The 'live' versus 'not-live' research

summary of the  “live” versus “not-live” research,  New Performative Practices, DOCH Uniarts, Sweden


The live versus not-live research was conducted inside  a practice based Master of Fine arts.  My practice  focused on the friction, the glitches appearing in time and space when experience is happening  both live and not live, at the same time or with a slight delay.  Experiments  included creating body-doubles by for example using distance communication inside architecturally framed environments, site-specific temporal objects (video, audio and text) working with and against the live environment. The practice further investigated flexible narratives and translations of online environments to physical spaces.


Historically 'live' means that performers and audience are both physically and temporally co-present to one another. Before the recording, there was no notion of liveness and no need for classifying something that was experienced in the present moment.  This brief history of the concept of liveness was given by Philip Auslander as a backdrop to his talk ”towards a phenomenological approach of digital liveness” at Transmediale in 2011. The point of Auslander's presentation is to discuss what liveness is in relation to interactive technology. Websites and other virtual entities respond to us in real time, they feel live to us even though the only live part is our own activation. The distribution of presence through social media is also creating a continuous parallel activity, where liveness happens not only in spatially shared environments. Nowadays liveness is not only happening in the traditional sense, but is rather a negotiation with your own immersion of a situation. In the live versus not-live research I researched this being specially interested in:


. understanding more about relationships to media immersion

. drawing inspiration from the sensations that "new" (see above) types of live produce and applying this in traditional live settings.

. finding alternative ways to use or misuse gadgets, apps, softwares in order to challenge the intended use, creating a shift of power between gadget and user.


The live versus not-live research further investigated what not-live could mean in analogue settings, specially looking at repetition, looped formats and comparing technical reproduction of recordings to the action of thinking.


Towards the end of the 2-year period, I suggested that the multiple interconnected perspective of a moment  generated in my practice can be thought of as meta-liveness. Meta-liveness as the resonance between the previous, present and coming situation. Meta-Liveness further can be thought of as the in and outside perspective of a moment.


The research was presented in two different exam presentations. One 6 x 15 minute long looped lecture performance, performed live on top of a recorded backtrack of key-words. Second presentation was a participatory experience, where experiments from the live-versus not-live research was applied in the format of a Treasure Hunt, for watching documentation of the tests click HERE


Influential reading  among others:  Philip Auslander:Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Second Edition Abigdon New York Routledge2008, Claire Bishop: Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship 2012, Marco Munoz Infrafaces ArtMonitor Avhandling 2013 upon the relationship between human and interfaces.