Performative re-enactment: the ontology of migrating from liveness to digitalisation in PaR documentation

I will be discussing the nature of performative documentation, as performative re-enactment; more specifically the ways in which the form of the website can serve as an interactive platform to create multi-media performances from the traces and ghost of performances past. I am interested in explicating the nature of the migration from ‘liveness’ to digitalization of performative re-enactment and its implications as a mode of documenting PaR. I propose to share my own performance documentation websites as a case study to illustrate this interactive documentation model. I hope to present performative re-enactment as a mode of docuemntating PaR which means that encountering the remains of PaR is an interactive and performative experience; an experience that I want to suggest stands in place of the ‘original’ live events themselves. In doing so I will interrogate the implications of such a migration for the nature of the practice-based research outcome. The PaR projects that I will be discussing in my paper were concerned with immersive and participative performance practices. The migration from liveness to a digital format has been constructed out of various artifacts, which have generated primary and secondary source material both directly as the traces left behind from the performances themselves but also through supporting research activity; all of which was designed to capture the various subjects’ perceptual and experiential experiences. I will suggest that the performative re-enactments not only re-present the live performances but also map the migration of practice to dissemination in a performative manner.