The Performativity of Politics In a Digital World

Edited by Aleksandar Dundjerović & Ivan Pravdić University of Arts in Belgrade THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS IN A DIGITAL WORLD 2 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS 3 IN A DIGITAL WORLD THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS University of Arts in Belgrade 5 IN DIGITAL WORLDIN A DIGITAL WORLD THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS IN A DIGITAL WORLD Edited collection of themed essays EDITED BY Prof. Dr Aleksandar Dundjerović, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK Prof. Dr Ivan Pravdić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia PUBLISHED BY University of Arts in Belgrade FOR PUBLISHER: Prof. Dr Mirjana Nikolić, Rector of the University of Arts in Belgrade SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Dr Christina Papagiannouli, Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of Wales, UK Dr Venelin Šurelov, associate professor, National Academy of Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria Dr Biljana Mickov, researcher at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France Dr Paola Botham, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK Dr Aleksandar Dundjerović, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK Dr Ivan Pravdić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia This publication has been published with the support of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Serbia. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15592973 University of Arts in Belgrade (in collaboration with the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) Belgrade, 2025 6 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS TABLE OF CONTENTS 8 FOREWORD Mirjana Nikolić ARTS AND POLICIES AS SOCIAL PROCESSES IN A REAL AND DIGITAL WORLD 14 PERFORMATIVITY OF THE REAL: SPECTACULARITY - THE MOON LANDING, PROPAGANDA AND THE PRODUCTION OF FANTASY IN THE DIGITAL WORLD Aleksandar Dundjerović 32 STYLING CLIMATE FUTURES Sarah Hager 46 TRANSFORMATION OF THE EPHEMERAL FUNCTION OF A SACRAL RITUAL IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MEDIA NETWORK Nadežda Elezović and Valentina Sablić 64 FROM CYBERNETICS IN THE FUN PALACE TO PERFORMATIVE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN COMMUNITY; A NEW MODEL OF CIVIC INTERACTION Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez 74 IMPROVISATION, APPLIED THEATRE AND DIGITAL POPULISM Cami Rowe 7 IN A DIGITAL WORLD AESTHETICS AND TECHOLOGIES AS POLICIES 90 THE AESTHETICS OF TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE: CONVERSATION WITH LEV MANOVICH 106 DESIGN OF A NEW PERFORMATIVITY: AI-GENERATED ACTORS IN THE DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA ENVIRONMENT Vanja Stanković PERFORMING CONFLICTS AND ACTIVISM 122 INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative - identity - media – culture Ivan Pravdić 152 ARCHITECTURE’S WEAPONISING PERFORMANCE Višnja Žugić 164 THE ASTRONAUT’S VIEW: CROSS COMMUNITY THEATRE-MAKING IN CHILE Paola Botham 176 THE ROLE OF CITIZEN-ACTORS IN DIGITAL SPACES: A CASE STUDY OF THE ANTI-RIO TINTO PROTESTS IN SERBIA Mirjana Milenić THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS FOREWORD Prof. Dr Mirjana Nikolić Rector of the University of Arts in Belgrade 9 IN DIGITAL WORLDIN A DIGITAL WORLD Following the success of the conference “Digital Performing Arts - Participatory Practice in the Digital Age,” the collaboration between the University of Arts in Belgrade and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK, continues to provide insight and new knowledge. The International Conference titled “The Performativity of Politics in Digital Media, Arts, and Culture” was organized by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK, in collaboration with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. The joint conference produced over 50 intellectually stimulating and exciting papers from international scholars and practitioners. We are pleased to be able to publish a selection of papers in this edition titled The Performativity of Politics in a Digital World. The digital realm increasingly shapes the arts, culture, and media, fundamentally altering how we utilize databases to represent our world. Artificial intelligence has become an integral part of our lives, significantly influencing the fields of arts and culture. AI is changing almost all rules in arts, culture and civilisation. Among other contributions, the book features a discussion between Lev Manovich and Aleksandar Dundjerović that not only summarises many important steps in digitalising individuals and society but also anticipates the future of entropy-info-technological integration. And precisely when we talk about artificial intelligence, we must clearly emphasize the ethical aspects of its use in art, culture, and media. AI does not have ethics of its own, rather, ethical challenges come from the way AI is created and used, which brings the conclusions back to people, individuals, decision-makers and creators who manipulate it all spheres of social life. Having in mind that we are faced with numerous challenges, it is important to think through all phenomena both theoretically and practically. As the boundaries of new knowledge expand, embracing international and intercultural perspectives is essential for enhancing the quality of higher education in the arts. Con sequently, the University of Arts in Belgrade is committed to fostering international collaboration and building constructive academic connections worldwide. Our international conferences and published contributions provide exceptional opportunities to forge strong relationships, explore new topics, and gain deeper insights into the world around us. Nikolić Foreword 16 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS transformed the creation of reality within digital realms. Additionally, the paper considers the role of digital media in creating place, as well as the relevance of arts and digital aesthetics through the media language established by Lev Manovich. The popular media (starting with film and moving to TV, apps and social media) are a powerful tool in creating public opinion, which can be used for political issues through its ability to reach audiences in diverse and engaging ways. Since its inception in the early parts of the 1900s, the Hollywood film industry has become the centre of world film production, where the image of a national hero dominated the cinema screen. It also explored the potentiality of the medium to produce American government propaganda, particularly during pivotal moments in history, promoting the military as heroic and war as glorious and justified. The core of the Propaganda Model applied to Hollywood films (from The Birth of a Nation and The Great Dictator to modern blockbusters such as Air Force One, Independence Day, Green Berets, the Misson Impossible series, as well as Marvel films heroes, for example) is based on Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s use of media in politics. 3Their conceptual model of manipulating the population in new media to consent to concentrated ownership of corporate media ideology that is promoting ‘flak’ (strong criticism) as an effort to discredit organizations and individuals who disagree with established views of dominant powers and promoting the ideology of ‘us’ versus the ‘Other’. Mathew Alford points out that, “without exception, mainstream Hollywood products will not only assume that the US is a uniquely ‘worthy’ and benevolent entity in world affairs but also will frequently endorse the application of US force against official enemies (with the resultant ‘unworthy’ victims).”4 The periods such as World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the various wars of the 2000s, were often marketed under different thematic titles easily acceptable to influence public opinions. For example in the post 9/11 area War on Terror, the Arab Spring, and stopping Russian president Putin and the protection of Ukraine. Hollywood films contribute to the process of Americanization, shaping both local and global perceptions of the United States, and the portrayal of wars in public perception. The stories constructed in Hollywood films influence opinions, create stereotypes, and frame future public discussions. The values they promoted were situated as being uniquely American —such as individualism, the idea of freedom, and the pursuit of happiness—thereby positioning the U.S. as a leader in freedom and human rights on the world stage. Through entertainment, Hollywood sells these ideas to a global audience. For that purpose Pro3 Herman and N. Chomsky (1995) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London: Vintage. 4 Alford, M., (2017) “A Propaganda Model for Hollywood”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(2), 144-156. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.128. For propaganda see pivotal work on public consent in N. Chomsky, (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston, MA: South End Press. Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 17 IN A DIGITAL WORLD paganda Model uses celebrities to reach out to audiences (such as Taylor Swift against Donald Trump) and put out the specific information that are smearing someone or influencing social and political trends through films, TV, music and social media. Hollywood propaganda is accepted internationally, promoting American values. As Mark Dice observes, propaganda of those values are : Carefully woven into movies and TV shows with the intent of influencing the audience rather than merely entertaining them. Sometimes the central plot serves as propaganda which is coated in a thin layer of entertainment, but the writers and producers know, and often openly admit, what their true intentions are.5 The U.S. government and the Pentagon have established partnerships with Hollywood, indirectly funding and providing resources for military-related films that align with national objectives and promote military interests. These movies are often big-budget blockbusters that mix entertainment with political messages. Such films serve the longterm purpose of reinforcing a positive image of the U.S. while undermining opponents through stereotypes and simplistic good-versus-bad narratives. While some films critique the military and the U.S. government, they can also be interpreted as propaganda that engages with relevant issues in the US society, suggesting that a culture of freedom of expression allows for diverse opinions and positions. The role of Hollywood propaganda must be viewed in the larger context of its psychological and ideological impact on public perception. The creation of fantasy as an alternative reality to influence opponents is an ancient strategy in warfare. Historically, it has often been more advantageous to persuade the inhabitants of a fortified city to surrender—thereby undermining their collective morale—rather than conquering the city by force. Modern warfare, especially since World War II, has been characterized by what the U.S. military refers to as psychological operations (psyops), which aim to influence the morale, mental well-being, and beliefs of the enemy. Great Britain pioneered various methods of psychological warfare in the early 20th century and now maintains military and intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, dedicated to psychological operations. Depending on the situation, elements of fantasy and reality are used to scare and intimidate or to make narratives appealing and desirable, while also highlighting the external or internal dangers facing the public. From 1955 until 1986, and beyond, the CIA has been involved in over 100 regime and leadership changes around the world, predominantly through force and unconstitutional means, often establishing military dictatorships. This process creates social conditions that lead to a country’s chief executive leaving office or the removal of the current government, which is then replaced by another individual 5 Dice, Mark (2020) Hollywood Propaganda. Resistance Manifesto, p36. Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 18 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS or group. 6 In efforts to displace unwanted governments that conflict with U.S. political interests, cover operations would be set up to initiate spectacular events generating the momentum of dissent. For the CIA (or indeed MI6) it is common to utilize socially marginalized groups, criminals, students, and opposition factions, while exploiting religious and ethnic divisions and historical tensions. Žižek observes that “fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock.”7 Brivic, in discussing Žižek›s concepts of ‘fantasy and truth,’ points out the impossibility of the fulfilment of desire because its actual object cannot match the one it imagines… Columbus believed that he had reached India, and so Native Americans were called Indians. What one reaches (the Real) can never articulate to match what one aims at (the Imaginary). For Žižek, fantasy, even when rebellious, supports ideology by serving as its inherent transgression—a level of imaginary misbehaviour that allows us to accept the limits of ‘reality.’ 8 Indeed, fantasies are not only illusions; they are essential in shaping our reality. Linked to these fantasies are desires influenced by dominant social ideologies and state powers that shape understanding and impact individuals. To effectively employ manipulative tactics and persuade others, it is essential to construct an alternative reality. Declassified CIA documents from 1973, published under the Freedom of Information Act and titled “On Countering Strategic Deception,” outline two systematic efforts within U.S. intelligence during 20th-century warfare aimed at creating deception and coordinating counter-deception measures. The deception planners have often enforced preconceptions or anticipated expectations. Prominently displayed self-deceptions may be reinforced by foreign deception planners. Counter-deception: planning involves not only the detection of deception but also countermeasures for stratagems that have been 6 CIA Reference Aid, ‘Patterns of Regime and Leadership Change in the Third World’ Approved for Release 2011, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP97R00694R000600560001-3.pdf 7 Žižek, The Plague p.10 8 Brivic, S. (2008). Žižek, Fantasy, and Truth. In: Joyce through Lacan and Žižek. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. p.81, https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230615717_5 Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 19 IN A DIGITAL WORLD detected and those stratagems that are detected may be anticipated based on past experience though not specifically. 9 In 2024, reminiscent of a Hollywood script, an unnamed Mossad agent interviewed on TV program 60 Minutes on the US CBS station discussed the creation of explosive pagers. This operation involved selling pagers to Hezbollah fighters, resulting in 12 deaths and 2,800 injuries in Lebanon. The agent described their operational process, which utilized a complex network of international companies. They laundered the sale of pagers to Hezbollah through a web of shell companies and subcontractors, ensuring that the trail could not be traced back to Israel. This approach deployed multiple layers of shell companies to ultimately benefit their supply chain. The former agent, masked and with a altered voice, stated during the interview, “We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we are the directors, we are the producers, we are the main actors. And the world is our stage.”10 In these examples, whether through psychological operations that craft believable narratives or by referring to the idea of the world as a stage, we observe the performativity of reality, where reality bends to support fantasy. These performance events utilize clever tactics to outmanoeuvre opponents and overcome obstacles, thus significantly influencing the political landscape in both times of peace and war. The rise of social media has transformed how information is disseminated and how content is accessed, enabling users to actively engage with political issues. In addition to being a platform for public engagement, social media also creates echo chambers and bubbles where only certain viewpoints are expressed, aligning with the beliefs of the users and reinforcing them. Where is the Moon? - Family Album The mythology and storytelling of the Moon provides a narrative that illustrates its significance across various civilizations. In Ancient Greece, the Moon is personified by the goddess Selene, who travels across the night sky. Her Roman counterpart, Luna, similarly rides a chariot through the night. In Hinduism, the Moon is represented by the deity Chandra, the god of night, who also embodies the aspects of the mind and emotions. Chinese mythology tells the story of the goddess Chang, who resides on the Moon after leaving Earth. She drank the elixir of immortality and ascended to the Moon. The Moon embodies the natural cycles of life, symbolizing the rhythms of life, death, and rebirth. 