misidentification of individuals through algorithms and endangering the autonomy of individuals and communities in performing their identity through data and in the data world and consequently in a real-life setting.
When a new form of presence and performance is being shaped which technologically embodied knowledge through online bodies, meaning social media users, is regularly being practiced, Yasamin’s paper re-explores the fundamental definitions of the stage, scenario, temporality, and liveness discussed by Diana Taylor and Peggy Phelan in the Performance Studies scholarship and attempts to re-define and apply them on discourses surrounding social networks where social media users perform identity while and by practicing and demanding social changes online. By drawing from Taylor and Phelan's theories, Yasamin’s essay reflects on #MeToo and its performativity in the realm of Performance Studies and New Media Studies. After revising and unpacking the terms such as archive, repertoire, stage, event, ephemerality, and scenario and evaluating them in the #MeToo movement on Twitter, her work raises questions around the physical vs. online space, the physical vs. virtual embodiment of acts of transfer and the notion of archive in the nature of online platforms. The paper looks at #MeToo and its widespread effect worldwide evolving out of its native western context as an example of crucial online activism making changes, influencing the vocabulary of common social discourses, and forming a new wave of identity performance and perhaps feminism.
Timeline of the panel is as below:
15 minutes Niyoosha (Presider) for introduction of the term, aims of the studies and reading bios
Total: 75 minutes