Performance, Possession & Automation

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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.