9 Harris R. William, (1973) On Countering Strategic Deception, Defence Advanced Research Project Agency. (approved for release 2007), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIARDP83M00914R002300090004-8.pdf 10 Stahal, Lesley ( 23 December 2024) 60 Minutes, Platform X , reposted in Jerusalem Post, https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1870994879314038938?mx=2 Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 20 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Fascination with the Moon was first captured in 1902 in the classic silent film A Trip to the Moon, directed by George Méliès. This film is regarded as one of the earliest examples of science fiction and features the iconic image of a spaceship landing in the Moon’s eye. The film was very theatrical and produced in a studio setting. This fascination with space travel reached its peak in 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission, which was filmed as what is often considered the greatest human achievement: the actual landing on the Moon. However, some have speculated whether the landing was staged, suggesting that it may have been a film possibly made by the famous director Stanley Kubrick. Regardless of these differing opinions on the Moon landing, the real event had to be imagined and conceptualized to be fully understood, and the elements of existing science fiction, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, have significantly influenced how this historic moment has been portrayed. So, if we are to represent the experience of the moon landing, what would that look like and how can we create a performative representation of that experience that could relate to people for whom the reality of being at the Moon is not something they are familiar with? But they have seen various science fiction films which can as fantasy be used to create a new reality. So, what does being on the Moon look like and what is the recorded experience of the only human Moon landing from 1969? When, as part of millennial production to celebrate human achievements, Robert Lepage’s solo performance The Far Side of the Moon (2000) was commissioned in Quebec, he was confronted with a dilemma. How to represent the reality of being on the moon? Should he dress in an image of an astronaut hopping on the stage space suspended in the air? How does he recreate the popular reality created by black and white film? Lepage decided to work from a fantasy on the Moon and his subjective experience of that event. He created a fantasy of place. His solo performance was a hybrid multidisciplinary event that combined live performance, music and dance with computer-generated images, future films about Apollo Missions, and puppets. One performer was supported by a group of technicians and engineers. The Far Side of the Moon was rehearsed in the multidisciplinary studio space La Casarne in Quebec City. The rehearsal space looked like a technical laboratory, with lots of props, projectors, audio equipment and computers, a space with no audience, just a black box where the performance was ‘written’ through digital technology of different media and designers; video, audio, lights, computer graphics. In this solo show, Lapage combines media, using computers designing visual material simultaneously as he is doing live improvisations. In 2003, the solo performance was turned into a feature film. What is significant about this production is that it was devised through Lepage’s subjective experience of being a pre-teen boy in Quebec City at the time of the great American Moon landing. How this human achievement where the USA conquered the Moon was played out in 2000, sharing that experience with contemDundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 21 IN A DIGITAL WORLD porary audiences who were born after the event or do not remember the iconic landing? Lepage often explains that the starting reference point for the performance was his childhood memory of when he broke the washing machine as he left a few stones and pebbles in the pocket of his pants. His mother had to take the machine out to the shed, and it became an object to play with; the washing machine became the space hub. The fantasy of the moon landing from 1969 became related to Lepage’s experience through the hub of the washing machine, it became a tangible place that Lepage used in his performance to relate to audiences some 31 years later, where the construction of the real was articulated through his childhood memory. In 1969, the live broadcast of the Moon landing on black-and-white television was a remarkable event, as it represented a significant moment of entertainment that entered people’s homes, fostering a sense of familiarity. The footage of the Moon landing captured the collective fantasy of reaching the Moon. No one could truly know what it would be like to be on the Moon, as it existed in the realm of popular fiction. The television broadcast was intended to function as a documentary, serving as an effective medium for shaping public perception through a shared experience of what was perceived as reality. However, there is a brief filmed confession by Stanley Kubrick from 1999, near the end of his life, in which he stated: “I perpetrated huge fraud... involving the US government and NASA. I am sure you’ve heard the rumours that the moon landing was fake; the moon landings were all fake, and I was the person who filmed it...” 11 This statement is widely circulated on social media. Despite the numerous discrepancies and improbabilities surrounding the Moon landing, the general public largely chose to believe in the fantasy that supported their acceptance of the event as The Real. During the II World War, Hollywood became an extended arm of the US military, becoming a propaganda machine that provided necessary communal bonding over shared national stories of a military hero. “Americans can tell the story of World War II in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. British people are the same. We love hearing stories about World War II because we like to think of ourselves as the good guys,” Nick Cull observed.12 It also prevents any negative images that the enemy may put forward about American society. Popular media such as film and TV provided images that at that time significantly influenced public opinion. Before apps, Netflix and a plethora of media platforms for streaming content, these outlets dealing with specific issues were shaping 11 Kubrick, Stanely on @peoplesremedyconspiracy Instagram account accessed 09 February 2025. 12 See the article on CBC web site “How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military”, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unofficialpropaganda-arm-of-the-u-s-military-1.5560575 Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 22 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS public belief and setting up public discourses. Therefore, in the middle of the Cold War, the US won the moon, and positioned the way the enemy (USSR) was perceived as weak while the US was victorious. This achievement in a race to the Moon created globally an emotional response to great US national conquest. Popaganda over the Moon landing provided a topic that was considered by the public rather than the Vietnam War, which was entering into a critical phase of low morale and a strong anti-war movement in 1969. My relationship with the Moon landing was also performative event. As a child, I played with friends, reenacting the landing. The Moon symbolized power that was achieved by the US America, which was essential to my family. In 1969, I was living in Yugoslavia while my extended family resided in America. Although I was very young, I remember the excitement within my family in Yugoslavia about the Moon landing achieved by the Americans. My grandmother, Helen, was born in Pennsylvania to Serbian parents who emigrated in the early part of the 20th century. She returned to Yugoslavia after World War I with her mother, following her parents’ divorce. English was her first language, and until her death, she counted and did basic math in English. Due to our transatlantic heritage, our family was labelled as pro-American after 1945, when Yugoslavia became a socialist country ruled by the communist leader Tito until his death in 1980. Being pro-American was not advantageous; there was a feeling of being an outsider. However, the Moon landing changed that predicament. Suddenly, something we discussed exclusively within our family—even speaking in English as if it were a secret code—became widely recognized. The astronauts became popular figures, and my aunt Mia ensured that I learned all their names to repeat in my games with other kids. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, was followed by Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, whom my closest friends pretended to be. I also had a toy model of the Lunar Module Eagle alongside an American flag. The reality projected in the black-and-white film shown live on TV as evidence of the Moon landing was about much more than just a group of men going to the Moon. It represented a new reality created through the performativity of the event, something unattainable by ordinary people and yet proclaimed as “a giant step for mankind,” as Armstrong famously stated. Most importantly, it was a spectacle achieved solely by Americans. The astronauts became precursors to Marvel fantasy heroes, embodying good and likely viewed as demigods who had gone to the Moon, an event we all witnessed on TV and in films. The performativity of the Moon landing operated within the ideological context of the space race between the USSR and the USA. In 2024, a Hollywood film titled Fly Me to the Moon proposed that there was a backup film of the landing staged in Hollywood. This version would excite the nation about the space program and demonstrate the superiority of NASA over its Soviet adversary. So, while the landing happened, the live Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 23 IN A DIGITAL WORLD filming was allegedly staged. If the landing had never occurred, the performativity of the real had taken place, and a collective fantasy was played out. Following Žižek›s insights the relationship between fantasy and reality is shaped by responses to desire—specifically, a desire for something that remains unfulfilled or lacking. The Moon landing serves as a prime example of this concept, representing a historical collective human desire while also embodying the ideological triumph of American space technology during the Cold War era. People wanted to believe in the miracle of technology; the centuries-old longing to reach the Moon was becoming a reality. Without this human desire to explore the lunar surface, the event would lack its significance. The need and want to believe in something transform the performative spectacle into what we perceive as the Real. This was a live event that was broadcast through various media, including photos, film, and audio recordings, along with tangible objects that enhanced our connection to reality by performing the fantasy of space exploration. Žižek argues that fantasies play a crucial role in shaping our desires and perceptions of reality. He suggests that these fantasies provide a framework through which we interpret our lives and understand the world around us. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the concept of the ‘Other,’ Žižek emphasizes how desire and identity are influenced by external factors such as social expectations and cultural norms, combined with individual cravings. Additionally, Žižek critiques contemporary ideologies, highlighting how they manipulate our fantasies to maintain control over us. He points out that cultural artifacts often reflect and reinforce these collective fantasies. According to Žižek, fantasies can serve as a form of ideological support, influencing how individuals perceive their desires and social realities. He also explores the dual nature of fantasies, recognizing that while they can offer liberation, they can also impose constraints. The interplay between spectacular events and the performativity of reality further illustrates Žižek›s point. These elements respond to our desires and shape what we choose to perceive. For Žižek , fantasies are not merely a form of escapism; rather, they are deeply interwoven with reality, structuring our desires and enhancing our understanding of the world. Placeness in New Digital Media The advancements in modern technology and digital media culture have rapidly expanded in the 2020s. Platforms for live video communication, such as Zoom and Teams, along with social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, enable real-time inter action. This concept of “liveness” is a crucial element that merges the physical and Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 24 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS digital worlds within a shared time and space—a live digital place.13 Being simultaneously present in both physical and digital environments shapes our understanding of how activities affect our perception of place. The digital space offers a new dimension of placeness, extending to a diverse array of experiences, including online shopping, education, entertainment, news, and politics. This shift is altering our everyday interactions and redefining what we perceive as real. Transnationality is a significant aspect of the digital realm; it facilitates global communication among individuals and artists involved in collaborative creative processes, while also providing a virtual environment for cultural exchange. The existence of a digital place has dismantled barriers associated with the physical landscape; geographical distance becomes irrelevant, allowing global cultures to connect in a direct and human manner, independent of corporate governance and bureaucratic limitations. Through technologies such as live video conferencing and distance learning, the digital space has become essential for developing new pedagogical and creative approaches in arts and, particularly, performing arts. In theatre and live art, it enables the exploration of innovative methodologies for performance practice that are conducted remotely. In today’s world, social media has transformed how we experience a sense of place. It has been established that every community place produces its social narrative, and so does the digital online community. With a growing impact on our lives, in social media, the duality of a physical and digital place, co-exist in simulations hybrid relations. It is almost as if the place is not produced on TikTok or Instagram platforms, you were physically not there; social media confirms your presence in a place and, therefore, a place itself. We can say that digital placeness is the sense of place in the same way as physical space gives us presence in a place. It is created and experienced in online or digital environments. It connects to a specific location or community digitally despite being physically distant. With the development of AI and robotics, perfecting VR and AR digital technology further establishes a human and non-human presence that can produce placeness.14 Every space tells a story, and every story can give meaning to a space. The Knossos Palace in Crete, with its preserved architecture, reveals the everyday lives of the Minoans and the legend of King Minos. According to myth, King Minos built a labyrinth 13 See Auslender, Philip (2023 3rd ed.) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Routledge. 14 Dundjerovic, Aleksandar and MJ Martinez Sanchez (2024) Placeness and Performative Production of Space (Bloomsbury) 133. Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda 25 IN A DIGITAL WORLD to contain the Minotaur, a creature that was half man and half bull. This legend imbues the palace with mythical qualities, inspiring various interpretations in art and narratives throughout history. While the dominant narratives of the time are reflected in space, these stories are not fixed; they are flexible and shaped by current social and cultural factors, causing narratives to evolve unpredictably through the act of storytelling. This is where the performative production of place comes into play, creating a spatial dramaturgy where spectacular events enhance the performative aspects of reality and popular belief in the Minotaur. In performance, the relationship between various elements in both physical and digital spaces supports storytelling through the use of space, along with cultural and historical references, design, lighting, sound, objects, structures, spatial relations, and audience interaction. These elements are key components of spatial dramaturgy in hybrid digital theatre.15 The connection between architectural space and the performance narrative is one of mutual influence. Performative actions that create narratives of placeness help define the meaning of a space. Conversely, the architectural entity itself shapes these performative actions, as seen in site-specific and immersive performances. It has been established that the discourse and knowledge created by the relationship between space and narrative provide the meaning of a space as produced by specific societies and cultures. This becomes even more relevant in our digital era. We aim to examine narratives performed as actions within placeness, which constitute these relationships as space-making. Performative actions serve a dual purpose: they are produced within a space while simultaneously creating a space, influenced by a matrix of social factors shaped by cultural, political, economic, individual and group identities, along with fictional influences. The contemporary shift from fixed to fluid structures, transitioning from a sense of place to a more dynamic notion of placeness, introduces a plurality of narratives that encourage interactivity with spaces that define their meanings. In the digital realm, factors such as the digital revolution, new technologies’ impact on everyday life, changes in production (particularly in post-industrial areas), conflicting aspects of post-globalism, migration processes, international conflicts, shifting global power dynamics, mass tourism, and the movement of people all influence placeness. Each of these elements possesses performative characteristics, acting as forms of action that contribute to the plurality of structures and narratives associated with a place. 