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I've been thinking a lot about remembering and forgetting.
What the difference is.
Where the similarities are.
Why that's relevant to me.

I feel as though I hold a contradictory position as a 'Performance Academic'. Performance, at least by the definition of Peggy Phelan, is essentially attached to its disappearance. Performance lives 'in the moment' and any other attempts to capture that 'moment' change it into something other than performance. Kind of like quantum physics. But not really anything like quantum physics.

Academia on the other hand, is dedicated to the storing and generation of knowledge. It's not about the 'moment', it's about how you store, articulate and define whatever happens to/by/from/because of that moment. I think anyway. The first thing I learnt about Performance Studies is that definitions are blurry.

There's some sort of contradiction here. If Academia is about remembrance, and Performance is about forgetting, where does the Performance Academic stand?
Somewhere completely different perhaps.

Or maybe the Performance Academic shouldn't move at all.

Maybe Academia and Performance should move.

If A Tree Falls In The Woods And It's Not Recorded On Social Media Did It Ever Make A Sound?

There's a huge contradiction in how I started with this. With how I started researching performance.
The particular type of performance that I enjoy, I learnt about through academia. Through reading and writing and watching videos of people like
Marina Abramovic,
Bob Flanagan,
Chris Burden,
Vito Acconci,
Robert Wilson,
The Performance Group,
Brian Lobel,
Igor Stromajer.
A bunch of artists who 'do' performance, yet all I know about them is through academia. That's still performance to me. In my memory.

How should I navigate this...

Now I'm blogging about this process. This research process. I'm storing it online, in an internet that takes and spreads everything ever published, storing it everywhere via cookies and internet histories and Timehop and livestreams and Google searches. Once this article is published, for example, it will be everywhere and unable to delete, fully. Unable to forget. Unable to disappear.

Fragments will always exist, somewhere.

The internet (2.0) could be the ultimate archive. Everybody's personal stories stored on social media, or on Dropbox or iCloud.
The internet (2.0) also holds a lot of potential for performance. It's participatory nature is a fertile ground for all kinds of human interaction and theatre.

Not only that, but I feel that the internet, through its remembrance of everything and all things, could teach us more about the beauty of forgetting than forgetting ever may. I hope anyway. Or else my research process is fucked before it's even begun.

This particular blog post will act as my start menu. It hasn't gone in depth, is incredibly scattered, but hopefully it'll be useful.
A lot of what I write probably won't be for You (the reader). In fact, a lot may be for Me (the reader), yet also some of it will be for Me (the writer).
If you're interested in You (the writer) then you can comment. It'll be an open forum for discussing things. Please do actually. It'll help me both validate certain ideas whilst also opening up others.

My next post will be research.