Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts

Garrett Lynch IRL

During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic. Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.

Networked images: Towards a visual language of networked performance

A Haunting of Haunts addresses the second of its aims of critiquing the dominant and largely accepted visual form of video, typically of a lens-based variety, employed in networked performance directly through the nature of the kits created and the subsequent performances created with them. The envisaged ways of using each kit’s image for compositing or video mixing, and its 3D model in ‘virtual’ worlds, gaming environments, or ‘virtual’ or augmented reality, suggest that conventional lens-based video is ill-suited to networked performance. Networked performance exists in a digital, networked, and interactive space where performance and media, liveness and reproduction, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ are complexly folded together. Consequently, networked performance simultaneously occurs in a network and is, in effect, itself a network of factors. The visual language of lens-based video, comprising a monocular, photographic capture of a physical or ‘real’ subject external to a network, which in turn implies a non-interactive and near-linear spatio-temporal continuity, transposed from film and video conventions, should not be the visual language for performance that exists in a network. →

Figure 8: A Haunting of Haunts' recreation of Alvin Lucier's living room from the performance I Am Sitting In A Room (1969).

In Aquila and Brace’s performances with kits from A Haunting of Haunts, video is the medium, primarily as a matter of convenience and dissemination for exhibition, through which the performance is viewed online by an audience. The matter of convenience and dissemination is a commonality shared with performances, as described by Kathy O’Dell (1997), that employ photographic images in art magazines, journals, books, or catalogues so that a wider audience might see them. Over time, performances, such as Vito Acconci’s Trademarks (1970), were developed that were conceived never to occur before audiences but solely as photographic images that exist as a result of the space or site of art magazines, journals, books, or catalogues. Aquila and Brace’s performances can similarly be understood to exist as a result of the space or site of a network. The performances are not captured through a lens, although that may be one factor as it is in Brace’s performance. They do not simply represent what was ‘real’, what could have been seen in person, and what was live in a physical space because they did not occur externally to the networked space. As such, what is seen is the performance, not simply a documentation of the performance, and can be understood to employ a visual language of networks consisting of what is termed as networked images, that is images that originate from and exist within networks, therefore representing various aspects of networks and having the capability of being active within a network (Lynch 2018a). →

Aquila’s performance occurs within the networked 3D space of Second Life and employs a combination of multiple media, including 3D models, code, sound, language, and imagery, while Brace’s composited performance employs a still 3D graphics image with moving photographic video collapsing multiple visual styles and times. Both performances are of a network and therefore employ the visual language of networked images. They move beyond representations of what is ‘real’, what exists in the physical world, and what is external to a network. The performances instead demonstrate that performance (and indeed in a Deleuzian sense, reality itself) can be understood as a totality of what is experienced: ‘real’, ‘virtual’, physical, digital, networked, multimodal, etc. As such, they critique the use of video in networked performance and, in turn, conventional performance principles. Yet, Aquila and Brace’s performances visually refer to the original notable historical performance art and their spaces that are external to a network, respectively Horn and Nauman’s studios. This is strategic in A Haunting of Haunts. It is not a conceptual fault. It serves to remind and challenge artists employing the kits that they are not alone in haunting the performance spaces of prior artists but that the physical space and visual forms of historic performance art, contributing factors to the new hybridized performances, in a sense haunt every networked performance and its development.

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