Towards an Ecology of Becoming - Engendering Posthuman Assemblages through Digital and Hybrid Performance

Abstract

This essay analyses and discusses digital and hybrid performance practices created in response to the online shifts driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on an emergent theoretical framework which seeks to define the relationship between human and non-human as an ‘ecology of becoming’, using as a case study a 2-year practice research and performance project developed in two iterations – Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose, high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for proximal and online spectators. The aim is to offer a critical perspective of the transition from a digital to a hybrid performance space, which intersects and identifies the liminal and interdisciplinary areas of creativity and processes that allow performers and technologies to enmesh, thus reconfiguring and repositioning performance practices in a posthumanist context. While the technologically saturated environments can be seen as influencing and enriching the agency of the non-human on both performers and spectators, through the support of technological devices in the digital home performance and its migration onto the screen technology at Sook, I argue that both processes and performance outcomes engender a posthuman assemblage which diffracts the performers’ identity and the perception of the spectators. I then evaluate how the combined effect of intermedial performances, social media interactions, original animations, digital cinema, hybrid use of screen technology and online platforms build towards the in-presence reveal of the two digital performers in the pop-up shop. The conclusion draws attention to the thresholds between material and immaterial, and the entanglement between the techne of the performer’s body and that of the technology, in a quest for soft boundaries between the post-pandemic human and non-human interaction.