Ulf Otto

Pervasive Performance, Embedded Actors and Distributed Publics: How Digital Technologies effect Public Performances

The decline of the public sphere is traditionally blamed on the media. But this critique has itself been attacked for bearing its own media preference and first of all producing a normative ideal of the public. Instead of conceiving of the public as a prerequisite for performance one might therefore think of (differing) publics as products of performances that are culturally coined and rendered possible by the underlying media technologies. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time suspect that what you do could be universally broadcast, becomes the performative imperative of the information society where everybody on the street carries a camera and the next broadband connection is only metres away. In consequence the concepts and practices of performing publicity in the arts as well as in the everyday undergo gradual but profound change. Nurtured by tried convictions this change is commonly diagnosed as an escalating narcism or attributed to a propagation of the panopticon. But drawing on Richard Sennetts historical perspective on the division of public and private and the relation between public appearances on the stage and on the street, this paper tries to show, that such phenomena as camgirls, flashmobs and their artistic and commercial successors have to be understood as an attempt to figure out whether the idea of the public can still be assigned meaning in a society that is dominated by networked communciation.