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29/3/2005

Becoming Uncomfortable, PSi #11

Brown University, Providence

Becoming Uncomfortable

Performance Studies international's eleventh annual conference

Performance Studies international (PSi) was launched by the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 1995. In its ten years of existence, the organisation has staged conference gatherings that have attracted a wide range of scholars and artists working in the field of performance. PSi has become internationally recognized for creating an opportunity for dialogue among artists and academics in a variety of disciplines whose concerns converge in the still-evolving areas of performance research and practice. Its coalition of the diverse field of performance studies has resulted in the formation of a worldwide membership association. PSi conferences have been held in the United States, Wales, and Germany. PSi #9 was held in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2003. PSi #10 took place in Singapore in 2004.

At PSi#11 we aim to host a conference where scholars may identify with the discourses of visual arts, media and cultural studies, theatre, dance, public rhetoric, ethnography, musicology, and philosophy can find common ground, however rocky and uneven. This conference will not only engage with and advance the discourses that surround performance, but will itself feature installations, theatrical and dance performances that challenge the borders of those genres, and scholarship

Elena Cologni, who has been awarded a post-doctoral AHRB Small Grant For Creative and Performing Arts based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, with the project: ‘Present Memory and Liveness in delivery and reception of video documentation during performance art events’ will present the piece ‘monitoring the gap’.

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MNEMONIC PRESENT, UN-FOLDING #1 is the first of a series of performances on the notions of deferral, fruition, mnemonic present and immediacy of interchange in liveness .

The difference between the time our memories belong to and that of their recollection is suddenly erased by the perception of it all in the present.

Part of the research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK) titled 'Present Memory and Liveness in delivery and reception of video documentation during performance art events', this project is based on an hypothesis that notions of liveness and presence can be questioned by allowing manipulation of documentation in the live event to be the performance's opening stage rather than its point of closure thus generating a form of mnemonic present. The practical work will partially draw on Derrida's notion of 'supplement'; a collaboration with Psychologist Thomas Suddendorf; and is to be placed within the debate on liveness and media led by Ausslander and Cubitt.

In my recent pieces (2001 onwards) defined as 'Video Live Installation' (VLI), the 'live-recording' and 'pre-recording' projected during the performative event has opened up questions regarding the involvement of the audience and their perception of what is present and represented. VLI, including its own simultaneous documentation can be regarded itself as a form of 'memory in the present' of the event, as perceived by the audience. In the new work I will create a 'real time distancing' from the event as part of its delivery at the time of its perception, to draw a parallel between the production of the performance's documentation and methods of memory archiving. In this context, the video documentation of the event is a 'supplement' to the performing body/self, which can itself become a 'supplement' to the event. The implicit continuous temporal and spatial shift of the event's meaning is thus created together with the temporary presentation and representation of the performer's self in relationship to the spectators - participating in the creative process through the fruition/interchange that takes place during its production. This process of constructing and recording of the documentation as 'supplement' (part) of the live event results in the paradox of its status as documentation, no longer just proof of the live event. With the possibilities offered also by digital media, this stage is expected to generate new discourses around 'aperture' - the opening onto the work - within live performance art. Elena Cologni

University of The Arts London, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Small Grant for Creative and Performing Arts UK

Hosted by Brown University, 77 Waterman Street, Providence, RI

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