Performance and Mediation: Performance, Space and Technology

Abstract

As noted in the Introduction, there are precious few examples in the academic literature on popular music where live performance is treated as performance, rather than as an expression of sub-cultural solidarity or as an incidental part of the industrial processes of popular culture. One of the few writers who treats the process with anything like the attention it deserves is Philip Auslander, whose book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (first published in 1999) deals with live music as an important, culturally indicative form in itself, and also as a clear example of a process which is overtaking all forms of performance:

[When] we go to a concert with a large video screen, for instance, what do we look at? Do we concentrate our attention on the live bodies or are our eyes drawn to the screen, as Benjamin’s postulate of our desire for proximity would predict? At an industrial party I attended recently, I found the latter to be the case. There was a live band, dancing, and a video simulcast of the dancers on two screens adjacent to the dance floor. My eye was drawn to the screen, compared to which the live dancers … had all the brilliance of fifty-watt bulbs.¹

In other words, live performance is necessarily collapsing into mediatised representation: any special cultural claims that ‘liveness’ — the once and once only event, that disappears the moment it is over — could make are no longer valid in a culture that prizes replication over uniqueness.