Reprogramming the Stage: A Heuristic for Posthuman Performance

Abstract

In this essay, we expand upon scholarly conversations concerning digital performance to demonstrate how performance studies’ current, primarily humanistic, paradigm for theorizing digital performance is due for an upgrade. We review how rigorous articulations of digital performance disrupt a hegemonic struggle between liveness and virtuality and suggest that ontologies associated with posthumanism may better serve performers, theorists, and audiences interested in exploring a more relationally framed “technocorporeal performance.” Finally, we offer three concepts for theorizing digital performance—terminal, network, and index—as ways to talk about such performance, using the example of one author's work.