Video Documents

Abstract

Audio/visual recording technologies, particularly (in shorthand) video, offer the ultimate test case where questions of ethics, ideologies and practices in representing live performance are concerned. More than any other form or activity of representation, video is constructed within discourses of documentation and disappearance as at once both the saviour and the death of live performance — as at once something that will solve the ‘problem’ of documentation, and at the same time something that will potentially obscure and overwrite the original performance.¹ For while the ability of audio/visual technologies to record the appearance of performance in time and space prompts claims of faithful and mechanical documentation — neutral, objective, factual, complete — the very strengths of this claim simultaneously threaten the prized uniqueness of the live event, with the possibility that the mediatized reproduction becomes a show in its own right.