Abstract

This article proposes to reanalyse the artistic and critical practice of performance through the deconstruction and remediation of its ‘virtual,’ unsighted potentials. It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of an ontogenenic dimension of affective transmission and recreation. Such recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art. These arguments connect concepts from aesthetic and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan as well as other theorists. The approach intersects methodologies and epistemologies from activist philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance as a ‘technology of aliveness’ formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal modulation of shared perception. Ultimately, these formulations propose to reimagine performance as a synaesthetic archive of perceptive experience marked by a representational impossibility; a failure to appear fully. This actual condition of recurrent abstraction enables however a processual state of becoming, becoming-other, and being-becoming in related moments of pure aliveness.