Elise Morrison

Our understanding of “presence” has made an epochal shift in the past three years. The field of performance studies—never settled, always in flux—is shifting as well on this topic, as what we study expands digitally, contracts physically, embraces new paradigms, and unlooses others. While it is impossible to fix an exact time when attitudes about something as ineffable yet entirely real as presence changed permanently, this issue touches down on several key moments.

Mathematicians use the word performance rigorously. In casual conversation or heated argument, skeptics are loosely admonished to “do the math”; but to comply successfully with such a prompt they must perform the necessary calculations to their precise end. To perform is to solve. This small linguistic detail has large practical implications for a society that now puts such a premium on what it calls the “high-performance algorithm,” which optimally organizes the intake of input and the production of output. Ever more present in contemporary life and increasingly urgent to its conduct, therefore, algorithms, which may be defined simply as small procedures that solve recurrent problems, are performing (or not) in every aspect of networked experience, which increasingly mediates, if not displaces, experience of other kinds. Today performance theorists and performers alike are reckoning with the emergence of the new algorithmic culture both critically and creatively. The editors devote this Consortium Issue of TDR to this work, prefaced by a brief history that begins with the coining of the word algorithm itself.

As systems of military, state, and corporate surveillance have become increasingly ubiquitous facets of contemporary life, artists around the world have employed drones, CCTV cameras, GPS tracking systems, medical surveillance equipment, and a host of other commercially available surveillance technologies as representational tools with which to critique and reimagine the social and political landscape of contemporary surveillance society. This special issue of IJPADM seeks to analyse and catalogue practical strategies for making art and performance work with and about surveillance. Surveillance art practices include the use of surveillance techniques and technologies to create interactive performance installations, industrial/electronic music, street performance and other public art works, subversive architectural design, tools for political protest and activism, performance experiments with drones and biometric surveillance, as well as more traditional film, dance, and theater works.

Abstract: In this article, I focus on several contemporary performance art pieces that stage critical artistic interventions into quotidian scenes of contemporary sociopolitical surveillance. Thesesurveillance art'works strategically redeploy mainstream surveillance ...