Excerpt
When we think about performance, we may think about performing art, an act of presenting a play, concert, or an act of performing a dramatic role, song, or piece of music. Yet in other contexts, performance may refer to a task or function, machine or a product, investment, or exaggerated human behaviour, or the use of language (Oxford English Living Dictionary). Three of our
AI&Society editors, Victoria Vesna, Sha Xin Wei and Satinder Gill, and the artist Idris Khan set the scene for this exploration. For the artist Victoria Vesna (victoriavesna.com), performance is about exploring the nature of the interface between the physical, cultural, and our experiential worlds, and investigating how communication technologies affect collective behaviour and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Reflecting on her vision of interactive art, she says that “In the end, all variations are about raising awareness of the interconnectivity of everything and everyone, and the collaborative interaction between the artist and the audience—through various expressions that can range in a number of manifestations. Technology is or should be utilised to amplify the experience and/or the range of influence”. Again Vesna surmises: “How does one create an experience that immerses the audience in a way that changes their perception of the subject matter? This is the core challenge of interactive art and made most obvious when computers are involved”. For the scientist, Sha Xin Wei (
http://asunow.asu.edu), the technologies of performance relate to gesture and performance, sensors and active fabrics, temporal patterns, computer-mediated interaction, geometric visualisation and writing systems. It is about creating new kinds of responsive environments and improvisation in all senses, for exploring gesture, distributed agency and materiality in kinetic and body-based media and in responsive environments. For the Polanyian, Satinder Gill (
http://cms.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/satinder-gill), performance is about sensing our relationships with our environments, handling ambiguities, negotiating difference, empathising and collectively making skilled judgement in modern society. It involves exploring rhythm as a perspective for working with physical and large data sets in relation to one another, how professionals can identify shared rhythms and how these rhythms can be manipulated to better understand possible interventions to enhance shared rhythms that support social cohesion. For the artist, Idris Khan (
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/14-idris-khan/), it is about manipulating photographs, be it a picture or an inscription on steel or board, or a scripture, sometimes using computers, to explore the deeper meaning buried in lines of writing, which he distils until they reveal some new truth. For the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), performance reflects a movement away from thinking in terms of immutable objects and singular subjects and focuses attention on collective contexts, exploring the potential of the idea of performance as an umbrella approach to culture: a ‘kind of thinking in its own right’. According to the Horizon project, the concept of Performing Data has emerged from multi-disciplinary engagements between artists, social scientists and technologists. Through performance, data are revealed to people in various material and embodied ways, sometimes slowly, sometimes, as if live, sometimes in tangible forms, and sometimes by requiring them to enact being sensors. …
