Bolt, Barbara. “Performance, Performativity, and Subjectivity at the Intersection of Art and Digital Cultures.” In Choreomata, 95–121. 1st ed. CRC Press, 2024.
This chapter addresses the contemporary moment in which the performative of digital cultures comes into intra-action with the performative of the artworld to create a very different ‘figure’ of Art and of subjectivity. Working with key concepts the dispositif, material formations, performativity, and networks of relationality, the chapter argues that the confluences and arrangement of forces produced through this intra-action are shaping not only what art is becoming but also who and what we are and can be-coming. Here we may conceive ‘the self’ as an ensemble in relation to and in a constant state of becoming and AI is just one actant in this ensemble. This reconfiguration can be understood as a pivotal shift from representationalism where humans staged themselves at the centre of the world to a performative framing and a materialisation in which the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic are entwined in the techno-social.
