Historic performance art was employed in A Haunting of Haunts for a number of reasons. First, while the practice’s origin lay in the pandemic and confinement, it was intended that the solutions it would propose could be applied to performance situations beyond those specific conditions. Second, historic practice could be mined for information, such as how interiors could inform performance in a variety of ways, in order to develop practice into a usable form as strategy for artists. Third, and finally, by visually invoking historic performance art through the use of its spaces, artists could be given a starting point, that is, the original historic performance could provide a clear example of what could occur in such a space and confinement in general. Artists could then choose to follow this example in the manner of a version or interpretation of the performance or disregard it by exploring alternatives. Visually invoking historic performance art would equally enable audiences to have an entry point into the performance, the historic performance’s aims and purpose, as well as how these had been mapped to new performances.

The aims of A Haunting of Haunts are twofold: first, to create a performance practice in confinement that would enable other artists to create performance under similar conditions; second, through practice critique the dominant and largely accepted visual form of video, typically of a lens-based variety, employed within and in effect haunting networked performance and, instead, propose a distinct visual language of networked performance. In addressing each of the two aims, two objectives were employed as strategies. These were engaging through practice with the process of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces and revealing that process of creating ‘virtual’ spaces or combinations of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces as hybridized spaces (see Glossary). To clarify how each of these objectives was employed and the aims were addressed, I must first outline how A Haunting of Haunts should be understood as practice.

The work as a whole is considered performative and employs Auslander’s definition. He states, “performance documents in all media are not just records of performances that happened but are themselves performative” (Auslander 2014, emphasis added). The creation of A Haunting of Haunts occurs in the creation and archiving of its media, which is conventionally considered as documentation. Without the media, the performative work does not exist and without the performative work, there would be no need for any media created. There is, therefore, a mutual dependency between performance and media that questions conventions of the former preceding the latter (Auslander 2008: 11). The relationship between performance and media that Phelan argues as binary opposites (McHugh 2011: 237) are in A Haunting of Haunts informing each other, as Auslander's understanding of the performative implies, in a cyclical manner. →