Performance, Possession & Automation

性能，占有和自动化汇集了学者和艺术家调查，通过性能的实践和研究：“精神占有”的抵抗力，自动化的当代兴起，以及他们与殖民奴隶制历史的纠缠。我们的目标是产生当代性能的理解是适当注意到它已经出现的历史的殖民和种族化的层面。今天我们不能不考虑自动化。科技企业家承诺，这是自由和繁荣未来的关键，人工智能将满足我们所有的物质需求。批评人士警告说，这将导致大规模失业和普遍监视的反乌托邦。我们的项目分析了这种情况，首先，在自动化和占有的历史，第二，在现场表演，作为一种实践，提供了新的思维方式，如何应对自动化带来的挑战：我们的自由，我们的社会生活，我们的想法是什么是人类。自动化有着悠久的历史。它并不是开始20世纪70年代在生产线上使用计算机，也不是始于福特的装配线，更不是始于工业革命中蒸汽动力机械取代工人。在我们对其历史的另一种描述中，自动化首先是在殖民地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。如果说自动化是从这里开始的，那么它在历史上就有一个对应的“精神占有”。这在诸如伏都教（vodou）和萨泰里亚教（santeria）等非洲流散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，与非洲以及生者与死者之间的联系得以维持。对精神的接受和这些做法所涉及的社会性构成了对种植园奴隶制自动化条件的抵抗形式。它们是表演形式的基础，这些表演形式成为对种植园经济生活的抵抗性理解的核心，并且仍然存在，作为表演，今天：蓝调和雷鬼。换句话说，表现出“种植园特色”。蓝调和雷鬼并不是唯一表现出“种植园特征”的表演形式（如重复，即兴创作或像歌一样哭泣）。表演--不仅仅是音乐，还有其他形式的作品，其目的是在社会聚会中分享它--提供了处理自动化和占有的历史和现实的方法。这些特征可以是充满希望的-集体幻想;与精神的沟通;飞行的梦想-或悲观-生产偏执系统;减少或限制人类数字;过度重复。例子来自1970年以来的表演，在这一时期，艺术家和思想家遇到了自动化，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·赫伦和塞缪尔·贝克特的作品，到今天的芝加哥步法和苏珊娜·肯尼迪的剧院。通过在占有和自动化的结合所建立的新颖的历史框架中研究这些作品，我们将对表演史做出原创性的贡献。我们的目标是提高公众对殖民地历史在现在仍然存在的理解，并利用这种理解使我们的思想和文化朝着自由的新可能性发展，这可能克服从过去继承下来的结构。我们将汇集来自相关学科，文化组织和表演艺术家的学者，通过学习驻留，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，这些知识将告知学者，艺术家和更广泛的公众寻求扩大对自动化历史最新阶段的人类的理解。

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.