Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities

In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering. This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked ‘informational selves’ in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron’s Avatar, Blast Theory’s Karen, Ontroerend Goed’s A Game of You, Randy Rainbow’s online videos, Sisters Grimm’s Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre’s Lippy and Chekhov’s First Play and Jo Scott’s practice-as-research in ‘place-mixing’. This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

Liam Jarvis is a theatre-maker, practitioner-researcher, and Reader in Theatre and Performance at Central School of Speech and Drama, UK.

Karen Savage is Head of Arts, Culture and Heritage for the College of Arts and Professor of Creative and Collaborative Arts at the University of Lincoln, UK. Karen works across film and theatre, creating work that has been screened and performed nationally and internationally. She was co-convenor of the Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) between 2017-2021. She is Co-editor of the Performance and Digital Cultures book series for Methuen Drama. Publications include Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities (2022) (co-edited with Liam Jarvis), 'Performance in the (K)now – Social Raportage and Rapport of Social Media in “Reterritorializing Digital Performance from South to North”', International Journal for Performance and Digital Media, 15 (3) (2019), William W. Lewis and Sonali Pahwa (eds); Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More Than the Sum of the Parts by Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds (2018); 'Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration' co-authored with Justin Smith in Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside (eds) (2018).