15 See Dundjerović, Aleksandar (2023) Live Digital Theatre, Routledge. Dundjerović Performativity of the Real: Spectacularity - the Moon Landing, propaganda THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS STYLING CLIMATE FUTURES Sarah Hager Humboldt University of Berlin Berlin, Germany 33 IN A DIGITAL WORLD “Art and literature have not merely an indirect effect on the main energies of life. Directly, they give vision. The world spreads wide beyond the deliverances of material sense, with subtleties of reaction and with pulses of emotion. Vision is the necessary antecedent to control and to direction.” 1 - AN Whitehead In (broadly) contemporaneous terms the mathematician and philosopher Whitehead (1929) and Economist Tinbergen (1936) place emphasis on variants of the word ‚style‘. In this essay I explore these conceptions as a way of tracing lines of inquiry through to a few tentative consequences in the onto-epistemology of climate futures. ‚Climate futures‘ is used here in its broad form, to refer to elaborations about the future at any scale, reached by any means or methods - including modelling, narrating, or imagining - in the context of changing climate. The use of ‚onto-epsitemology‘ emphasises the entanglement of what exists (ontology) and how it is known (epistemology). In the present context this entanglement is foregrounded based on the idea that dominant knowledge practices sediment ontologically, forming a web of commitments that make alternatives to themselves seem implausible. Despite this implausibility, the space of futuring in general and climate futuring in particular, has been described as a contestation between scientistic prediction and hopeful provocation. This essay should not be read as a charge against econometric models that, beginning with Tinbergen, were gradually evolved from the 1970’s and absorbed into the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) and eventually became central to climate mitigation (van Beek et al, 2020). Such models can claim achievements across generations of scientists, numbering in the thousands of people, and these achievements have been essential in demonstrating the sure fact of climate change and catalysing international climate collaboration. Rather, the argument of this essay is that in this success, something that has fallen out from the onto-epistemology of climate futuring (where ‘futuring’ is the process of creating climate futures). One possible articulation of that absence can be made visible through the comparison of Tingbergen’s and Whitehead’s use of ‘stylisation’ and ‘style’. Whitehead’s foil is not authoritative, but rather comes from his work as a a thinker who tried to bring science and arts into epistemological conversation. The present paper belongs to a research process considering the possibility that the ways of knowing that lead to the understanding of the fact of anthropocentric climate change may not be the ways of knowing that will muster an adequate response. Its original contribution is the reflection on ‘style’ in two historical texts, respectively from 1929 and 1936. Although ‘style’ is only one of many points in both texts, and is not the major thesis of either, it is also not arbitrary. In particular, both Whitehead and Tinbergen 1 In ‘Technical Education and its Relation to Science and Literature’ in the ‘Aims of Education and Other Essays’ page 114 (Northrop and Gross, 2009) Hager Styling Climate Futures 34 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS connect ‘style’ to knowledge and aesthetics that are present in fields remote from artistic practices (for example engineering or administration). For both authors, ‘style’ refers to a specific capability connected to knowledge and experience. Thus, they point in the direction of a distinctive aesthetic way of knowing and acting, that while present in many formative activities, can be said to reach an intentional distillation in artistic practice2 (Ribault, 2022). Of greater importance than the general category of ‘style’, however, is the connection between Tinbergen‘s specific usage of ‚stylisation’ and the adoption in economics of the ‘stylised fact’. A stylised fact is an epistemological idea that aggregate patterns and relations can claim a kind of appropriateness as abstract generalities that can be maintained even in the presence of evidence that would be falsifying if such a stylised fact was instead represented as a scientific hypothesis. The construction and use of a stylised fact is here termed a knowledge production ‘move’. A knowledge production ‘move’ is a epistemological construct that is legitimated in a specific field. Such a move can be reused within that field without the need for substantial justification. In economics, ‘stylisation’ is a move that is essential for the production of econometeic models. It is for this reason that an interest in IAMs reaches back to the first econometric model where ‘stylisation’ still required argumentation and justification, rather than its taken for granted mature form. The first section of this paper, ‘A Few Words on Climate Knowledge’, provides a brief background for interdisciplinary readers who may not be familiar with the problem space addressed by this essay. Following this, an exploration of ‘style’ and ‘stylisation’ under the title ‘What does a Stylist Know?’ argues that despite some similarities, Tinbergen‘s conception of ‚style‘ is an action, whereas Whitehead‘s is a capability or power. The consequence for climate futures is that the divergent epistemologies of ‚stylised‘ and ‚style‘ imply different orientations toward the relationship between knowledge today and outcomes in the future. In the ‚stylised‘ model a range of possible futures are presented as the outcome of simulated interventions that, definitionally, preserve all assumed relations. In the case of ‚style‘, mastery enables the attainment of an open space of possible ends, without any assumption of the transmission of relationships between periods. The final section, ‚Politics and Poetics of Stylised Climate Futures‘ concludes with reflections on the difficulty and potential of thinking policy with style. A Few Words on Climate Knowledge That the response to the sure knowledge of anthropocentric climate change has been inadequate is described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2 See the ‘Specification of Art’ (Bazalgette’s translation of Payerson’s Specificazione dell’arte’) esp. pages 35-36 in Ribault 2022 Hager Styling Climate Futures 35 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Assessment Reports. These reports aspire to collate and explain the state of climate knowledge, as it is represented in academic publications. The highest level summary, the ‚Summary for Policy Makers‘, is approved line-by-line by the member governments. In the most recent one (AR6) it describes that „Total net anthropogenic [Green House Gasses] GHG emissions have continued to rise during the period 2010–2019 (IPCC 2023)”. It cannot be suggested that simply changing knowledge practices would magically and singly impact this trend. In the first case, the problem is a complex accumulation across many scales and frames. This includes, to name only a few, species of the economists’ ‘rational self interested maximisation’ by people, firms and countries; national, regional and global political conflicts and strategies; the existing structures of production, consumption, distribution and circulation, culture and history - which are obviously all hopelessly commingled in themselves and with each other. It is likely that the list includes more facets of collective living and being on this planet than it excludes. In this aspect, the ‘social side’ of the climate problem is among the towering problems of our age, not only for its urgency but also for its sharp cut into and across different lines of social, economic, ecological, cultural and technical constellations. To understand why, in all of these entanglements, knowledge itself might matter, one starting point is to consider the performativity of representations of the future, which Oomen et al (2022) show has a substantial basis in the contemporary literature. In the specific case of IAM’s, van Beek et. al. (2020) define this performativity as, “shape[ing] the possibility space in which future options for climate action are discussed and thus the content of policy deliberation in international climate politics.” (page, 3). More generally, arguments for the role of knowledge organisation in governance are long established (Jasanoff, 2004) and the consequences of data organisation for world-ordering in the specific context of the IPCC has been explored (Cointe, 2024). What has received relatively less direct attention and activation in the context of climate futures are arguments from ontological plurality, or what Holbraad et al (2014) have called the ‘Politics of Ontology’ for “the anthropological concept of ontology as the multiplicity of forms of existence enacted in concrete practices, where politics becomes the non-skeptical elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could be.” The link back to knowledge, thus ontoepistemology, is that the terms that we use to produce and legitimate knowledge, such as the IAMS, are often ‘packaged’ (sedimented and unreflected) ontological commitments, validating and reproducing the objects that form the basis of knowledge claims. These ontological claims are requisite for, and productive of, many of the entanglements listed above. What is important to recognise is that ontological commitments overlay, thereby resulting in many-layered symbolic and material forms that support each other’s existences, create existences, and exclude existences in ways which are neither wholly systematic nor random. While objects ingested in the IAMs, like the GHGs, have physical forms others are the result of a specific imagination such as proxied estimates (Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) and quantified concepts (discounting). Research on such Hager Styling Climate Futures 36 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS entanglements and sediments is produced not all at once, but through an accumulation of patient study of concrete moments and infrastructures in the historical development of climate futures knowledge and its alternatives. In this context, the present essay explores onto-epistemic exclusion through the conception of ‘style’ by two significant thinkers working at the cusp of the modelled world. What Does a Stylist Know? The two works compared in this essay have marked differences. ‘Whiteheads collection’ of essays ‘The Aims of Education’ (first ed. 1917; second ed. 1929) is first a polemic reflection on the changes to education with the advance of science and technology, and second hints into Whitehead’s epistemology and philosophy of science which are more deeply developed elsewhere. Tinbergen‘s ‚An economic policy for 1936‘ is considered the world‘s first econometric model (although Tinbergen also produced a model in 1931 under the title ‚Ein Problem der Dynamik‘ (‚A problem of Dynamics‘)) (Don and Verbruggen, 2006). Tinbergen‘s objective is clearly not to explain knowledge, but to use it to solve a definite and pressing problem - specifically the policy possibilities to encourage economic recovery in the Netherlands, defined as increasing employment, of course in 1936. It is also worthwhile to keep in mind that ‘Whiteheads work‘ is written in English, whereas Tinbergen‘s essay was translated into English from Dutch. For this reason we should not dwell too deeply on the choice of constructions by Tinbergen‘s translator (who is unnamed in Klaassen et al 1959) but try to grasp the main directions that these constructions sign. Despite these differences, both works are written by men with commanding mathematical facility and creativity at a time of profound social and technical change. Another similarity is that both works are are addressed to national policy. Tinbergen seeks to give some insight into what might happen to economic relationships in the Netherlands under a selection of proposed alternatives, bound by a range of assumptions, such as the bracketing out of exogenous shocks. Whitehead‘s essays are addressed to the modernisation of education in England, particularly to changes in the curriculum and support for some elements of mathematical and liberal education for all learners. Tinbergen and Whitehead connect ‘style’ to an aesthetic sense that pervades accomplishment outside of arts (engineering, administration, and clearly, model making). In Tinbergen‘s essay he performs the role of ‚stylist‘. He connects ‚to style‘ with ‚to generalise‘, wherein the former is a partial means to the latter. In particular, Tinbergen is keen to stylise aggregate categories that enable visibility into dynamic relationships at a so-called ‚macro‘ scale - so when he ‚styles‘ he groups, names and relates. He acknowledges that grouping is a hazardous activity - and one that almost fully determines the success of the model outcome. Here it is worth to quote, keeping in view that it is the quote of a translation: Hager Styling Climate Futures 37 IN A DIGITAL WORLD “As a matter of course every attempt to generalise or stylise is a venture. The artistry in the work of the social economist lies in this stylising. Some attempts have been made which could not be handled, some proved to be unrealistic. We have to steer clear of these rocks. Stylising is necessary however and the alternative is sterility.” (Klaassen et al 1959, pg. 41) The centrality of stylisation is demonstrated by Tinbergen’s own urging that all criticism should be directed to his assumptions - which are specifically what has been ‘styled’. This styling is of an abstract ontological sort, specifying in this case what from the mass of social activity belongs to economics, how these dynamically change, and some ‘preprogrammed’ relationships (such as the assumption that a price increase implies a lagged increase in wages). In 1936, Tinbergen felt the need to justify his use of mathematics, which he referred to as a machine. He writes: “Let us put it in this way: the relations discussed in section four are now thrown into the mathematical machine and the result is ejected from the machine, more or less readymade. The reader not versed in mathematics can be assured that this machine process is uninteresting, in so far that, economically speaking nothing new is added.” (Klaassen et al 1959, pg. 67) Tinbergen’s stylising is explicitly quantitative - that is, all things which it categorises or groups must be expressible in quantitive terms so that the magnitudes and distance in time of the relationships can be found and explored according to the mathematical machinery. The engine powering this machine is a set of equations from applied physics. The justification for the use of these equations is premised on the so-called ‘strange wave-like’ movements which Tinbergen claims have a similar dynamics in the physical and economic systems. Preempting critique, Tinbergen recognises that uncertainty remains, but that simply pointing to these uncertainties brings one no closer to a solution. In this, we see a direct line between the reasoning laid out by Tinbergen as it continues into climate futures and the use of IAMs. This line is the one that underlines how ‘uncertainty’ is used as a cover for inaction. This excuse for inaction was prevalent in the early days of climate multilateralism and was countered by substantial efforts to define and communicate levels of uncertainty across working groups in the IPCC assessment reports. However, the relation of stylisation to uncertainty also makes it possible to evade a set of empirical strictures, including falsifiability and reproducibility, while retaining the technocratic legitimacy of ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ reasoning in strands of popular collective imagination. Sargent, who was (with Sims) awarded the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 20113, described in a keynote 3 Advanced information. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Thu. 31 Oct 2024. