Practice as Research PhD projects

Ponton, Anita | Goldsmiths College, University of London

Title of the thesis:

Vertigo: The Technophenomenological Body in Performance

My project is a consideration of how new technologies impact on the body in
performance. The affect of digital media and virtual reality on
conventional notions of physicality and representation is initiating a
radical rethink on how we define and understand body/performance art. The
question of how and where we locate the internal and external self, an
issue that is crucial for artists who use their bodies, is further
emphasised through new technological mediation. This signals the
possibility of new thinking about presence and exchange within
body/performance art. I am primarily interested in how new technologies
facilitate different sorts of exchange between artwork/artist and audience.
I contend that when the performing body is immersed in new technologies
it’s desires and anxieties are exposed. The intersubjective relation
generated between the work and audience ? the phenomenological experience
of a public performance of self ? is consequently revealed as erotic.

I aim to reconfigure contemporary ideas of performance as dependent on
immediate presence (liveness). In the performance of self, as embodied by
the artist in performance, the conventional distinction between fixed
notions of subject and object is collapsed into an intersubjective dynamic.
My analysis of this relation is informed by Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the
relationship between the visible and the invisible as a ‘chiasmic
intertwining’. Accordingly, rather than proceed from the idea of a split
between artists and viewer/s, I examine the intersubjective dynamic as an
exchange of flesh.

I use the term ‘technophenomenological’ to describe the enworlded nature of
the relationships between bodies, machines and media. I extend this
understanding by drawing on psychoanalytic concepts of incorporation and
narcissism, on cinema and media theory and on theories of excess and waste.
I endeavour to ‘write through’ my practice, sometimes anecdotally and
sometimes intuitively, to evolve a dialogue between my practice and
theoretical concerns.

Date of award: January 20th 2006.

Supervisors: Dr. Janet Hand, Prof. Gerard Hemsworth

External Examiners: Dr. Lizbeth Goodman, Dr. Sophia Lycouris