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.

The definition of the performative and the cyclical mutual dependency of performance and media, liveness and reproduction, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, that it entails can be understood as enabling a process-led approach in A Haunting of Haunts. The spaces of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ inform each other because they are folded into each other in a Deleuzian manner to provide a hybridized space or site across which the work occurs. In explaining Deleuze’s fold, a concept of interiority and exteriority in things, Simon O’Sullivan (2005: 107) states, “the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside” and that Deleuze discusses folds in a number of contexts including “the fold of our material selves, our bodies, to the folding of time, or simply memory”. In A Haunting of Haunts, the concept of the fold is extended to space and implies that what is ‘virtual’ is incorporated into what is ‘real’ (Lynch 2018b: 303). This is in agreement with Deleuze’s four-part ontology of virtual/actual and real/possible, where he states that virtual and real must not be considered as opposites (1991: 96). However, there is also feedback from the ‘real’ to the ‘virtual’ implying that the ‘virtual’ as the inside of a ‘real’ outside can and is something more than the term fold might initially suggest.

Folding is a method I have used extensively in prior practice (Lynch 2018a; Lynch IRL 2020) to affect the media and site of works. However, in A Haunting of Haunts each pair of performance and media, liveness and reproduction, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ provides a means, context, and site in that order. The cyclical mutual dependency of each pair also provides a form of iterative methodology that can be applied as a process to transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, time and again to historic performances that are selected for inclusion in the work. This methodology supports my existing use of the fold as a method in practice; however, this time, not just through the philosophical discussions of Gilles Deleuze, which may seem abstract or detached from performance as a practice, but through examples of artists’ practices (Auslander 2006, 2014; O’Dell 1997).

In order to reveal the process of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces in A Haunting of Haunts, both to artists who might employ the kits as well as audiences who would subsequently view performances created with them, several steps have been taken. Only open-source software is used in the creation of the completed scenes media. This ensures the ability to provide scenes in open formats and thereby allow artists to employ them within a multitude of applications and platforms. ↓

All source files and media used in the creation of scenes, their source code, are also provided. Doing so not only allows artists unrestricted access to all aspects of the scenes and their constituent parts so they can understand the process of creating them, but also allows them to rework or remix scenes in any way imaginable. Scenes, their source files, and their media are presented and accessed through GitHub, a repository or archive website that is typically used by programmers to collaboratively coordinate and develop software (Figure 3). By using GitHub, files can be tracked to facilitate the versioning of each scene, remixes of scenes, any performance media produced from scenes, and the work as a whole. ↓

Scene source files and media are freely distributed under a Creative Commons attribution share-alike licence. The licence allows artists to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon those files and media. New distributions of the source files and media must be maintained under the same licence, authors must be credited, and changes indicated. In doing so, ongoing distribution is facilitated (versions of versions of versions), while ownership/authorship is identified within a participative/collaborative whole. The licence encourages artists to access and employ the kits as they choose while enabling them to establish ownership/authorship of what they subsequently create. Combined, these steps define what can be considered an open-source ethos to the work, which is a pragmatic means to presenting, accessing, distributing, and employing it. However, this open-source ethos also pays tribute within its own technological context and manner, that of networked performance’s use of digital tools, to performance studies’ attitude towards media and reproduction epitomized by Phelan as a defiance of commoditization, capital, its market, and economics (Auslander 2008: 7, 45).

For example, artists can move the operating table in Orlan’s performance Omniprésence (1993) (Figure 7), the radio in Bruce Nauman’s performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) (Figure 2) or the armchair from Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969) (Figure 8), placing them anywhere they choose, including in other scenes.

Figure 3: A Haunting of Haunts' GitHub repository containing kits distributed under a Creative Commons licence. Click to bring to foreground.

Figure 4: A Haunting of Haunts' recreation of Rebecca Horn's studio in Berlin employed in Scratching Both Walls at Once (1974–75).

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