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.

Glossary

‘Virtual’: ‘Virtual’ is that which exists but is specifically immaterial. It is, therefore, experientially a part of what is ‘real’ (Lynch 2018b: 303). This definition of ‘virtual’ is based on Gilles Deleuze’s four-part ontology of virtual/actual, real/possible explained in Bergsonism (1991: 96). It is employed in all of my practice and writing, which consistently uses single inverted commas as scare quotes around the term. The scare quotes are intended to suggest uncertainty, irony, and that the term is being questioned. Their use yields my own terminology of ‘virtual’, which acknowledges the inability of language to summarize Deleuze’s concept of virtual in a singular term and the general misunderstanding of what ‘virtual’ is in the wider world. An expanded discussion of Deleuze’s definition of ‘virtual’ and how I position it is discussed in The Transformative Nature of Networks within Contemporary Art Practice (Lynch 2018b: 34). For further reading on the use of ‘virtual’ in my practice, please also refer to I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL) (Lynch IRL 2020).
‘Real’: ‘Real’ is that which exists, regardless of whether it is material or immaterial, and is experienced. What is ‘real’, therefore, incorporates what is ‘virtual’ (Lynch 2018b: 303). This definition of ‘real’ is based on Gilles Deleuze’s four-part ontology of virtual/actual, real/possible explained in Bergsonism (1991: 96). It is employed in all of my practice and writing, which consistently uses single inverted commas as scare quotes around the term. The scare quotes are intended to suggest uncertainty, irony, and that the term is being questioned. Their use yields my own terminology of ‘real’, which acknowledges the inability of language to summarize Deleuze’s concept of ‘real’ in a singular term and the general misunderstanding of what ‘real’ is in the wider world. An expanded discussion of Deleuze’s definition of ‘real’ and how I position it is discussed in The Transformative Nature of Networks within Contemporary Art Practice (Lynch 2018b: 34). For further reading on the use of ‘real’ in my practice, please also refer to I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL) (Lynch IRL 2020).
Networked performance: Networked performance is defined as performance created or enhanced, in either form or how it is experienced, as a consequence of any type of network (Lynch and Dennis 2014). To fully comprehend what this means and the potential breadth of what can qualify as networked performance it is best to start by defining what it is not instead of what it is. Networked performance does not simply occur on the internet or the web, which is often mistakenly conflated with the former. Nor does it assume that the network referred to is by necessity technological or anthropogenic. Networks, created or naturally occurring, may form any or all means (I.e. a technology, medium etc.), site (i.e. a ‘real’/’virtual’/hybridized location), and context (i.e. a conceptual or theoretical basis) for performance at any level of its creation. Equally, networks may be intrinsic to the spectatorship of networked performance, in particular when it extends into areas of interaction, participation, and collaboration. In each instance of creation and spectatorship, networks must be of key importance to a performance. Networked performance is, as a consequence of these factors, fundamentally transdisciplinary (or even post-disciplinary), and is guided by principles of connectedness and distribution embodied by networks.
Hybridized space: A hybridized space is defined as a new space formed by the combination of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ spaces and the term hybrid is used throughout this article to refer to this. In networked performance, however, hybridized space is usually a misnomer, as it is not formed by the combination of actual spaces but by their representation in various media forms, e.g. the combination of video and 3D. The combination of media as spaces and the distributed spatiality of networks is what principally makes networked performance a hybridized form of practice.

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