When we discuss performance it should be clear that we are interpolating between several senses of performance. One of them is the idea of micro-performance which goes back, for example, to geometric sketching as a technology of performance, where we look at a tool as function or as intention, rather than as a tool to represent an object. The term "user" has a problem in that it is connotes a subject using something,using "x", using an object. We move to this notion of actants and actors with a lower case "a,"performing with a lower case "p" where performance is a much more low-key activity: the making of traces, the making of symbols, the shaping of objects which are temporally-embedded processes. It's always something that you can fall into or step out of but usually you fall into.
Constraints
The constraints of course that we cannot escape are human agency, material agency and disciplinary agency. What people carry with them into the T-Garden are their histories – individual and collective – the different human agencies.Yet we are equally fascinated by the agency of the material, the friction of cloth, the decay of data, the elasticity of MIDI-controlled sound, and by the agency of disciplines – grammar, algebra, systems of orthography, legal systems, and so forth. These are all larger than any one of us, and yet they are born out of our own actions.
Actor vs.Actant
We start to imagine, as we've already said, the idea of user or "actant,"as opposed to an audience or spectator. Spectator implies passive, user is active. The user takes on his or her responsibility for moving through an experience. This goes toward the distinction between knowing that and knowing how or even better, between looking and doing, to make this distinction very coarsely. Philosophers have talked about this in terms of epistemology; always interpreting experience as a problem of cognition and logical truth mediated through sense perception. So the question is phrased in analytical terms, knowing that something is the case vs. knowing how to do it. We are going beyond that: instead of just knowing or seeing, we are also interested in doing, in taking action in the world. This is why we take issue with the terms "spectator" or "witness." We are not interested in witnesses anymore. In fact, even the term spectacle we would challenge.
Transforming the tool
We want to go further still. We are interested in the user or the actant influencing the process by which the work and the experience itself is made-from prototyping and learning from these kinds of experiments (in the product design sense) as well as by the ability to change the event itself. For example, in drawing programs such as Photoshop or Canvas or Painter, there ’s nothing you can do to change how the program works. You want this computer screen here to assume some qualities, say the material quality of bleeding ink into paper. Now, how would you do it? One way would be to script it. If you had a scripting language (like Java or Mathematica), then you could specify in that language, say the behavior of a lattice model of ink on paper: "when these bits are turned on, in the next time step, the pixels around it will be changed thus and so." Basically, it ’s designing a convolution.
Now, most times the only people who make such definitions are mathematicians and engineers, not designers or artists. Most people cannot do anything at all like this with most technology today. We ’re interested in making it possible for someone who is trying to "write," in the broadest sense, to refashion the tools of writing him or herself. A reflexivity of action.
available here as pdf. Originally written from an interview with sponge conducted by Fabienne Regnaut and Franck Bauchard for the French publication ec/artS ,issue #2 2000.
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