Mandić? What the fuck is Mandić?

The art of the liveness and the digitisation of presence

Why are we, performance artists – live artists – more and more obsessed with digital technology and its possibilities to archive, reproduce, transmit, multiply, network etc.? Is it mainly because that is the only way we can retain at least traces of our transitory research object and – hopefully – secure the presence of our work in art history? Is it mainly due to the need to transform live event into a tangible product in order to secure its accessibility for the purpose of information exchange and sheer existence on the cultural market?

Or, are there more profound reasons at stake? Perhaps the liveness of contemporary performance art has reached a sort of dead end. For quite some time the radical performance practice is facing its own political powerlessness, strategies of opening and testing communicational potentials of the live performative event seem to be nothing but stylised forms, transgression holds out only as an aestheticised excess, while relation performer-spectator is becoming a synonym for impotent relationship… It seems that insistence on the body and live presence is nowadays, and already, an anachronism of liveness; that live experience, as “the subject of the work” of contemporary performance art, is simply no longer real without digitalisation of presence.

Mandić? What the fuck is Mandić?

2011 • Via Nova
Performance debate • 180 min

Concept — Marin Blažević, Bojan Jablanovec
Performers — Marko Mandić, Marin Blažević, Anna Teresa Scheer, Nicolas Salazar-Sutil
Production — Via Negativa
Co-production — Performance Studies International, Utrecht

The performance was specially conceived for the Performance Studies International Conference #17 on the theme “Technology, Memory, Experience” and is based on the performances Extract Mandić and Viva Mandić.

Performance
27-05-2011 • UCK Theaterzaal, Utrecht na konferenci PSI #17