The machinic city by Marcos P. Dias

Author:Marcos P. Dias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Participation in the machinic city

Participation in digitally mediated environments

In order to analyse how participation unfolds through digitally mediated performance art events, I turn back to Dixon’s argument (discussed in Chapter 1) about the introversion of the computer paradigm. In his comparison of the Futurist movement and contemporary digital performance, Dixon (2007: 64) highlights the futurists’ extreme enthusiasm for the technologies that were emerging at the time. As he points out, the futurists appropriated them in expressive performances, as they singled out machines – ‘film, automobiles, airplanes, and … electricity’ – as actants that not only superseded human actants but also replaced them. In contrast, he argues that contemporary digital performance is marked by ‘the introversion of the computer paradigm’ and the absence of any manifestos (in comparison to the plethora of Futurist manifestos). To a certain extent, this reflects the nature of contemporary technical machines. While the machines of the early twentieth century were ‘all out there’ (in the physical sense) as they revolutionised transportation and communication exchanges in the city, contemporary digital technologies – despite radically reshaping (once more) social and spatial exchanges – did so through a more inward trajectory.

This is illustrated by the diversity of digitally mediated communication forms emerging in the last few decades – cable TV, the World Wide Web, large urban digital screens, smart phones – that operate by directing our gaze towards screens. But it would be too simplistic to label these as inward and introverted communication technologies. It is more productive to analyse how the impact of these technologies is felt when they assemble with other actants towards producing unique forms of social interaction, and to reflect on their effect beyond their immediate presence in the shape of screens. To achieve this, we must account for their inner workings and their innovative actant-components as mediators of agency. These include the seamless integration of computers into the real world in the shape of ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991), the widespread use of artificial intelligence and the increasing influence of remote computing processes on urban interaction through online cloud computing, video conferencing and real-time online collaboration. All of these factors facilitate new modes of participation.

Performance art events provide a way of analysing the effect of such technologies on contemporary urban living without pre-empting their participatory outcome. They reveal multiple modes of participation that are influenced by the translation of the artistic narrative by the participant, but also by the emerging assemblage of expected and unexpected actants. These do not necessarily fit in with the digital introversion paradigm. To observe how these patterns emerge, it is necessary to combine multiple methods of investigation (interviews, recordings, observations, participation) across different venues, assembling what Marcus (1998) refers to as a multi-sited ethnographic study, enabling a discourse that ‘[refocuses] ethnography from structure to voice/discourse’, and where multiple perspectives – or voices – are assembled together (Marcus, 1998: 66). Another research framework that is quite fitting for the purpose of tracing the multiple actants involved in performance art events in

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