Media Specific Performance: the screen mediated productions during the Pandemic - Dudu TSUDA

In this presentation, I am aiming to discuss the development of new possibilities of aesthetic explorations in sound art, experimental music and audiovisual performances, that emerged during the pandemic. I am interested in real-time audiovisual researches that were specific created in and for video call software applications and virtual environments such as Zoom and Mozilla Hubs. In that sense, new forms of art works that had to englobe structural and sensitive limitations of the interfaces – that were not designed for this end -, and that could only emerge in that extreme social situation. Therefore, an essay about how this technical environment transformation influenced the development of a new cultural context for performance practice, that includes not only the new forms of image exploration for the construction of the dramaturgy, but also the acceptance of this new kind of real-time art experience by the audience. I will problematize how this accelerated technical development of software applications was – and is still linked - with the growing precariousness of the social-political-economic conditions of Global South realities. Finally, I will present the performance “Plurinational Hymn :: Life is an Utopia” created in and for Zoom application. The performance problematizes the recent episodes of legal precarization of the demarcations of indigenous lands in Brazil realized by the alt-right fascist government Bolsonaro. In that sense, it questions the growing devaluation of life in face of the financial market, manifested in the recent environmental catastrophes and the systematic dismantling of social and human rights.

Dudu Tsuda