Talk in the course of the annual meeting of the Swiss association of art historians:
ART HISTORY AND NEW MEDIA: WHAT’S UP? SITUATION AND PROSPECTS
15. – 16. OKTOBER 2021
HEK HAUS (HAUS DER ELEKTRONISCHEN KÜNSTE), MÜNCHENSTEIN/BASEL & ONLINE

"In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance everything is real." Marina Abramović, a performance artist both celebrated as well as heavily criticized, summed up with this sentence a certain preconcenption of performance as a medium of fine arts: performances are based on the "authentic" body and its presence: performances are fleeting - and only realized in the here-and-now.
The performance theory of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s confirms these myths, on this side (for instance with Erika Fischer-Lichte) or beyond (for instance with Peggy Phelan) of the Atlantic. In my contribution I will explore the question to what extent artistic performances in digital games can nevertheless be meaningfully included in a
history of performance as a medium of visual art. This will be done with particular
examples from the 2010s, which are understood by the artists as performance and were streamed on the gaming platform Twitch. Following the art-historical discussion of performances, how can one meaningfully talk about these works as such, if bodies can only occur in a mediated way? If these performances themselves are based on a complex interplay between human and non-human (machinic) actions?

Download the full program here