Thoughts on Documentation

The morning meetings held every other day throughout the festival focus on the problem of documenting. This is a key concern in the festival given the fact that most works are nomadic and do not lend themselves to the same aesthetic preoccupations as staged performance. In the discussions many of the artists voice a desire not to index the events in a moment in time or as evidence of “what happened”.

Often documentation of performance art (or live art) is recorded with video or photography in order to record the so-called original and authentic moment of a performance. Documentation has often been used to legitimize and historicize performance art and function as evidence of activity to funders. The obsessive and excessive presence of video in performance events has now become normalized. The presence of a videographer lurking in the background of performance works, or audience members using camcorders have become conventional props augmenting the performance event.

Our discussions focus on how this performative presence of a documenter (videographer or witness) might be employed in the works of the festival. I ask each artist how I can engage as an audience member and documenter in each of their works. I ask, might it be more advantageous to include documenters in the creative process of the work rather than after the fact, (as is so often the case of performance art festivals). We talk about the process of documentation as being integral to the development and production of some of the works.

As noted in the previous post, the Visualeyez blog is the site of documentation and reflection for a durational audience. By this I mean that audiences will experience the blog through various lenses of time, (Ie. As a current blog and as an archive). The blog extends the potential experiential dimension of the events through time in a very different way than the accidental encounters with the nomadic performance do. Playing with diverse strategies to encounter the audience and for the audience to encounter the creative impulse of the works, many of the artists have created parasitic blogs that reflect on their own processes of creation throughout the festival. (See the links).