Performance of a performance within a performative work
While the source files and media of the kits described above are freely distributed under a Creative Commons licence that requires attribution and sharing, the performances created with them can, if artists choose, be presented outside the context of A Haunting of Haunts and indeed its Creative Commons licence. Performances are, consequently, considered to be independent and complete performances in their own right, of which artists have full authorship. The scenes of the kits, however, are based on historic performance art and the practice of its original artists, and so at that initial conceptual/media level, authorship is deliberately left ambiguous. The resulting levels or layers of practice and authorship that exist in the work as a whole of new performances, historic performances, and media kits can, therefore, best be summarized as the performance of a performance within a performative work.
Two example new performances enabled by A Haunting of Haunts as a performative work, the first aim of the work, have at the time of writing occurred within the context of a group exhibition titled At A Distance #4. The exhibition was conceived to pair artists with volunteers. Artists provided instructions in any form to the volunteers to create an artwork, which the volunteers then created in the physical absence of the artist and at a geographical distance from their location (Vague 2020). The performances were recorded in one take and without editing. Similar to the historic conceptual art exhibition Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1969, At A Distance #4 explored art as a process and questioned the role and status of the object in art. However, the exhibition also examined the form of instruction, namely where it ends and the artwork begins. →
In Have You Ever Been a Human Being? (2020) (Video 1), Simotron Aquila employs the kit for Rebecca Horn’s Scratching Both Walls at Once (1974–75) (Figure 4) and transposes Horn’s studio in Berlin, where the performance originally occurred, to Second Life. In Second Life, Horn’s studio has been colourized as if by a posterize filter applied in the process of transposition, and sounds (a wind chime, undecipherable whispering, and the noise of objects falling) are all indicators of physicality and materiality that have been folded into the ‘virtual’ space. Through the site of the ‘virtual’ space and the notable absence of a performer’s body, typically embodied as an anthropomorphic avatar, Aquila questions classifications of body and place during the pandemic’s confinement. Aquila’s space performs itself as if haunted by Horn and is reminiscent of Horn’s later automated kinetic sculptures. Representations of body and place are therefore made uncertain within ‘virtual’ space. They are non-bodies and non-places (Aquila 2020), all at once suggesting the qualities of ‘virtual’/networked/digital that are comparable to Deleuze's classification of what is not physical yet real (Deleuze 1991: 96–97) and the genericness present in Marc Auge’s non-place neologism (1995). However, if there are no bodies, no places in ‘virtual’ space, and the performance is technologically mediated, initially through the 3D models and subsequently through video, how can performers and audience be co-present, sharing a time and space? Are bodies and places classifications that simply cannot function in ‘virtual’ space and is what we are viewing classifiable at all as performance, according to established performance studies or otherwise?