Pixelated Memories: Performance and Digital Historiography

By coincidence, luck, or--more likely--bad planning, I find myself writing this post in the midst of three simultaneous theatre festivals in New York. All devoted to new work, these festivals--COIL by PS122, Under the Radar by The Public Theatre, and the American Realness Festival--offer extraordinary opportunities to view contemporary performance from across New York and around the world. Seeing over a dozen shows in 6 days, I'm in performance heaven.

Many of these works include at least some engagement with digital technology. This is very much the goal for some such as Gob Squad, a group that creates spontaneous, ridiculous missions in the streets outside the theatre just prior to the performance (the subsequent film shows four simultaneous cameras and characters and these videos mixed in real-time constitute what we see on "stage") and Big Art Group (one of my favorites) who make real-time movies on stage playing with the cliches, tropes and trash of popular culture. (Moments of heightened emotion in their most recent Broke House for example, are rendered through mash-ups of texts from Marx in the visual and sexual excesses of the film Showgirls (1995).

But there are examples of other groups, such as the physical theatre group Every House Has a Door (formed by members of the theatre group, Goat Island), who are newly turning to digital media and film for choreographic inspiration. Whether the digital elements are either explicit or hidden, either incidental to the main action or the structuring element for the work, nearly all of these performances, across the various festivals and among artists from the US, Lebanon, Germany, and the UK, overwhelmingly refer to media--including film, video, and other digital records--as tools of both memory and loss. That is, in many of the works I've seen over the past few days, it seems that much of contemporary performance is using digital records as the tools best suited to explore the process of both remembering and forgetting. These performances situate questions of authenticity and artifice, history and fiction, within larger investigations of how we remember, reconstruct, and reconstitute the past. Without looking for truth or authentic master narratives, these new works offer compelling commentaries on how and what we remember and, perhaps more importantly, how a culture informed by digital technologies and replayed (often in real-time) across glowing screens might record, remember, and even forget itself. The most interesting aspect of the digital influence on stage is not always realized in obvious examples of digital technology such as cameras and screens on stage, but often in less obvious and more subtle forms.

Take, for example, the Argentinian director Mariano Pensotti's The Past is a Grotesque Animal. According to Pensotti's program notes, this performance was inspired by his collection of damaged photographs scavenged from a nearby photo developer. Taking these damaged pictures of strangers, he then constructed narratives performed in four distinct spaces on a rotating show and performed by four performers in all of the necessary characters. The main characters--Mario, Pablo, Vicky, and Laura--become entangled within narratives both familiar and bizarre, both in quests for new futures and attempts to recover the truth of the past. Pablo, for instance, finds a severed hand on his doorstep and in his search to uncover the secret meaning of the discovery, develops a perverse attachment to the hand. His most ideal relationship is an affair with a woman missing her left arm. In narration by one of the other performers, we learn that when Pablo puts the severed hand (kept in his freezer) next to his lover's armless side, he experiences a pleasurable sense of "completeness." Thus remembering--literally re-membering his girlfriend--he experiences the pleasure of the whole. The fragments finally arranged into a satisfying whole.

What all of these performances speak to is a current moment in which the document--the fragment and the whole--and memory itself are precariously poised on the edge of collapse. Pablo is unable to make his lover into his ideal whole for more than a moment (she leaves him) and eventually after his own death, the fragments of his life will be collected by his sisters who will have to confront the various parts and pieces in their attempt to reconstruct some kind of meaning of their deceased brother. This brings me to the significance of digital historiography in our current contemporary moment and the unique contribution that performance lends to this discussion.

Digital historiography is most simply the application of digital tools to historiographic practices, the reconstruction and writing of history. Looked at from a certain angle, we might question whether there is any non-digital historiography (or humanities, for that matter) anymore. When nearly all archives are becoming digitized, when collections are organized through databases and search engines, when papers, journals, and books are written with word-processing programs, it might be difficult to assess what aspect of historiography isn't affected by digital processes. But it is also more than this. Lev Manovich argued in his influential Language of New Media (2000) that contemporary culture followed the logic of the database, by which he meant that digital culture followed the patterns of random access memory (RAM) as opposed to a linear structure more akin to print (notably, he included a good deal of film montage in his analysis as well; cf. http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf).