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2011/advanced-information/> Hager Styling Climate Futures 38 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS talk in 20174 that unlike empirical models, economic models are not testable according to experimental conditions because the rules (the policies) governing the system are changeable. Further, it is rather that economic models themselves are directed to thinking about the consequences of induced rule changes. In this, the economic models become a quasi-empirical simulation. This specific type of reasoning can be traced to Tinbergen and is consequent of his advocacy for the move of stylisation. Thus, we can say that what Tinbergen’s stylist knows consists in at least three major dimensions - all of which are somehow beyond the scope of the problem itself. The first is a theoretical grounding in economy that suggests certain relations and candidates for abstraction, the second is the knowledge of the ‘mathematical machine’, and the third is the knowledge of the political policy environment that his work addresses. As such, successful stylisation belongs to expertise - though is not guaranteed by it and remains hazardous. Whitehead’s conception of style also passes through experience but is obtained only at the level of mastery. His metaphysical system, which seeks to accommodate and encapsulate science, religion and art was formalised in Process and Reality approximately 10 years (1927-28) after the first version of the Aims of Education (1917) and coincides with the updated edition (1929). Caranfa (2015) emphasised the creative tension Whitehead brings in between rationality and imagination. This tension is mediated aesthetically - what Caranfa calls the ‘poetics’ of Whitehead’s philosophy. Within these poetics, one bridge is ‘style’. Whitehead’s style is of a fundamentally aesthetic character, but can be realised in any occupation or objective. Whitehead writes: “Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint.” (Whitehead, A. N., Northrop, F. S. C., & Gross, M. W. (2009), pg. 97) What is important to notice first is that Whiteheads conception of style is reminiscent of a mathematical species of aesthetics. He praises parsimony and the realisation of whatever end the activity supposes. Nevertheless, this is of a different order than that of stylisation pursued by Tinbergen. In particular, stylisation is a ‘move’ in a knowledge production process, that relies on an expertise, whereas ‘style’ is a way in which any move can be performed. Thus, style is invested in the individual, and Whitehead claims, only in individuals with substantial experience in the field. The possession of this aes4 Sargent, Thomas. 2017. “Economic Models.” Keynote, PyData New York City, December 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mf_LvwxFqY Hager Styling Climate Futures 39 IN A DIGITAL WORLD thetic power, is for Whitehead an “ultimate morality of mind” (page 98) which “pervades the whole being” (page 97). The power of such style is foresight without excess: “With style the effect of your activity is calculable, and foresight is the last gift of gods to men. With style your power is increased, for your mind is not distracted with irrelevancies, and you are more likely to attain your object. Now style is the exclusive privilege of the expert. Who-ever heard of the style of an amateur painter, of the style of an amateur poet? Style is always the product of specialist study, the peculiar contribution of specialism to culture.” (Whitehead, A. N., Northrop, F. S. C., & Gross, M. W. (2009), page 98) It is clear that here, ‘calculable’ means something very different from the mechanistic calculations performed by Tinbergen on programmed relations. Throughout Whitehead’s essay, he stresses that specialised study is not only narrow study. In addition to the development of the specialism must come some interdisciplinary familiarity - classics for craftsmen and maths for poetsit is ‘culture’ to which specialism is directed. Whitehead describes culture as “activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling” which he explicitly distinguishes from “scraps of information” (page 87). To understand the relevance of this in the context of climate futures, it is worthwhile to return to the opening quote in this essay - specifically that “vision is the antecedent of control and direction”. In this we find the greatest contrast between the epistemologies of the future proposed by a model comprised of stylised facts processed in a blind mathematical machine, and the slow attainment of vision which is defused through a broad cultural and technical education. The ‘stylisation’ of Tinbergen postulates a strict form of relations projected mathematically, whereas Whitehead proposes recombinant dependencies which can be summoned by mastery to attain specific ends, guided by foresight. Within Whitehead’s conception is the possibility that the web of relations can flex and change. What then does a person with style know? They have a high degree of domain specific knowledge, enhanced by a broad complementary education, that enables them to envision an outcome and realise it parsimoniously. A central tenant of this complementarity is a capacity both for technical and artistic knowledge. It is clearly possible that a person having style can perform the ‘move’ of stylisation, and that then one would speak of ‘style in econometric modelling’. It is certain that Tinbergen had such style. Tinbergen’s work is imaginative and creative in devising an application of physics to an economic problem, creating useful aggregations, and putting these into the the service of a pressing national problem. The intended effect of Tinbergen’s work is to effectively cut through uncertainty and the debates of his contemporaries. The use of this form of technocratic legitimacy, coupled to the presentation of neutrality, enables the model to circumvent mere political wrangling and rhetoric. The importance of this cannot be overstated, particularly in the context of denial of climate change by powerful interests. The construction of models enables a check on power and a crossing of factions that substantiates itself only on the stylisation and the outputs from the Hager Styling Climate Futures 40 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS mathematical machinery. The economy is able to be understood in aggregate without reference to any people, real or imagined, apart from their aggregation as labour. In each step, decision making and policy as a political and value based activity enters into negotiation with technocratically legitimated descriptions that can provide estimates of effects. There are at least two points to notice here - the first is that the sociality of neutrality confronts the individuality of style. Thus, even though we can describe Tinbergen and many subsequent modellers as having Whiteheadian style, the assessment of their work depends on its acceptance as de-individuated. Here we encounter the question at the centre of our investigations - specifically if the knowledge production process that established and upholds the sure fact of climate change is potentially not the kind of knowledge that might catalyse appropriate responses. Which is another way of asking if the IAM’s with quantitive stylisation aimed at policy making do also have the Whiteheadian power of attainment. This question, of course, requires an argument about how ultimate the goal of the models should be - if they are aimed only at reducing uncertainty about a possible range of effects in response to specific policy options under ceteris paribus assumptions, than it is possible to answer ‘yes’. However, if it is to be a part of a knowledge generating process whose aim is transformation of underlying relationships and social realities, the answer is less certain - at least to the extent that the performativity of the models reinforces ontological solidification. Thus, Tinbergen’s model evaluation performs a subtle alteration of the social ontology of the policy process. Specifically, it marks the beginning of the creation of a science of policy whose legitimacy is premised on reducing uncertainty and the depoliticisation of policy. In its performative reception as a means to predictive control, we can grasp directly the difference to Whitehead, who, sees control and direction as consequent of ‘vision’ which is developed through engagement with arts and entered in a vital form - “pulsing”. If Whiteheadian vision is of a kind in which ‘exogenous factors’ are not required to be assumed away, but rather exist within the flow of the expected and unexpected that converge in the hands of aesthetic mastery, then there is at least a plausible ground for thinking about how to bring such vision to the climate policy process. Politics and Poetics of Stylised Climate Futures On the epistemological generalities there is very little difference between Tinbergen’s model in 1936 and the IAMs that maintain the frame of a specific stylised ontology. Wherever analogies to this way of thinking are described, the tension between calculating prediction and humanistic vision enters into debate. Examples include, Galison’s ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the Cybernetic Vision’ (1994) and Rindzevičiūtė’s ‘The power of systems: How policy sciences opened up the Cold War world’ (2016). To concretise this debate, we can take one description of the the contest Hager Styling Climate Futures 41 IN A DIGITAL WORLD between the imaginative and predictive strains of ‘futuring’. In reference to the 1960’s as a time of contest over conceptions of the future Andersson (2012) writes: “...a struggle ensued over representations of the future of the world in the postwar period, with competing visions of the future as: an object of science of which certain predetermined traces could be found; and the future as a becoming: an object of the human imagination, creativity, and will.” (page 1413) In more recent times, this contest has been explicitly referenced to climate futures and the dominance of the epistemic practices similar to those initiated by Tinbergen. In particular, Hulme (2011) describes what he terms ‘climate determinism and reductionism’. His basic argument is that the success of climate models has lead to a primacy in thinking about the future that is characterised by epistemic exclusions - Hulme writes of: “the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative, and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future. It is a hegemony that lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model-based descriptions of putative future climates.” (page 245) Seeing then the endurance of this opposition, we can return to Whitehead’s claim that the repository of humanistic accounts and corresponding vision is in cultural activity. These activities are not activities merely of communication, but of ways of knowing that stretch beyond stylisation and into style. When considering the consequences of these epistemic exclusions for climate futures it merits a reflection on the interactions between the performative and political consequences of these knowledge systems. Going back to to Holbraad et al (2014) we recognise that stylisation, especially in the highly structured and comparable ways pursued by global modelling consortia are ontologically exclusionary. If politics is the ‘non-skeptical elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could be’, then the entrenchment of certain stylisations also preselects a range of the futures. “For a start, to subjunctively present alternatives to declarations about what ‘is’ or imperatives about what ‘should be’ is itself a political act—a radical one, to the degree that it breaks free of the glib relativism of merely reporting on alternative possibilities (‘worldviews’, etc.), and proceeds boldly to lend the ‘otherwise’ full ontological weight so as to render it viable as a real alternative.” Holbraad et al (2014). While the future as an object of study had somewhat reduced its urgency in the era of Globalisation, the climate crisis has given renewed impetus to these questions (Oomen et al, 2022). In the performativity of these models outside of specialist discourse it does not matter that they are not intended to be taken as predictive. If we accord Holbraad et al (2014), models and imaginative futuring, that is all knowledge practices directed to climate futures, are implied political apparatuses. That is to say that, the implied Hager Styling Climate Futures 48 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS ritual performative practice, and ephemeral ritual, will establish the scope of this paper. It is important to mention the tradition of political art in the named area to emphasize the continuity of critical, subversive, and activist-oriented artistic practices as forms of public action in Croatia. This work explores a distinction between non-artistic and artistic activist practices in the public space of the specified area, using a comparative methodological approach on a sample of selected cases. It will demonstrate how the function of cultural ritual defines the strategy of its performance, whereby non-artistic practices through ephemeral repetition reduce the function of ritual to the identity character of its narrative. The concept of performative and ritualized action as a form of social behavior Casquete defines protest rituals as “all the regularly occurring symbolic performances staged by social movements in the public sphere with the manifest purpose of influencing authorities, public opinion and/or movement participants” (2006, 47). In this way, protest rituals are presented as mechanisms for expressing collective identities. In this context, there is a distinction in terms of ritual and performative performance in culture. The historian Peter Burke in his essay Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context (2020) indicates the institutionalization of the concept of performance studies, which has by then overcome the widespread concept of ritual in the secular society as the form of civil and political action in interdisciplinary scientific research. Although in both cases, in the context of research on civil ritual or performativity of politics, the focus of research in various scientific disciplines is directed at the interests in the concepts of ritual, festival, ceremonies, and other forms of social behavior in the public sphere. Thereby, the term ritual suggests the invariability of the performance “scenario” unlike the variability and fluidity implied by the term “performative” (Burke, 2020, 10). In any case, this is about understanding the world as a set of social rituals, i.e., the world as a stage for social interaction (Turner, 1987), therefore both artistic and non-artistic happenings in public space can be interpreted in the context of ephemeral ritual. This study utilizes both terms, especially to differentiate between non-artistic and artistic practices that, through repetition, symbolism, and the appropriation of procedures or by direct citation, imply a religious context. It should be noted that Burke in the named article discusses the approaches in new science research of public ritual in connection with the ideas of the German-American society and culture historian George Mosse, about the “symbolic activity” of collective performances in constituting political rituals, such as parades, marches, and gymnastic demonstrations in public space. He indicated the context in the name of the article. A considerable number of scientists agree that numerous forms of contemporary art practice, particularly of a performative character, are derived from the tradition of political action, such as activist art practice or feminist art (Aladro-Vico, E., Bailey, O., Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 49 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Jivkova-Semova, D., 2018). This also goes the other way around. Namely, art performances or actions as “live” art activities have been recognized as an attractive form in the context of political speech (Preciado, 2009; Serafini, 2018, 15). Comparing artistic and non-artistic practices may serve for a better understanding of the phenomenon of action in public space and the effects it can have on contemporary society. In this context, art viewed as a social activity has become the focus of extensive research by art theorists and historians. At the turn of the 21st century, in a period dominated by digital images (Iconic Turn) (Boehm, 1994) and amid the global dissolution of distinct boundaries between artistic, activist, political, and theoretical endeavors (Klein, 2005), the focus of scholarly research interests particularly shifted toward transdisciplinary studies of evolving cultural concepts (Bachmann-Medick, 2016). Nowadays, there is a growing interest among researchers to understand and articulate the newly formed cultural and social phenomena associated with activist artistic action (Weibel, 2015). To grasp the nature of these cultural rituals, it is essential to highlight contemporary approaches from various scientific fields that examine the connections between everyday life, civil engagement, social issues, and activism, specifically regarding ritual and performativity. Focus is mainly on several significant phenomena, including activism, the performative aspects of politics, and the relationship between aesthetics and performative studies of “resistance culture” (McGarry, A., Erhart, I., Eslen-Ziya, H., Jenzen, O., Korkut, U., 2020), as well as the articulation of practices within public spaces (Pike, 2024). Additionally, Serafini (2018) emphasizes that to fully understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics, it is necessary to focus on diverse scientific research that explores artistic and non-artistic activist practices. In the discussion of cultural rituals, it is important to highlight the ideas of a leading continental philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, particularly his thoughts on the aesthetics of public performance, regarding continuity of rituals in contemporary secular society. In his observations on the continuity of cult and ritual in the profane context, Gadamer (1977, 59) distinguishes between religious and secular cultural rituals, emphasizing the differences between past Christian carnival festivities and the performance art. This distinction helps us gain a better understanding of the elements that constitute social order, both historically and in the present. Gadamer argues that creation—or transcendence or the game—plays a crucial role in art performance. In his hermeneutics, the concept of “play” holds a central position, focusing on the importance of active participation. In this context, the act of “playing” becomes significant to the extent that nothing else matters but the game itself. In discussing