A Dance Epidemic, Once Again

A study of artistic practices that explore speculative presence and new performativities on contemporary digital platforms

Abstract

One of the fundamental values of live art — theatre, dance, performance, and so on — lies in the encounter, the co-presence of a group of people in the same here and now. In contrast, digital spaces and social media are often seen as paradigms of disembodiment. But is this really so? This article proposes a review of performative gestures and interventions by artists in online user cultures as “speculative presences”.

A co-presence effect can arise when an effect of shared space and time is created. However, speculative presence seems to be a specific effect of digital platforms that emerges in the complex panorama of technological mediatization created by social media and other digital infrastructures.

By analysing various artistic strategies developed in the last decade, we suggest that — like a new “dance epidemic” spreading across platforms — speculative presence emerges and encourages new performative gestures of all kinds, original or repeated, simple and memetic, or complex and metadiscursive. Finally, we argue that, within such a diverse and irregular range of practices, some of these manifestations expand the very idea of the performative act by adapting to the rules and tempos of digital infrastructures and protocols.