Antonio Damasio’s latest book begins with a ‘very simple’ idea: ‘feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavours’ (2018: 3), including, presumably, the myriad ‘cultural endeavours’ that formed and in turn, now respond to the capacities of digital technologies. How we feel about the ways in which networked and digitised culture, artefacts and their attendant behaviours are embedded in our everyday lives can be various, conflicted and a site of ambiguity (it certainly is for me…). As a practitioner though, and specifically one who collaborates and performs with digital processes, felt relationships and ‘negotiations’ emerge, opening up potentialities, which are often not present in our functional (though still feeling) engagements with digital culture. With reference to current intermedial performance practice, this lecture identifies intersections that emerge in and through these types of performance. Drawing on a recently published chapter ‘Performance and Digital’ in Experience Bryon’s edited collection, Performing Interdisciplinarity (2018) as well as forthcoming chapters written for Mark Crossley’s edited collection, Intermedial Theatre: Principles and Practice, it playfully opens up the frustrations, challenges and possibilities of entangling with the digital in performance and the distinctive, productive and feeling networks this produces.

Biography

Jo Scott is an intermedial practitioner-researcher and lecturer in performance at the University of Salford. Following the completion of her practice as research PhD project at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2014, Jo has developed both practical and theoretical research in the area of intermedial performance, addressing in particular live media practices and the affective relationships between the performer and digital materials with which they perform. Her first monograph, Intermedial Praxis and PaR, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016 and she has also contributed writing to a range of recent books and journals. Jo’s current practice as research project is using creative and participatory intermedial practices to explore urban ‘wildscapes’ in her adopted home of Salford, Greater Manchester: www.joanneemmascott.com

All lectures are free, no booking necessary.