Hazelle

Robles
A11244226
ICAM 160A
February 21, 2017

Conversations in the Digisphere: An Interactive Performance

My senior project, titled Conversations in the Digisphere, is an interactive
performance where I play the role of an Internet junkie who livestreams herself
doing various tasks in an attempt to gain validation from her audience. The
audience members are not performers but people who will encounter me when I am
performing on location. The performance can take place anywhere but it will always
maintain a specific setup. I will be inside a rectangular booth-like structure where I
am sitting in front of a laptop with which I will be livestreaming. The walls of the
booth will be covered with an opaque curtain and just outside it will be a table with
another laptop. This laptop will be facing outward with my livestream open and any
passerby can look and interact with it. They can only speak to me through this
laptop despite me being physically right in front of them. As the audience adds
comments, likes, and dislikes, my behavior will begin to change becoming loud and
frenetic in response to approval or cold and quiet in response to disapproval.

Ultimately, Conversations in the Digisphere will end in me taking on a persona
that my audience, through their interactions with me on the livestream, has
constructed for me. This is an integral part of my piece a loss of autonomy over my
own self. Despite me being physically present before my audience, the fact that my
presence is mediated to them through a screen causes a shift in the power dynamic
between us. The separation created by the screen and the further division of space
created by my placement in the booth grants the audience a degree of anonymity,
which in turn enables them to respond to me in a more truthful manner.

 The concept of power with anonymity is one that has become increasingly
relevant with the advent of new social technology in recent years. The 21st century
has given way to the creation of online social networking, providing virtual spaces
for people to converse. MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are a handful of
such spaces where millions gather to post personal content, foster relationships,
and give/receive feedback from peers. The new ability to mediate ones identity and
relationships through a screen is convenient physical distance is no longer a
barrier and the instantaneous nature of content allows for constant stimulation. But
these new abilities granted by this mediation has also resulted in a shift of power
people are now able to critique others as they see fit while hiding behind the
physical distance between them. Conversations in the Digisphere is my attempt to
explore this new power dynamic and the relationship between the dual spaces of
social interaction physical and virtual by simulating a physical distance with a
virtual platform as the main gateway for interaction.

While my piece uses physical separation as a large component of the
performance, I occasionally subvert it by pulling back the curtain walls of my booth
and forcing the audience to be aware of my presence just behind the laptop screen. I
could do this at any given moment and as a response to any number of things (a
person leaving a troll comment or a lack of interaction with my livestream on the
laptop). This subversion flips the power dynamic of our interaction by taking away
the comfort of their distance and anonymity and allowing me, who was transformed
into a performative object for them to view, to regain my autonomy as a person.

This confrontational aspect of Conversations in the Digisphere and my
awareness of my status as an object draw inspiration from performances of a
similar nature such as Yoko Onos Cut Piece in 1964 and Marina Ambramovics The
Artist Is Present in 2010. In Cut Piece, Yoko Ono allows her audience to come up to
her and cut off a piece of her clothing as she sits complacently before them. In The
Artist Is Present, Marina Ambramovic sat at a table in Museum of Modern Art in New
York for several days straight. People who came into the museum could become part
of Ambramovics piece by taking the chair across from her at the table and allowing
her to gaze directly at them for a period of time.

I point out both of these works in relation to Conversations in the Digisphere
because both explore the relationship between the artist as an object and the viewer
as well as the power dynamic between the two even subverting the dynamic by
forcing the audience to confront the fact that the object they are acting upon is a
sentient person in their immediate presence. However, what differentiates my piece
from the works of Yoko Ono and Marina Ambramovic is its division of space
between I the artist and my audience. I am exploring this power dynamic, but I am
exploring it in relation to virtual space how people, by displaying themselves on
the Internet, are transformed into objects for their peers to judge and how the
unequal power distribution online alters a person in real life.

There is another work that is performative in nature and also looks at
unequal distributions of power online the Internet personality That Poppy, a girl
who makes enigmatic videos on the website YouTube. I refer to Poppy as a work
because she, just as I am doing in my piece, is a girl who is taking on a persona and
performing for an audience. Unlike Yoko Ono and Marina Ambramovic, Poppys
performance does not happen on-site before a live audience but in virtual space
with her audience being the people who watch her videos. In her videos, the
persona Poppy demonstrates an awareness of her status as an object and often
engages with the invisible audience by looking outward as if gazing right at you and
speaking directly into (or perhaps even through) the camera to her viewers.

My performance piece, like Poppy, tries to open a dialogue about how social
technologies have changed the way a person constructs their identity and the power
of the online audience. Again, there is an exploration of power dynamics in social
spaces. But Conversations in the Digisphere does not take place in either a purely
physical or a purely virtual space my performance piece connects the two through
the incorporation of an on-site livestream

Works Cited
Ambramovic, Marina, The Artist Is Present, 2010, Performance. Museum of
Modern Art, New York.

Ono, Yoko, Cut Piece, 1964-1965, Performance.

Poppy , That Poppy, 2016-2017, YouTube channel.