Hold Please: The Search For Immediacy in Digital Performance

I think I've found it.

A whole bunch of stuff I've read finally hit a common thread.

While researching immediacy, I read a few things speaking along the lines of 'something can only be defined against it's opposite'.

The opposite of immediacy is waiting. The opposite of analog is digital.

As the world moves more towards digital, we attempt to make the digital more like us. Humans want things now, do things now, are now - that's why we're called human BEINGS. We push the digital world to react to the speed of life.

I argue that this is not possible, and I do so via performance, specifically analog (live) performance versus digital (delayed) performance.

No matter how fast our digital connections, the live will always be more instantaneous, more immediate. By blending the two (mixed media) or negating the analog (digital), we only serve to illustrate just how true this is.

Art reflects life, and there is no more intimate (and immediate) art than theatre, where life is played out before our very eyes. The closer artists such as Blast Theory or Avatar Body Collision come to engaging the digital, the more obvious the divide becomes to non-artists and artists alike.

While the digital will increase in it's scope and influence in everyday and artistic life, the live will always react accordingly and strengthen its position, using technology to help rather than overtake.

As our eating and exercise habits return to our Paleolithic roots, so too do our artistic endeavours. Interactive media groups like Blast Theory use digital advances in conjunction with the physical to lend mixed media art the same credence as Vibram footwear or organic produce, by promoting societal (psychological) practices with the aid of digital technologies.

Instead of dismissing technological advancement as inherently detrimental to the human condition, mixed media art forwards an inclusive view of the human/technological debate through co-existence. While digital technologies aid in many facets of daily human life, the intimacy of the immediate will never be replaced - only heightened - by it's juxtaposition with the asynchronicity of the digital.

Whoa!