Intimacy Across Visceral And Digital Performance

the long version

Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance is an edited collection designed to address a diverse set of critical responses to and practical interrogations of the notion of being intimate in emergent and hybrid performance practices, aiming to elicit connectivity and provoke debate about the potency, nature and agency of intimacy in contemporary performance. Lauren Berlant suggests that 'intimacy involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared' (2000, p. 1). Sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the private experience to the public sphere. Within the current climate of intense global political, social and financial insecurity and unrest, at a time infused with both hope and fear, artists appear to be demonstrating a desire for intimacy and closeness with the Other. Those public figurings of intimacy -- staged through contemporary performance, visual culture and digital art practices -- become the cultural fuel which, when placed alongside political potentialities, can ignite debates and provocations such as those contained herein.