Frakcija Performing Arts Journal, no. 62/63, 2012

Editor(s): Tomislav Medak, Ivana Ivković
Language: English, Croatian

This issue of Frakcija Performing Arts Journal, under the title "Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating", is a continuation of BADco.’s interest in relating performance and image. More concretely, it comes as a final chapter in a series that was motivated by our installation work Responsibility for Things Seen commissioned in 2011 for the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us - in the absence of performers in the exhibition - to pursue the idea of ‘theatre by other means’ and to custom develop an algorithmic live editing video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology. The work presented in Venice was followed up in February of 2012 by the performance Black and Forth, a performance that was conversely premised on the translation of cinematic procedures by means of theatre.

Wishing to extend the interest in that nexus beyond own work, in the March of 2012 we organized a symposium and artistic programme with the same title as this issue of Frakcija. With the help of our partners Multimedia Institute and What, How and for Whom, we convened a smaller group of prominent international artists and scholars working in performing arts, visual arts, film, performance studies and philosophy to discuss and showcase the experimental encounters between the image and the body in the artistic practice. The volume in your hands is a selection of contributions, interviews and interventions on paper documenting and extending the purview of that event.

You might be asking yourselves why performance, body, image and technology? Why that constellation? Well, in our day and age we tend to subscribe to the critique of the domination of image: the unebbing repetition of hegemonic representations, the homogenization of mediatized social experience, the habituation of sensory apparatus to technological artifice, the reification of individual and social gestures through their visual re-representation. However, understanding the encounter of image and body as a field of performance allows us to explore this encounter beyond the totalizing adequation of sensory perception to technological apparatus, of social behaviors to reproduced images. Understood as an encounter that is operated in or on, that operates on itself through the variation and recomposition of its constitutive elements, we see incompatibilities between technology and habit, excesses of agency in image, spectator or subjects, noises in transmission, strange modes of viewing arising. The encounter transforms into a mis-encounter. An indeterminate field of negotiation, slippage, mis-performance, deterritorialization and reterritorialization… In short, a field of divergences that are themselves frequently subject of artistic experimentation and that we here want to propose for reconsideration.

Authors:
Jonathan Beller
Miha Colner
Manuel Vason
Stephen Zepke
Ivana Ivković
Vlatka Horvat
Sinisa Ilić & Bojan Djordjev
Slobodan Šijan
Igor Marković
Mischa Twitchin
Bruce McClure
Mario Kozina