the functions of ephemeral cultural rituals, it is important to consider the ideas of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin ((1935) 2010, 38), as expressed in his renowned essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Benjamin Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 50 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS explores the origins of art production within the context of ritual, contrasting this with the exhibition function of art that emerges once it is liberated from ritualistic practices. Additionally, he introduces the concepts of “aestheticization of politics” and “politicization of aesthetics” to warn about the political tendencies to exploit symbolic, aesthetic, religious, or mythological content for ideological purposes. Art activism and social change The term “activistic art” in literature refers to artistic practices that borrow the language, structure, performance, and aesthetics of social and political protest movements, transferring experiences of protest into the realm of art. In other words, activist art uses resistance strategies as their core components (Kester, 2021; Lah, 2002). Such practices include street art and contemporary forms blending political and artistic actions, with notable examples being Pussy Riot and Banksy. The transposition of the forms of activist actions from social, political, and cultural contexts into the field of artwork is a significant aspect of artistic activism according to Šuvaković (2012, 282). Serafini (2018, 2) distinguishes artistic activism from other forms of activist, critical, or political art, describing it as a performative practice where artists, in collaboration with social organizations, seek to inspire social change (Lippard, 1984; Groys, 2009). Artistic activist practices can be “integrated” into movements and resistance groups, positioning them in opposition to political oppression, dominance, and various forms of discrimination. Since activism is inherently aimed at fostering social change, the key characteristic of artistic activism is the “function” organized approach to activist actions (Lippard, 1984; Vilenica, 2011, 324). Some authors prefer to simply use the term “activism” (McGarry et al., 2020). Additionally, we differentiate critical and subversive art practices. Critical art focuses on destabilizing power structures, while subversive practices push boundaries in art, often provoking strong reactions from the audience (Lah, 2002), to the level of iconoclastic acts against artworks or hostile reaction of attack at the artist (Pino Ivančić). Continuity and tradition of political art in Croatia Political art in Croatia has been continually present since the distinction between the socialist realism program and post-war abstraction, particularly within the socialist society of the 1950s (Kolešnik, 2006). The experience of collective action, especially present during the 45 years of Communist society, should be noted. Within the artistic subversions toward the power institutions, the above-mentioned is recognized in the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Lebhaft, 2012). The politically engaged art scene in this region developed in the context of social and political changes, stemming from Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 51 IN A DIGITAL WORLD the fall of the Eastern Bloc after the 1990s, in the period of transition, and in the context of establishing the civil sector. Engaged art, in this context, refers to artistic phenomena that utilize political symbols and ideological language to participate in local social change (Serafini, 2018). According to Lippard (1984), when referring to artistic activism, these practices are not necessarily related to the professional and “art world”. They refer to collaborative projects that gather artists, activists, and other community members against non-democracy, or as a form of support for human rights protection, freedom of speech, against environmental devastation, and political and capitalist economy repression. In recent years, however, in Croatia emergence of social activist practices in the public sphere whose performance strategies are not artistic but can be associated with cultural rituals. Non-artistic activist practices in public space In June 2022, a Catholic male movement called “Be Manly” (Muževni budite, 2023) was established in Croatia. The media (RFI, 2023) referred to the group as “the kneelers” due to their symbolic gesture of kneeling during prayers. This male’s movement represents an organized religious male group leading public rosary prayers. After their inaugural gathering in front of Zagreb Cathedral, the group convened in Zagreb’s main square in October 2022. Since then, on the first Saturday of every month (U ime obitelji, 2024), men across Croatia come together in the main city squares to pray in the kneeling position for 45 minutes. According to their official website (Muževni budite, 2024), they pray for various reasons, including the restoration of “spiritual authority” for men within the family, opposition to premarital sexual relations, and resistance to female reproductive rights in Croatia, as well as for their “personal intentions”. The group was formed after a Polish model (Muževni budite, 2023), and certain media such as Radio France Internationale (RFI, 2023) associate it with the growing global conservative or male movements that “reject LGBTQ rights, feminism, and the so-called ‘woke’ values”. The movement is accompanied by the eponymous web portal aimed at, as stated, “Catholic men” and, as noted, seeks to “reaffirm the biblical concept of masculinity, which has been seriously undermined in today’s time” (Muževni budite, 2023, bottom of the page). The organization is cited as the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Vitezovi Bezgrešnog Srca Marijina) (U ime obitelji, 2024, 14). Their symbolic posture and the symbolism in kneeling is one of the bodily movements and gestures that plays an important part in the “religious ritual and behavior” (Goldammer, 2020), and their meaning is derived from the “relation toward the holy”. In terms of religious meaning, kneeling represents an expression of humility. This symbolic gesture has also evolved into a form of silent protest, especially when performed in public spaces. Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 52 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS For example, in the context of the social justice movement, kneeling protests were initiated by American football players (NFL), following the practice of their co-player Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans while also raising awareness about the role of athletes in political discourse (Britannica, 2014). This act of kneeling became a powerful symbol of resistance, challenging social norms and sparking critical discussions about race and social equality in American society. In the Croatian example, continuous repetition of the performance indicates a ritualized act, particularly since it is rooted in ceremonial and religious practices. According to Frits Staal (1996, 115), a philosopher, Indologist, and scientist dedicated to the research of religious rituals, the act of repetition in a religious ritual is directed at traditional actions, intrinsic motivation, and participant’s immersion in the performance, whereas a ritual “is self-contained and self-absorbed”. From the purpose of public performance, it can be concluded that prayer in the said example is not intrinsically motivated, but it suggests two fundamental religious phenomena, beliefs, and rites (Durkheim 1912 as cited in Staal 1996, 126) which indicate a religiously contextualized action. The act of ritualized kneeling in prayer in public here represents the transfer of experiences from the sacral and private realms to a public, profane, and extrinsic context. The act of prayer here is led by intentions of public and social character, and the purpose of prayer is pre-defined and communicated through a movement’s online media portal (Muževni budite, 2024). Performativity is manifested in the form of public gatherings of men who pray together on main squares of Croatian cities, holding rosaries in their hands, posters with the Virgin Mary, as well as national symbols and Croatian flags (RFI, 2023). Here, the religious and the national meet and perform in the context of public and activism. Furthermore, the iconographic symbolism such as kneeling gestures and carrying prayer beads is related to the attributes of national and political features. The Christian iconography and national attributes are followed by posters of non-religious content, which indicates the use of visual language, aesthetics, and protest props. Along with the location of collective prayer, not in a sacral space or in own privacy, but in a public space. We can conclude that the form of the religious ritualized action is here borrowed, recontextualized, and integrated from the sacral to the context of an urban secular society and organized in the context of cultivating patriotism and patriarchal values. The continuous routine of performance expresses the event as an organized form of protest against destabilized patriarchal values, as well as against earlier achievements of women’s reproductive rights to choose. The humble position symbolically points to identification with sacrifice, so collective identification is directed toward recognizing the status of the victim. Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 53 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Artistic activism in public spaces (Josip Pino Ivančić) Josip Pino Ivančić is an artist, musician, performer, and activist from Pula. In 1999, he performed his artistic performance titled Everyone Carries Their Own Beam (Svatko nosi svoju gredu). Metaphorical carrying of life weight in a beam a year later, which metaphorically explored the weight of life, he transposed a subject of symbolic calvary cross-bearing in his work Relics of Relics / Reliquiae reliquiarum (Man on a Cross) (Ostaci ostataka / Reliquiae reliquiarum (Čovjek na križu)), performed in 2000 in Rovinj, Croatia. Then, wearing only a loincloth as a perisoma and with a crown on his head, he carried a wooden cross uphill along the steep stone street all the way to St. Euphemia Church (Lah, 2012, 126; Lah, 2006) In front of the church, he lay on the cross in a frame and by a bilingual sign in Latin and Croatian Reliquiae reliquiarum / Olim magnus et inclytus st. I. J. Pinus (Grisia anno domini 2000) / Ostaci ostataka nekad velikog i slavnog sv. I. J. Pina. He placed his body in a laying position on a wooden cross in the pose where limbs followed the beam arms, suggesting Christ’s crucifixion. Christian iconography given in the practice of a corporal act of Golgotha represents the intrinsic internalization of the symbolism, simultaneously functioning as a strong comment on the social and political situation in the country, long characterized by the tradition of Christianity. Ivančić’s works have been analyzed by several art theoreticians and historians, particularly the art theoretician Nataša Lah, who curated and authored the retrospective exhibition of Ivančić’s work at the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (Lah 2012; Lah 2022). Additionally, Suzana Marjanić, a scholar with special interests in performance studies, as well as art historians gathered in the curating team Kontejner / Bureau of contemporary art praxis (Kontejner / Biro suvremene umjetničke prakse). According to Marjanić (2006), Pino’s performance in Istria was interrupted by the pastor, who called the police because the performance, “invoked Imitatio Christi”, and the police officer who “kicked” Ivančić during his artistic performance. This raises the question of what aspects of his art could have “offended” the pastor (W. J. T. Mitchell) and what qualities of his work might provoke such a severe reaction to the level of offense and assault. The performance was critically interpreted through the two above-mentioned levels. The first level addresses the themes of human suffering and equality before the cross (Kontejner), while the second level focuses on the subversion of the current social and political order in the country (Lah, 2012; Lah, 2006). The answer to the question of how a scene commonly depicted in movies, media, and during religious holidays, and appeared throughout the whole of art history, provokes such controversies, according to the art historians gathered in the organization Kontejner (2016) is that this is a criticism of “the trade of the objects of worship, beneficiation from gullibility, criminal tycoonization”. Respectively, with a critical discourse that is continuously present in Ivančić’s artistic work. Here the political connotation is additionally emphasized in the title of the work because the term Reliquiae reliquiarum represents Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 54 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS the remnants of the territory and weakened Croatia after Ottoman and Venetian conquests in the 16th century, and here it metaphorically represents the “remnants” of the national power. The most consistent analysis of why Pino’s artwork is considered “offensive” was provided by the theorist Lah. Lah argues that Pino’s work subverts a recognized social anomaly by bringing it down to an individual level and it resonates with the audience due to its authenticity. According to Lah (2012, 126): Pino’s performances inherently transform myth into reality, subverting and ironically reducing a mass phenomenon to an individual case. As a result, they are often interpreted as excessive. […] In these performances, the artist utilizes familiar, well-known objects. By presenting these old objects under new descriptions, he deepens our understanding, which is particularly significant in addressing our need for solidarity with the pain of others (2012, 128). This can be linked to the interpretation of political philosopher and theoretician Jacques Rancière of the performative art practices aimed at power disclosure, which in the end results in a sensory effect. Rancière (2004, 60), namely, stated that “aesthetics has its own policy”, where political labeling and the shock caused by something unpleasant functions “between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning” (Rancière, 2004, 60). The described Ivančić’s performance does not contain elements of a ritualized action, moreover, it is a performance of ephemeral character where relational communication is established through the physical and emotional audience participation. In other words, the communication framework is formed on an individual rather than a collective level. In that sense, the work is associated with the practice of individualization and subjectivization of current social issues and linked with the excess in art as a resistance to the dominant power structures in art. Subversion is accomplished through physical practices, particularly body art, which aim to destabilize political authority (Linn, 2021). This approach appropriates the concept of Golgotha and draws on the themes of physical suffering found in religious discourse. Ivančić repeated the ritual cross bearing in Belgrade in 2016, titled Relics of Relics where he bore the cross from the Library of Belgrade to Trg Republike (Angeleski, 2016), within the international festival of contemporary art Extravagant Bodies organized by the Association Kontejner. Performance of the symbols and iconography of Western Christianity is here simultaneous on the level of public and private/intimate. The latter is an intrinsic level and performance of self-reflective identification with Christ’s Golgotha. The personalized form is correlated with the poetic of expressive art performance, and it may be interpreted as an excess and subversion of the dominant social and political discourse. Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 55 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Artistic activism in public spaces (Siniša Labrović) By the time he performed his artistic action Protest! (2008), Siniša Labrović was already an established artist, moreover one of the most famous Croatian artists in the field of art performances and actions in public (urban, gallery, and media) spaces with the subject of confronting an individual with the current social and political issues (Labrović, n.d.). For the purposes of analysis of relational communication, the named art action was selected because it is in the form of happening as a collective work of art performed in a public space, and it indicates the specific communication aspect significant for the topic. However, the analysis could also include some other Labrović’s work, among numerous works with the specific irony and subversion procedures for the current political circumstances and with the topic of the relation between art and sociability in the context of modernity and the memory of the past. In 2008, Labrović staged his collective “protest” action in Zagreb, as part of the 29th Salon mladih exhibition, which marked the 40th anniversary of the revolutionary moveJosip Pino Ivančić, Relics of Relics / Reliquiae reliquiarum (Man on a Cross) (Ostaci ostataka / Reliquiae reliquiarum (Čovjek na križu)), performance, Rovinj, 2000. Photographed by Hilda Grubić. Courtesy of the artist. Used with permission. Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 56 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS ments of 1968, event curated by art historians Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača. The performance took place on the closing day of the Salon, October 25, 2008, and involved a “protest” walk from the Home of Croatian Artists to the Supreme, Administrative, and County Court. During this happening, according to Marjanić (2009, 144), Labrović and the participants carried “banners without any protest or demonstration slogans”, i.e., without any titles and paroles, symbolically emptied of content. The action borrowed language, practice, and strategies from social activism and public protests, as a form of artistic expression. The relationship with the audience can be viewed as a happening that encourages participation, indirectly focused on the individual. The audience is left without any explanation, suggestion, or instruction about the function of the protest act. The individual is given the freedom to choose how to participate or create a narrative, without recognition of the content. In this way, the transformative dimension of the work is established as a language for raising awareness of the individual’s resistance to imposed norms, positions of power, or aesthetics. Therefore, we are not here about provoking the symbolism of the past, nor about identity politics in the participation of random passersby. On the contrary, the collective here takes on an ephemeral character, especially since the form of the performance directly arises from political protest and a Siniša Labrović, Protest!, Artistic Action/ happening, Zagreb, 2008. Courtesy of the artist. Used with permission. Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context 57 IN A DIGITAL WORLD culture of resistance, although the call for social change as an activist practice is absent. Ultimately, meaning resides in the strategy of playing with connotations, all with the intention of creating new meanings (Rancière), between visibility, corporeality, presence, and non-conformity as aesthetic and artistic categories. Conclusion The performativity of performances in public spaces is revealed as an attractive form of public speech, constituting itself not only in artistic contexts but also in non-artistic practices. The function of performing a cultural ritual thus establishes itself as a key indicator of the differentiation of collective forms of behavior that have an activist character. Namely, activist practices in public space are characterized by their participatory nature. Artistic activist practices are not identity-conditioned, while participation in non-artistic practices is predominantly identity-based. In contrast to artistic performatives in public space, which establish relational dynamics without pre-scripted procedures, the identity-based relational dynamics with the audience in non-artistic practices are linked to a pre-established narrative. In other words, non-artistic and artistic practices can be identical in a formal performance sense, but they are differentiated by the meaning and function of the performance. Artistic practices contain the function of transcending the meaning of performance to a higher level. The performance aspires to uniqueness and authenticity as key features of the artwork. It also has the communicative ability to provoke sensory reactions from the audience, thereby enabling the release of emotional content, regardless of whether it concerns the recognition of sublimated social content or subjective recognition. In this sense, the practice of performing one’s own artistic work inevitably encompasses a cathartic moment of liberation for the artist himself at the time of performance. Finally, art itself seeks the possibility of establishing new modes of expression. In other words, artistic play, provocation, satire, irony, excess, subversion, and other strategies of artistically oriented behavior serve to destabilize social taboos, canons, and boundaries of artistic action. This positions them in opposition to the unequivocal, as positioned in non-artistic practices. In artistic practice, symbolization can unfold in various directions, simultaneously in the context of intrinsic and critical interpretations. This is not the case with pre-defined normative programs. An example of a non-artistic practice shows a focus on performance based on a pre-defined narrative, where the relational level with the public occurs within the context of affirming normative content. On the other hand, the unequivocal Elezović & Sablić Transformation of the ephemeral function of a sacral ritual in the context THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS FROM CYBERNETICS IN THE FUN PALACE TO PERFORMATIVE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN COMMUNITY; A NEW MODEL OF CIVIC INTERACTION Prof. Dr Maria J. M. Sanchez Associate Dean for Research Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, UK 65 IN A DIGITAL WORLD [This is a transcription of the keynote speech delivered at the conference on the 17th of October 2024 online] I’m a Professor of Architecture, with a background in Theatre and Performance Design, although I am not an expert in politics, the theme of the conference, I always try to bring any theme I discuss back to my discipline/s. I’ll be covering four areas in my presentation. First, the importance of citizen engagement in politics. As we know, “politics” comes from the Greek “polis” and “politikos,” meaning “of the city.” Architecture and the built environment shape the stage where life unfolds, making it a central discipline. Next, I’ll discuss interdisciplinary pedagogies and the concept of the “University of the Streets.” The Fun Palace was a project developed in the 1960s by architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood. It was never built, but its impact on architecture and other fields has been significant for something that never materialized. I find it essential to discuss in the context of this conference. The Fun Palace embodied this idea—politics cannot be discussed without considering pedagogical practices. Citizens need to engage and understand a common language, and there’s a theoretical framework behind that, which I’ll explore in this talk. Then, I’ll address performativity, as discussed in my latest co-authored book Placeness and the Performative Production of Space; any city or space where daily life happens is performative. Politics are performative. This ties into the concept of the architectural script—spaces not rigidly designed by architects but open for interaction and adaptation. Finally, I’ll discuss collective intelligence and AI, particularly models like Taiwan’s democratic approach, where AI facilitates pedagogy and knowledge-sharing, feeding back into governance. Starting with the idea of the architectural script, I always show my architecture students this example—the ideal representation of this is Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house. They lived separately, each in their own house and studio, connected by a bridge. Their home materialized a script where they lived independently, worked on their own arts practices, and communicated through that bridge. This is a strong visual example of the architectural script concept. Another example is the Opera of Paris. It’s not just a building—it’s a performative event. Beyond the performance on stage, there’s a social performance: people enter from the street, navigate through layers of space, and participate in the experience. Similarly, the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi, elevated rather than entered from the ground; creates an open-ended space where possibilities unfold. Inside, Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 66 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS its permanent exhibition allows visitors to navigate freely among floating artworks, breaking the conventional museum format. These ideas align with the open-ended architecture of the Fun Palace. Though never built, it was designed as a flexible space where people could engage in various activities—a performance space, a cinema, or a workshop. Movable staircases allowed users to transform the space as needed. For instance, if a group wanted a knitting workshop, they could rearrange the space accordingly. This level of adaptability was groundbreaking for the 1960s. Another key aspect of the Fun Palace is how knowledge is transmitted in community engagement. It’s not just about directing people but gathering their thoughts in a non-hierarchical way, creating new channels of communication. The Fun Palace embodied this, functioning as an interactive matrix rather than a static structure. Joan Littlewood referred to it as the “University of the Streets.” I first encountered the Fun Palace as a student, in architecture school, where it was framed as an architectural project by Cedric Price. But then I discovered that it was more than that—it was an interdisciplinary project, influenced by Joan Littlewood’s theatre workshop, rooted in Brechtian traditions and Cybernetics. In one of my visits to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montreal, where the Cedric Price archive is housed, I found a note from a board member stating that the Fun Palace extended the theater workshop concept. It was not just architecture—it questioned how space could be designed with citizenship and transformation in mind. This fundamentally changed how we perceive architecture, just as Brecht transformed theater by breaking the fourth wall. The Fun Palace was a project at the intersection of architecture, theater, and cybernetics, led by three key figures: Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and cybernetician Gordon Pask. Cybernetics was cutting-edge at the time, facilitating communication between humans and machines. If the project were conceived today, it might use AI instead. Its essence was engagement with contemporary available technology. Joan Littlewood, working in community theater, envisioned a space for learning and leisure. With household appliances freeing up time, society was shifting people had more time for leisure, and she wanted to create a space for them to explore and engage. She reached out to Cedric Price, and together, they conceptualized this innovative, adaptable space. Cedric Price was a visionary educator, known for radical pedagogies and experimental approaches to architecture. The 1960s were a time of cultural transformation—The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Swinging London—all influencing new ways of thinking about cities. This vibrant era shaped the Fun Palace’s vision of civic engagement and participatory architecture. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 67 IN A DIGITAL WORLD An interesting project in this context, was Walking Cities by Archigram, envisioned movable cities equipped with everything needed, embodying a pop aesthetic. It was about actions within spaces—visual, colorful, and communicative. Archigram’s drawings weren’t just for architects; they aimed to engage the public, much like mass media. Their collages didn’t just represent architectural ideas but communicated them to a wider audience. This ties into the Fun Palace manifesto, developed by Joan Littlewood. It envisioned a future where factory, mine, and office workers could spend more time on leisure. London would become a University of the Streets, a laboratory of pleasure, open to many kinds of actions. This idea remains crucial today. The Fun Palace wasn’t a single project but an evolving space for endless possibilities. The architectural challenge was to create a space that could host all these activities—a dynamic, inhabitant-driven universe. The concept proposed immersive experiences, from a realistic space capsule simulator to cybernetic cinema and kaleidoscopic mazes. Anything was possible, with no restrictions. A defining feature of the Fun Palace was its interdisciplinarity—bringing theater, cybernetics, architecture, and even game theory. This collaboration birthed new fields like performative architecture, explored more recently in books such as Performing Architectures by Juliet Rufford and Andrew Filmer. It also introduced the idea of the architect as a social engineer and led to the Cybernetic Theatre Manifesto, developed by Gordon Pask and Littlewood. Pask’s Proposal for a Cybernetic Theatre set a framework for an open, interactive space. In 2021, we explored this idea by creating a performance space using balloons (Cybernetic Cabaret; Dundjerovic, Sanchez and Simms). For 20 minutes, audiences engaged with the space without a script, filling it with spontaneous interaction. This experiment, post-pandemic, highlighted the impact of translating theoretical ideas into action. The Fun Palace drew inspiration from the Crystal Palace by Paxton, designed for the 1851 Great Exhibition, reflecting its era’s technology. Its floor plan functioned like a diagram—movable escalators connecting reconfigurable spaces. Platforms, reminiscent of oil rigs, influenced its structural concept. The design wasn’t based on conventional civic architecture but on adaptable, mobile structures. A smaller version, the Interaction Centre in Kentish Town, embodied these principles. Price designed buildings for disassembly, emphasizing temporality. When the building was no longer needed, it was dismantled and its materials repurposed—a concept highly relevant today. Ultimately, the Fun Palace wasn’t just a building but a vision of architecture as flexible, interactive, and temporary. Joan Littlewood described it as the world’s first giant space-age mobile, challenging traditional notions of permanence and function. One of the promotional clips for the Fun Palace, recorded by Joan Littlewood, shows the site where they planned to build it, along with the robots. Interestingly, the robots bear Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 68 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS a striking resemblance to those in Soviet-era children’s cartoons, which reflects the broader influence of the Soviet Union at the time. Given that the general concept was shaped by developments in the Soviet Union, this connection is not surprising. This ties into Bertolt Brecht’s influence on Littlewood. Moving from dramatic theater to epic theater, my key thesis about the Fun Palace is that it also represented a shift from dramatic architecture to epic architecture. In dramatic theater, the spectator remains passive, whereas in epic theater, they are forced to engage and make decisions. Similarly, traditional architecture was something imposed by architects, but the Fun Palace introduced a transformation—offering an open-ended architectural space with multiple possibilities, rather than a fixed, linear experience. Cybernetics played a crucial role in enabling interaction between people and the “machine”—in this case, the building itself. This idea redefines the Fun Palace as more than just an architectural project; it represents a fundamental shift in architecture through theater and performance, rooted in Brechtian principles. The diagrammatic drawings of the Fun Palace illustrates this idea. Rather than a traditional architectural floor plan, it functions more like a temporal map of potential actions. It resembles choreographic scoring systems, such as those developed by Rudolf Laban, more than it does a conventional blueprint. This further demonstrates the deep influence of theater on the project. The Fun Palace was one of the first major projects Cedric Price worked on in the early 1980s, but another highly relevant project is the Potteries Thinkbelt. This project ties into the concept of urban pedagogy, placing citizens at the center of knowledge transmission in a rhizomatic structure. The Thinkbelt was a university, but not in the traditional sense—it was not housed in a single building. Instead, it functioned as a network of infrastructure spread across Stoke-on-Trent, where the ceramics industry was in decline at the time. Price, born in Stone, Staffordshire, proposed repurposing unused industrial infrastructure into a dynamic university setting. Students would attend a lecture in Hanley, board a train for further instruction, and disembark in another town such as Burslem for hands-on practice. This performative approach embedded learning within the city itself, creating a dispersed knowledge network rather than confining education to isolated university buildings. This model was influenced by Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and her work on the Fun Palace. Price carried her influence throughout his career, creating a system where universities and local communities were integrated. His underlying belief was that embedding knowledge in the urban environment—rather than isolating it in academic institutions—would lead to community improvement. Railways formed the backbone of Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 69 IN A DIGITAL WORLD the system, with train carriages repurposed as mobile classrooms. Students would begin lessons in one location and travel to another for practical application or internships. This approach transformed education into a flexible, interactive experience, aligning with Price’s broader vision of adaptable, responsive architecture. The concept of a movable university network had the potential to revitalize the entire city. At the time, this was exactly what Stoke-on-Trent looked like, full of bottle kilns. I have to say, I’m completely fascinated by these structures. I lived there for a few years and found myself searching for them everywhere. While only a few remain today, the city was once filled with remarkable bottle kilns used for firing ceramics—distinctive elements of the landscape. The significance of the Potteries Thinkbelt lies in its radical vision. Even though the region has not reached its full potential, Cedric Price introduced ideas that continue to be revisited today. There are numerous initiatives in the area now, including the Portland Inn Project, which I collaborated with in 2023, as part of their summer programme. This community-led initiative in Stoke-on-Trent promotes street-level learning through an arts program. These artistic practices, inherently performative, have successfully regenerated a small neighborhood. This exemplifies the power of performative interaction. While technology was not a key component due to financial limitations, one can only imagine the possibilities if it was integrated. One such experiment was a smallscale project, Airplace, in collaboration with Becky Nunes, I developed with the group— an inflatable, pop-up learning space inspired by Cedric Price’s vision for the Potteries Thinkbelt. He envisioned deployable structures in different areas, and we decided to create one to test its impact in a single neighborhood. Airplace allowed us to explore the concept of street-level learning. The community built the space together and used it for a temporary event. Though ephemeral, it demonstrated the transformative potential of such initiatives. Moving towards the final part of my talk, I want to touch on the idea of collective intelligence. A few months ago, I came across Taiwan’s democratic model, which incorporates AI as a tool for civic empowerment. Their approach acknowledges that societies are more powerful when they control their own technologies, using AI as a force for good. It fosters collaborative diversity and enhances democratic engagement. In contrast to the widespread fear surrounding AI, Taiwan recognizes its risks but has found ways to harness it for societal benefit. Their first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, has championed a rhizomatic democratic model that integrates AI, creating systems for collective knowledge and public participation. This pedagogical approach to AI and politics reinforces the idea that citizens should be at the forefront of governance. Instead of hierarchical structures for knowledge dissemination, Taiwan promotes a decentralized, networked approach, making information flow more effective and democratic. