Performance, Possession & Automation

表现、控球

• 批准号: AH/W006014/1
• 负责人: Nicholas Ridout
• 金额: $ 41.18万
• 依托单位: Queen Mary University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW006014%2F1
• 关键词: Performance; Possession; Automation

Performance, Possession & Automation brings together academics and artists to investigate, through the practice and study of performance: the resistant power of 'spirit possession', the contemporary rise of automation, and their entanglement with histories of colonial slavery. We aim to produce an understanding of contemporary performance that is properly attentive to the colonial and racialising dimensions of the history from which it has emerged. We can't avoid thinking about automation today. Tech entrepreneurs promise it is the key to a future of freedom and prosperity, in which AI will satisfy all our material needs. Critics warn it will lead to a dystopia of mass unemployment and pervasive surveillance. Our project analyses this situation by looking, first, at the history of automation and possession, and second, at live performance, as a practice that offers new ways of thinking about how to respond to the challenges automation poses: to our freedom, our social lives, and our idea of what it is to be human. Automation has a long history. It did not begin in the 1970s with the use of computers on the production line, nor with Ford's assembly line or the even earlier replacement of workers by steam-powered machinery in the Industrial Revolution. In our alternative account of its history, automation was first developed on the colonial slave plantation, where human beings were used as machines for the production of commodities like sugar and tobacco. If automation began here, it had a historical counterpart in 'spirit possession'. This played a key role in African diasporic religions such as vodou and santeria, and formed part of an ensemble of cultural activity through which connections with Africa and between the living and the dead were maintained. The receptivity to spirits and the sociality involved in these practices constituted forms of resistance to the automated conditions of plantation slavery. They were foundational for performance forms which became central to a resistant understanding of life in the plantation economy, and which still live, as performance, today: blues and reggae. In other words, performance with 'plantation characteristics'. Blues and reggae are not the only performance forms to exhibit 'plantation characteristics' (like repetition, improvisation, or crying as song). Performance - not just music, but other forms in which work is made with the intention of sharing it live in a social gathering - offers ways of dealing with both the historical and the present realities of automation and possession. These characteristics can be hopeful - collective reverie; communication with spirits; dreams of flight - or pessimistic - production of paranoid systems; reduction or restriction of human figures; excessive repetition. Examples come from performance made since 1970, a period when artists and thinkers encountering automation found ways of exploring its histories and effects. They range from the work of Gil Scott Heron and Samuel Beckett in the 1970s, to Chicago footwork and the theatre of Susanne Kennedy today. By studying such work in the novel historical framework established by the conjuncture of possession and automation we will make an original contribution to histories of performance. We aim to enhance public understanding of the persistence of the colonial past in the present and to use this understanding to orient our thinking and our culture towards new possibilities of freedom, which might overcome the structures inherited from that past. We will bring together academics from relevant disciplines, cultural organisations and artists working in performance, to explore these ideas, through study residencies, online dialogues, commissioned art works, symposia and publications, to produce new knowledge that will inform academics, artists and a wider public seeking an expanded understanding of what it is to be human in the latest phase in the history of automation.

《表演、占有与自动化》将学者和艺术家聚集在一起，通过对表演的实践和研究来研究：“精神占有”的抵抗力量，自动化的当代兴起，以及它们与殖民奴隶制历史的纠缠。我们的目标是对当代表演产生一种理解，适当地关注它产生的历史中殖民和种族主义的维度。今天，我们不可避免地会想到自动化。科技企业家承诺，这是通向自由和繁荣未来的关键，在未来，人工智能将满足我们所有的物质需求。批评人士警告称，这将导致大规模失业和无处不在的监控的反乌托邦。我们的项目首先分析了这种情况，首先考察了自动化和占有的历史，其次是现场表演，作为一种实践，它为如何应对自动化带来的挑战提供了新的思考方式：对我们的自由、我们的社会生活以及我们作为人类的想法。自动化有着悠久的历史。它并不是从20世纪70年代生产线上使用计算机开始的，也不是从福特的装配线开始的，也不是从工业革命中更早的蒸汽机械取代工人开始的。在我们对其历史的另一种描述中，自动化首先是在殖民奴隶种植园发展起来的，在那里，人类被用作生产糖和烟草等商品的机器。如果自动化是从这里开始的，那么它在历史上就有了一个与之相对应的“精神附体”。这在沃杜和桑特里亚等散居海外的非洲宗教中发挥了关键作用，并构成了一系列文化活动的一部分，通过这些活动，与非洲以及活着的人和死者之间的联系得以保持。这些做法所涉及的对精神的接受和社会性构成了对种植园奴隶制自动化条件的各种形式的抵抗。它们是表演形式的基础，这些表演形式成为对种植园经济中生活的抵触理解的核心，这些表演形式至今仍作为表演而存在：布鲁斯和雷鬼。换言之，表现具有种植园特色。布鲁斯和雷鬼并不是唯一表现出“种植园特色”的表演形式(如重复、即兴创作或哭成歌)。表演--不仅是音乐，还有其他形式的作品，目的是在社交聚会中现场分享--提供了处理自动化和占有的历史和现实的方法。这些特征可能是充满希望的--集体幻想；与灵魂的交流；飞行的梦想--或悲观的--产生偏执的系统；减少或限制人物形象；过度重复。例子来自1970年以来的表演，在那个时期，遇到自动化的艺术家和思想家找到了探索其历史和影响的方法。它们的范围从20世纪70年代吉尔·斯科特·海伦和塞缪尔·贝克特的作品，到今天的芝加哥步法和苏珊·肯尼迪的戏剧。通过在由占有和自动化相结合而建立的小说历史框架中研究这样的工作，我们将对表演史做出独到的贡献。我们的目标是加强公众对殖民历史在现在持续存在的理解，并利用这种理解来引导我们的思想和我们的文化走向新的自由可能性，这可能会克服从过去继承下来的结构。我们将把相关学科的学者、文化组织和从事表演工作的艺术家聚集在一起，通过学习实习、在线对话、委托艺术作品、研讨会和出版物来探索这些想法，以产生新的知识，让学者、艺术家和更广泛的公众了解在自动化历史的最新阶段什么是人类。