Setting the Stage for Post-human Performer

This paper responds to the political and ethical focus of the conference addressed through the question of digital identities and analysis of changes that digital technologies brought in contemporary understanding of the body. Referring to Jon Mckenzie’s proposition of performance as onto-historical formation of power and knowledge, on the one hand, and revisiting Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto after the species have met, on the other, I shall analyze the crucial shift from natural through cultural to technological bodies, in relation to the performing subject. Thirty years after Cyborg Manifesto the question of the body as a social construct is more relevant than ever. The technological environment that is here at stake is neither politically nor ideologically innocent. The information communication technologies are defining the conditions of neoliberal globalization. Therefore we need to constantly re-articulate our position when we perform with(in) technology.

In this regard I will focus on the construction of the social, cultural and personal identity in media-dominated environment. What happens with the body when it performs in the digital space? How does it relate to its digital representation? What happens with performer’s subjectivity in a digital era, it the situation when the performer becomes the final instance in the global network structure of cyberspace? Human beings no longer perceive their own bodies as fixed, finished, organically complete entities, but rather as fluid, extendible bodies in the permanent process of becoming.

In this context I intend to explore how the meanings are created through interrelation between the body and technology and elaborate how these newly established relations, protocols and procedures are, and can be used in performance (artistic) practices.

Aneta Stojnić is a theoretician, artist and curator born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1981. Currently she is a post-doc research fellow at Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media).

After graduating theatre directing she got her PhD in Theory of Arts and Media at University of Arts in Belgrade in 2013, with thesis titled: « Theory of Performance in Digital Art: Towards the New Political Performance ».
In 2013 she taught a seminar: « Conceptual Art and Techno-Bodies: Cyborg and Queer in the New Technology Environment” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Conceptual Art study program, IBK where she was a visiting researcher with Ernst-Mach scholarship. She was an artist in residence at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2011, and writer in residence at KulturKontakt Austria in 2012. As free-lance artist and curator she collaborated with organizations and institutions such as: Tanzquartier Wien, Quartier21 (MQ Vienna), Les Laboratoires d’ Aubervillers, Open Space (Vienna), Dansens Hus Stockholm, Odin Teatret (Denmark), BITEF Theatre (Belgrade), TkH Walking Theory, October Salon Belgrade, Pančevo Biennal, Biennal of Young Artists from Europe and Mediterranean, National Theatre in Belgrade and many others.