The Thing That Is What a Circle Is

The Thing That Is What a Circle Is is a heavily mediated performative lecture engaging and interrogating the positions and relationships of technological and mediatic writing/performing apparatuses with “live” or “real” time, repetition, and circularity. Framed through explicit concerns with objects that begin to emerge through evading conventionally attenuated forms and discourses, The Thing That Is What a Circle Is is an attempt to conflate technological and performative repetition with traditional notions of “live/real” time through addressing and recuperating the object/image of performance, the performance as object/image, the object/image as performance. The lecture will be staged by occupying the interstices of the subjects of tautology and circular logic, the former being a successful instrument of philosophical argument, the latter being evidence of poor scholarship and criticism. How might deep repetition, radical mimesis, and performance and writing media and machines expose and reveal not only the aesthetic execution of performance/writing and

media/machines themselves but also their conceptual underpinnings? To put it another way, how might the failures and slippages of such repetition and apparatuses not focus simply on meaninglessness specifically, but on the extra-representational strategies of duplicity, doubleness, desire, and simulation. Duplicity, doubleness, desire, and simulation lend themselves to the artifice of interface design and critiques of textuality, of reading and writing practices, the direct address of performance, and the lecture as an object/site of fetishism and spectacle. How might these seemingly disparate forms and contents be coerced and positioned to be put at odds with one another? What new dialogues/forms might this tension produce/generate/negate?