ELMCIP Seminar on Digital Textuality with/in Performance
As part of the ELMCIP research project, and under the aegis of University College Falmouth, participants in a seminar at Arnolfini, Bristol will investigate the relationship between e-literature/digital text and performance. Members of the ELMCIP project, international speakers and practitioners will discuss the function and understanding of performativity and its relationship to digital literature through a series of papers, presentations and practical engagements.
Although the field of e-literature is rife with references to performance, they have tended to remain relatively untheorised. In the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to the relationship between the text output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body responding performatively to that text, or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to fold digital text performance into the wider context of the ‘turn to performance’ among the humanities in recent decades. It is against this background of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, performance of self and gender, performance writing, etc, that the conference will take place.
While continuing the investigation of live performance, we will be seeking to broaden the scope to include; interactivity, the performative gesture of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface, the performativity of language itself on the screen, social performance or how digital texts ‘perform’ us, the performance of codes and scripting, and the performance of the machine itself, i.e., what does an engineer mean when s/he talks about performance? In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif) and, in order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact and collaborate with each other.
Conference proceedings, along with artist’s pages, will be published in a dedicated issue of the journal Performance Research (2013).
A schedule of the event is available for download as a pdf.