I have argued elsewhere (here and here) that digital historiography is often akin to performance. That is, that the impermanence or ephemerality of performance is reflected in the apparent immateriality of digital code. Both forms have a kind of duality in this sense. The performance is there, composed (often) of material bodies in physical space, but disappearing continuously throughout the duration of the performance itself. Similarly, digital records appear to last forever (think of unflattering Facebook images, for example) but may lack any material presence. How many digital images are created on cameras and mobile phones every day, circulating endlessly but never achieving a materiality of their own? These images then exist in a space where they are both present and immaterial; recordings, but not necessarily durable records. If we think about constructing the history of this current moment, we will likely have to rely on such digital records and will confront the problems of obsolete platforms and incompatible technologies. We will find (as we often do in history) only pieces and fragments—body parts—and will struggle (as all historians do) to put these pieces and fragments into satisfying wholes. But, as Pensotti's performance suggests, these reconstructions of the past will never become satisfyingly complete. They will remain Frankenstein monsters of a sort—fragmented, incomplete, even mutilated.

When contemporary artists integrate digital technologies into the space of performance, they point to the ways in which the digital suggests a false sense of completion and our paradoxical, futile attempts to continuously record in spite of ourselves. In the digital context, these artists have much to offer digital historiography.

I will close with one final example from Lebanese video and performance artist Rabih Mroué's newest work (still in progress, as I understand it), The Pixelated Revolution. Considering the recent Syrian protests and violent attacks by the state, Mroué examines the images created by the protesters on mobile phones within the context of other films and manifestos, most notably the Dogme95 filmmakers. Mroué is particularly interested in the protesters' repeated recordings of their own deaths, that is, the continued filming via mobile phone, even after the military sniper or tank has pointed the barrel at the protester with camera and until the hit has caused the phone camera eye to spin wildly into the dirt or crash to a black screen. In his commentary on these images, Mroué questions why the repeated filming of these moments. Why not run away? The aggressor is never identified because of the low resolution. These recordings are not evidence to bring the perpetrator to justice. So, why continue filming? What he suggests, both in the lecture performance itself and in the title, is that the meaning of these images (what he also calls, “the double shooting”) is not contained within a single specific instance, but has meaning only in the accumulation of moments. This accumulation gives the representations meaning. Much like the individual pixels combine and compose the larger image (more pixels=higher resolution and a clearer image), so too do these repeated and repeatedly, infuriatingly futile recordings at the moment of death combine to create a larger, clearer significance. More recordings, however individually limited each one is, create a clearer larger picture for the eventual viewer. Thus it is the act of recording—the performance as such—that gives the events significance within a larger context. The history of this and other similar actions then can only be fully ascertained when considered within the context of performance, performances that are as fleeting, incomplete, and potentially incoherent as the fragmented, decontextualized digital images upon which they draw.

To engage in digital historiography, then, is to attend to the importance of performance. These two realms have a great deal to say to one another. Digital media, its theory and historiography, provides useful tools, frameworks, and methodologies for capturing, studying, and relaying historical evidence and documentation. But within the mutability of digital documentation, it is performance that helps us understand what we cannot see within the image, what extends beyond the frame, what is lost in the recording, the replaying, and the reconstruction of images. In performance, we understand that we are re-creating mutants, fragments from the past that can never be fully reintegrated and seemlessly sutured together. We know—through the inherent problems, challenges, and loss that accompany every performance—that the past can never be re-membered perfectly. That past, after all, is a grotesque animal. The challenge is to bring the principles of digital and performance historiography together. This is the subject of my current research about which there is always more to say, but I have to run to another show.