What does performance, a term that has become hot in the visual and media arts,
imply and what does it promise? We seem to historically understand it as something that happens on a stage. But in contemporary culture, disciplines as diverse (and divergent) as anthropology, gaming, psychology, sociology, art, design or marketing all use the word with abandon. But why this new, almost meteoric interest in the term, particularly given that there have already been substantial “performative turns” in the past in many disciplines, both inside and outside the visual and performing arts: anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, the sociology of science, design. As a concept, performance suggests an act or a “doing”— the behaviour of someone or something over time. Time here is the critical element, for the word’s original derivation from the old French parfournir (“to complete totally, to furnish forth, to carry out thoroughly or to bring to completion”), already implies change. Yet, in many contemporary artistic and design practices (particularly in the technologically inflected arts) there is a marked move away from the performative acts of strictly human bodies and towards an emphasis on environments of techno-scientifically orchestrated things, transient objects and processes. Indeed, many artists and designers (not to mention engineers and natural scientists) are increasingly focused on the performances and acts of these so-called “nonhumans.” These are not just
academic issues that are the purview of philosophers. From the collapse of
interdependent global financial markets, the ecological catastrophes of Fukushima or the increasing bio-political invasions of the “knowledge monopolies” (Franklin Foer) of Google and Facebook into all facets of social life, such socio-technical monstrosities demonstrate to us the urgency of trying to understand a viewpoint beyond strictly ourselves. If the origin of performance in the West thus attempted to bring together the gods and man, techne and nature, the human and the non, it seems that the urgency now afforded to the stage-based arts is to reclaim the word performance as well as embrace the new concepts brought to it by other fields of knowledge – ones that concern themselves with the performances of all types of life.