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 70 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS To summarize, the Fun Palace serves as a case study of performative technologies as a means of civic engagement, using the technological possibilities of its time. Today, with advanced AI, one can only imagine the transformative potential of such a space. If we think of an adaptable environment where AI is embedded within the architectural framework, the possibilities are endless. Spaces could respond dynamically to human presence, thoughts, and needs. Each person might have their own device that interacts with the environment—perhaps something worth exploring in future projects, budget permitting. The future of architecture lies in its adaptability. We must also reconsider architectural scripts as a form of spatialized performativity—something I discuss extensively in my book Dynamic Cartography: Body, Architecture and Performative Space (Routledge, 2020). Cities themselves are performative, and recognizing this is crucial for addressing urban challenges such as regeneration and public engagement. Local authorities often struggle with decision-making regarding underutilized spaces, and perhaps AI—or the principles of the Fun Palace—could be embedded into public consultations to facilitate more dynamic solutions. Finally, interdisciplinarity is essential for shaping the future of design, architecture and urbanism. We can no longer afford to work in silos; collaboration across disciplines is necessary to create meaningful, responsive environments. We need to create that rhizomatic structure of knowledge, with technology serving as a facilitator for the rhizomatic transmission of knowledge and street-level learning. Returning to the Taiwanese model and collective intelligence as a rhizomatic democratic model, I believe this is a crucial concept. AI and the technologies we possess today allow for the democratization of knowledge in every field, including the arts. It ensures that people have access to information and a voice in decision-making. Communication now flows through multiple channels, and this is something we must truly consider as we move forward. I’d like to finish my talk with a project that Dr. Ana Bonet Miro, Martin Brown, and I have been working on over the last few years, — the Thinkbelt project. It brings together seven schools of architecture across the UK, with potential for future expansion. The focus here is community engagement as pedagogy. How do we integrate schools of architecture and built environment into cities, the places where everything happens? We are exploring ways to embed digital elements into our curriculum while shaping pedagogy that promotes community and civic engagement for future professionals. We’ve set up a touring exhibition featuring Cedric Price’s archive from Canada, including prototypes of his original market stalls (Drawing Matter collection). This exhibition will visit schools across the UK, and each school will contribute their own pedagogical insights. At the end of the project, our goal is to compile a handbook or catalogue showcasing best practices from the schools, allowing us to share and disseminate knowledge. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 71 IN A DIGITAL WORLD An exciting aspect is that local authorities and councils are involved in the process, acknowledging the need for collaborative work with schools of architecture. Some councils are already incorporating technology into their work, which is a promising development. The main focus is on consultation and community engagement, ensuring that citizens’ voices are heard through different channels. These images show some of the exhibition’s content. Balloons and lights, which add a sense of dynamism and color—reflecting the playful and vibrant spirit of the Fun Palace. It’s interesting to reflect on the technology available at the time, as Cedric Price used short videos instead of traditional manuals to show people how to assemble his market stalls. The videos were incredibly performative. For example, a 1987 video showed two people acting out how to assemble the stalls. These tapes, digitized today, were a unique way of blending performance with instruction. Today, we might do this differently, but it’s worth noting how performative the approach was. To conclude, let me answer some of the key questions that the work presented today has raised in workshops and discussion with the audiences. What kind of criticism did the project face during its planning phase? The Fun Palace faced criticism primarily because it was an unconventional, unbuilt project. People struggled with understanding its ephemeral and experimental nature. Additionally, many were unsure about how it would function in practice or whether it could be sustainable. Is it possible to recreate something similar today? Could we still benefit from creating community spaces like the Fun Palace? The Fun Palace was never constructed, but its vision and ideas remain relevant today. Community spaces designed to be interactive and dynamic are still needed. We’ve seen elements of this thinking in projects like Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt and even in the Taiwanese model of collective intelligence. Today, it would be possible to recreate such a project, but it would need to be more adaptable to current technologies. However, the concept of spaces that evolve with people’s input and interactions is something that’s still very much needed in urban environments. Because it was seen as subversive, local governments were concerned about too much freedom and activity, fearing potential conflict in the city. This is documented in various letters and records. The project received approvals but never secured final planning permission. Once local authorities became involved, progress stalled. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 72 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Today, the context has changed significantly, making a Fun Palace for a city more feasible. It would be interesting to see how it could be realized, adapting to current building technologies. Unlike the 1960s, when reconfigurable spaces were the best way to create change, we now have digital screens, tactile elements, and interactive flooring. Technology would play a much larger role. I haven’t been involved in such a project recently, but perhaps it’s time to propose a contemporary Fun Palace for a city. Regarding criticism, the Fun Palace faced opposition, which contributed to its failure. It was relocated multiple times, and although today it is celebrated, at the time, it wasn’t widely accepted. Another question is why it hasn’t been recreated—perhaps because people now engage more online, shifting the idea of a Fun Palace into a digital space. The Thinkbelt exhibition is touring Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham and London in 2024 and 2025. Perhaps it will spark new discussions. With my students, I am designing a Fun Palace in Aberdeen, and in nine weeks, I hope to offer insights into how a contemporary Fun Palace might look. This project encourages students and communities to explore the concept from a modern perspective. Could a contemporary Fun Palace exist online? A virtual Fun Palace could be an interesting model. There is also the annual Fun Palaces Project in the UK, held on the first weekend of October, where over 300 community-led events happen simultaneously. It’s a performative and interactive initiative but remains rooted in its original concept. However, we must reconsider what a Fun Palace means today and whether there is a need for one. Joan Littlewood originally envisioned it as a response to specific social issues. To recreate it, we need to define the contemporary triggers and frameworks that justify its purpose. This is an area that requires further research. A key point raised today is the need for involvement beyond academia or community groups—local authorities must be engaged. However, there is no universal practice manual. Some city councils are excellent at piloting engagement projects, while others are less active. Public bodies must collaborate for meaningful progress. Regarding fun in the Fun Palace—was it political or pedagogical? The original project Fun Palace was both. It embodied the concept of the “university of the streets” while also being a political project. The agitprop and radical theatre movements of the time influenced it. This political nature likely contributed to its failure. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 73 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Another important discussion is whether to build new structures or adapt existing ones. Adaptive reuse is essential, especially considering sustainability and climate concerns. Cedric Price envisioned buildings that could be disassembled and recycled when no longer in use. We should prioritize reusing and repurposing spaces rather than demolishing them. For example, many industrial buildings—particularly in places like Stoke-on-Trent—are currently unused. While some may see them as unremarkable, they hold architectural and historical value. Successful projects, such as the Tate Modern in London by the architects Herzog and De Meuron, transformed a power plant into a renowned cultural space. Similarly, Battersea Power Station became a large commercial hub. Identifying underutilized buildings and proposing their transformation into Fun Palaces could be an exciting direction. By integrating adaptive reuse, we could create vibrant spaces that serve contemporary needs while preserving architectural heritage. Biography Professor Maria Sanchez is Associate Dean for Research at Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment. She is an Architect and a chartered member of the RIBA and RIAS. Maria is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her research focuses on the intersection between architecture, spatial practice, and performance design. Maria’s research-led practice has been presented internationally, including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Prague Quadrennial of Scenography, and the Venice Biennales of Architecture and Dance. Her scholarly publications include Dynamic Cartography: Body, Architecture and Performative Space (Routledge, 2020) and Placeness and the Performative Production of Space (Bloomsbury, 2024), both contributing to emerging conversations around spatial practices, representation, and the lived experience of architecture. Sanchez From Cybernetics in the Fun Palace to Performative digital technologies 80 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS about (Saxton & Prendergast, 2013). We also know from dramatherapists and psychologists that improvisational activities facilitate improvements in emotional intelligence, group problem solving and flexible thinking (Drinko, 2013; Harinck & Dooren, 2023). All of the above would seem to suggest that improvisational activities could be a fundamentally positive and constructive feature of democratic political processes – populism included. Improvisation is undoubtedly present in social media environments. A quick-witted improvised response to external events is often seen as a key driver of online virality (Borah, Banerjee, & Eisingerich, 2020). Such tactics can be employed by users ranging from corporate advertisers to political candidates to individual posters. Many examples suggest a desire for users to join a community of people responding to the same event or issue, thereby solidifying their sense of belonging to a particular political bloc. It is clear then that a sense of improvisation, and the sense of connected communities that results, remains present in digitally-mediated interactions. Given the seemingly rich ground that improvisation establishes in terms of political potential, we must then ask serious questions about why the collaborative improvisations of digital populism do not tend to be democratically constructive. In this section, I turn to specific elements of theatrical improvisation and the ways that these elements are often placed at the heart of Applied Theatre practices and philosophies. This provides some crucial insights regarding the detriments of digital populism. Improvisation and Applied Theatre Practice In the discussion to follow I seek to demonstrate how Applied Theatre practices might elucidate the dynamics of political improvisation. I will focus somewhat narrowly on themes and activities drawn from the work of Augusto Boal. Boal’s work has been almost ubiquitously foundational to Applied and socially engaged theatre, so it is a useful starting point when arguing for the relevance of this genre in more general settings. This is not to suggest in any way that the rich and diverse field of Applied Theatre should be reductively viewed through the lens of Boalian-inspired approaches. Rather, I am anchoring this discussion in activities drawn from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as a useful starting point to illustrate how Applied Theatre generally can offer a rich bed of knowledge that might advance our understanding of digital populism, and what kinds of considerations might be necessary to ensure that digital media can be more effectively employed to promote authentic, vigorous democratic engagement in years to come. Spontaneity Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is perhaps most famously known for the inclusion of the ‘Spect-Actor’. This figure is based on the notion of empowering spectators to beRowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 81 IN A DIGITAL WORLD come active participants in the performance of scenes of injustice, thereby fusing the traditional roles of actor and spectator for the purpose of collectively-improvised political strategies (Boal, 2000). One of Boal’s oft-told anecdotes locates the origins of the Spect-actor in an incident in which a female spectator felt so incensed at male actors’ portrayals of a domestic scene that she spontaneously leapt to the stage and, in effect, insisted that she show the actors what she meant. Thus, at its heart, the role of the Spect-Actor is fundamentally based on an understanding of the value of spontaneous improvisation. Key to this is Boal’s notion that spontaneity, facilitated through various creative activities, possesses the potential to free participants from the ordering and organizational frameworks that ordinarily predominate: When it was free, the body could invent the dance, which came from inside; free, the body could dance in space and time. The choreographer turned up and charted the movement, explained the gesture, defined the rhythm, and limited the space. The dramatic poet came and wrote his verses. No more freed thought or creative chaos. Premeditated Order had arrived. Dramatic poetry and choreography were great advances, but freedom was over and done with. […] Now everyone danced the same dance and sang the same religious song. (Boal 2000 xi). Boal is suggesting here that scripted frameworks rob participants of the freedom to genuinely experiment from the basis of personally-felt sensations and thoughts. This bears a close relation to Viola Spolin’s influential writings on the value of theatrical improvisation: Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other peoples’ findings. (Spolin in Svendsen 2017, 295). For both Boal and Spolin, spontaneity is key to unlocking participants’ capacity to outstrip the already-existing ideas and norms of society and politics. Through the facilitation of spontaneous collaboration, we might engender truly creative and innovative political communities. However, when we consider this theme in relation to digital populism, we can clearly identify a diminishment of spontaneity. This comes about partly through the temporal frames of social media, which, while seeming to allow for a free flow of continual contributions from multiple parties, in actuality rely on interruptions and pauses brought about by each individual user encountering and responding to content in their own time and space. This is a crucial difference to live, in-person improvisations; the demand for participants to openly accept and build on others’ work is diminished through the ability to rehearse as an individual before making one’s own contribution. Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 82 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS In addition, success in social media spheres tends to depend on the extent to which one narrowly focuses on the pre-given theme or scenario. Digital populist improvisations tend to adhere to a narrow script, departing only insomuch as one can showcase and promote their own unique performance of Self. Rather than the ‘yes, and….’ model described by Viola Spolin, we find a model more akin to ‘yes, and yes again’. We are not accepting the improvised premise and moving forward with it; at the behest of algorithmically controlled digital entrepreneurship, we are simply accepting it and re-illustrating it with our own bodies. This suggests that the spontaneous innovations that are otherwise inherent to improvisation are somewhat truncated by digitally-mediated platforms. The possibility to imagine new, better, different futures is thwarted in favour of channeling content consumption into already-established patterns. Uncertainty and Unresolvability Similar to the diminishment of spontaneity in online contexts, the sense of uncertainty and unfinishedness is also a key issue. As Yves Citton notes, ‘[t]he etymological roots of ‘improvisation’ emphasise the concept of the unforeseen’ (Citton, 2016, p. 165). At the heart of improvisation is this embrace of unknowability. Applied Theatre practice, and perhaps most famously Boal’s Forum Theatre and Legislative Theatre, often encourages participants to creatively and immersively experiment with multiple possibilities in the course of collaborative problem-solving (Boal, 2000). Importantly, Boal emphasized the necessity of making collaborative, improvisational work difficult for participants. While Boalian-inspired activities are generally conducted in a spirit of fun and solidarity, there is a serious philosophical orientation that underpins it all. In Boal’s work, the aim is to investigate disputes or dilemmas that lack an obvious or straightforward political solution. Throughout his writings, he was insistent that this work should not yield to the inclination to seek a clear happy ending. Instead, those leading such activities must continuously challenge and question participants, placing more emphasis on the intricate political aspects of issues rather than the pursuit of a gratifying conclusion (Boal, 2000; Saxton & Prendergast, 2013). In this way, Boal demonstrates that improvisational collaborations might be most politically effective when certainty and finality are rejected. However, the bulk of digitally mediated political improvisation suffers a lack of unforeseen-ness, due in large part to the absence of risk and uncertainty. As noted above, instead of each user generating a genuinely original response to what has come before, cumulatively adding to and progressing the political action as it unfolds, we find on social media a tendency to largely repeat and reiterate prior users’ content. This goes beyond a simple lack of innovation; it is equally related to the entrepreneurial pursuit of success in terms of visibility on social media, and the capacity to predict this based on what is already successful. In artistic terms, this can be referred to as “uncreative Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 83 IN A DIGITAL WORLD improvisation” - a process of appropriation in which the typically mundane or overlooked source material is taken, transcribed and presented with the new author’s name on it; there is little innovation beyond re-framing or re-packaging (Wershler, 2017). Particularly in the case of digitally-mediated political interactions, individual contributions can be premeditatively shaped according to predictors of success. Ultimately then, the improvisational elements that we find in digitally-mediated populism are significantly divergent from theatrical improvisation. Attentive Interaction Finally, I am particularly interested in the ways that the bulk of Applied Theatre practice, with its historical emphasis on process and collaboration, foregrounds the perception and creation of meaning across and between bodies. In contrast to the one-by-one cumulative improvisations of social media, Applied Theatre practices show the importance of live interaction. For example, we might focus on the way that one common Boalian game, ‘Columbian Hypnosis’, can facilitate a sense of inter-relational collaboration. In this activity, participants take turns either leading or following, as person A uses the palm of their hand or another body part to lead some part of person B’s body in a sequence of motions (Boal, 1995). The pair thus move together as if joined by an invisible string. The activity engenders a strong sense of interdependent improvisation as it demands attentiveness to the joint pair of bodies rather than each participant’s individual self. In ‘Columbian Hypnosis’, participants must jointly buy in to the agreed premise of unscripted, collaborative creation. As they do so, they become deeply aware of their partner’s own body and their relationship to it. As such, ‘Columbian Hypnosis’ offers a powerful example of how a facilitated sense of connection to others’ physical bodies can alter our experience of improvisation. Boal describes how activities like this place a demand on participants to become deeply attuned to both self and other: […] concentrating means endowing themselves with the capacity intensely to direct their attention and their powers of perception towards those things that really matter to them in the scene, the things they come into contact with, interact with. […] concentration means establishing an intense interrelationship with this other, speaking and listening, seeing and being seen, giving and receiving. (Boal, 1995, p. 65) An attitude of attentive listening is known to underpin the efficacy of much Applied Theatre work. According to Julia Saxton and Monica Prendergast (2013), improvisationRowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 84 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS al collaborations can facilitate active and empathetic listening. This mode of attunement toward others requires the participants to commit themselves to seeking out and “understanding both the content of the message as well as the intent of the sender and the circumstances under which the message is given” (Saxton & Prendergast, 2013, p. 95). In a physically-present activity like Columbian Hypnosis, it is easy to see how participants must deeply focus on one another. As their bodies begin to move in greater and greater synchronicity, it is sometimes difficult for the onlooker to discern who is the leader and who is the follower. This symbiotic engagement comes about through the deep attentiveness that each individual brings to the exercise; when the work is at its most successful, they find themselves attuned not only to the actions of their partner, but to a deeper understanding of that partner’s patterns of movements and the motivations behind them. The improvisational movement sequences are therefore created and sustained based primarily on this deep level of listening and cooperation. Contrastingly, digitally-mediated political interactions rarely inspire such a degree of interpersonal attentiveness. When interacting via social media platforms, our engagements are deeply affected by the influence of algorithms that condition what content we see, and who sees what we ourselves produce. Algorithms serve to exacerbate social and political divisions as they privilege polarising content that captures users’ attention – whether that attention is negative or positive matters less than what kinds of content a user tends to linger upon longest. This leads to false perceptions of the real social and political worlds that we all inhabit. Furthermore, because our digitally-mediated political worlds appear to lack nuance and complexity, there is less demand placed on us to engage with others in a committed and sustained fashion. Whereas improvisational theatre activities require unbroken attentiveness to others, the improvised actions of digital media only need to either conform to what has already been established, or to exceed it in a manner that generates a new and different scene of activity. Conclusion There can be little doubt that populism continues to thrive in Western democracies in 2025, and it is likely poised to continue dominating political engagement for the foreseeable future. It is now quite widely understood that digital mediatization is a force to be reckoned with in this context, as it deeply alters citizens’ perceptions of the social world and colours their interactions within it. Often, the divisive attitudes and behaviours engendered by digital mediatization spill over into in-person actions, devolving even to the point of harassment and physical violence. It is easy to feel deeply pessimistic about the future of democratic interaction, and to sense that radical democratic goals are simply a utopian fantasy in light of the obstacles presented by digital populism. However, I want to suggest that it is still crucial to retain a sense of hope and Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 85 IN A DIGITAL WORLD optimism, and perhaps theatre practitioners and scholars should have the confidence to claim their sphere of knowledge as a rich territory that can offer prospects for a more authentically democratic future. There are of course numerous features of theatre practice generally - and improvisational Applied Theatre specifically - that could usefully elucidate digitally-mediated social and political interactions. The discussion above is offered as an illustration of the benefits of such an approach; by paying serious attention to what Applied Theatre practice can tell us about topics like spontaneity, uncertainty and collaborative listening, we might find clues that will help us to develop digital media platforms in a manner that will better facilitate the Left Populist goals of respectful, collaborative political contestation. New technological interfaces are emerging that will vastly increase our ability to embed embodied, theatrically-inspired experiences into digitally-mediated political interactions. By mobilizing knowledge derived from Applied Theatre practice, we might become significantly better equipped to face the challenges of digital populism that we will inevitably be confronted with in the near future. Abstract: This paper examines the role of creative improvisation in digitally-mediated political performance. Through a discussion of notable features of populist political interaction, the paper outlines the centrality of unscripted and spontaneous improvisations to the formation and sustenance of populist movements. The author critically examines the ways that improvisational interaction alters when populism is enacted via social media. This is followed by an argument for the relevance of Applied Theatre scholarship to the study of political interaction. To demonstrate this relevance, the paper explores key themes of applied improvisational performance and compares its traditional use in workshop contexts to its manifestations in digital populist contexts. Specifically, the paper addresses issues of spontaneity, unpredictability and interpersonal attentiveness. This analysis provides insights into the ways that improvisation is altered in online interactions, and it suggests that Applied Theatre practice could be especially useful in the development of future approaches to the facilitation of digitally-mediated political interaction. Keywords: Populism, Improvisation, Applied Theatre, Digital Media, Performance References Belgrad, D. (2016). Improvisation, Democracy and Feedback. In G. E. Piekut, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (pp. 289-306). New York: Oxford University Press. Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow of Desire: the Boal method of theatre and therapy (1st ed.). (A. Jackson, Trans.) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 86 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the Oppressed (2000 Edition ed.). (C. A. Fryer, Trans.) London: Pluto Press. Borah, A., Banerjee, S., & Eisingerich, A. (2020). Improvised Marketing Interventions in Social Media. American Marketing Association, 84(2), 69-91. Born, G., Lewis, E., & Straw, W. (2017). Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. London: Duke University Press. Busby, S. (2021). Applied Theatre: A pedagogy of utopia. London: Methuen. Citton, Y. (2016). Politics as Hypergestural Improvisation in the Age of Mediocracy. In G. E. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (pp. 160-181). New York: Oxford University Press. Dolan, J. (2005). Utopia in Performance: finding hope at the theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dowdall, C. (2009). The Texts of Me and the Texts of Us: Improvisation and Polished Performance in Social Networking Site. In R. W. Marsh, Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures (pp. 73-92). London: Routledge. Drinko, C. D. (2013). Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition. New York: Palgrave. Harinck, F., & Dooren, L. (2023, December). Improvisation Exercises Increase Negotiators’ Divergent Thinking, and Sometimes their Negotiation Outcomes. Journal of Creative Behavior, 57(4), 606-621. Jennings, S., Cattanach, A., Mitchell, S., Chesner, A., & Meldrum, B. (1994). The Handbook of Dramatherapy. London: Routledge. Kindler, A. (2010). Spontaneity and Improvisation in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 10(3), 222-234. Lewis, G. E., & Piekut, B. (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: performance, political style, and representation. Stanford University Press. Mouffe, C. (2018). For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2020). The Role of Theatre in the Struggle against neoliberal hegemony. In Why Theatre? (pp. 192-195). Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag. Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2012). Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or corrective for democracy? Cambridge University Press. Müller, J. W. (2016). What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nicholson, H. (2014). Applied Drama: the gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan . Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism 87 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Prior, H. (2021). Digital populism and disinformation in “post-truth” times. Communication and Society, 34(4), 49-64. Reinelt, J. (2019). Politics Populism Performance. Performance Research, 24(8), 59-68. Rowe, C. (2022). Performance and Politics in a Digital Populist Age: Imagining Alternatives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Saxton, J., & Prendergast, M. (2013). Applied Drama: A Facilitator’s handbook for working in the community. Bristol: Intellect Books. Spolin, V. (1963). Improvisation for the Theater: a handbook of teaching and directing techniques. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Svendsen, Z. (2017). The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the social in theatre. In E. L. Georgina Born, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (pp. 288-308). New York: Duke University Press. Vilč, S. (2017). Acting together: The art of collective improvisation in theatre and politics. Filozofija i drustvo, 28(1), 32-40. Wershler, D. (2017). Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation. In E. L. Georgina Born, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (pp. 160-182). London: Duke University Press. Zummo, M. L. (2020). Performing Authenticity on a Digital Political Stage Politainment as Interactive Practice and (Populist?) Performance. Iperstoria. Biography Dr Cami Rowe is a Senior Lecturer in Applied and Socially Engaged Theatre and the Director of Studies for Theatre at Lancaster University (UK). She holds a BA, MA and MPhil in Drama and a PhD in International Relations. Her research addresses the theatrical elements of global politics and related applied theatre and performance practices. Her most recent monograph is entitled Performance and Politics in a Digital Populist Age: Imagining Alternatives, and was published by Routledge in 2022. This work explores the application of creative theatricality to the anti-democratic tendencies of digitally-mediated populism. e-mail: [email protected] Rowe Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Digital Populism AESTHETICS AND TECHOLOGIES AS POLICIES 96 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Aleksandar Dundjerović:You have provided an overview of AI aesthetics while sharing your journey. This conference is focused on your latest chapter and the final stage of your book. Since I have seen different versions of your chapters online, I want to ask: What are the essential differences between AI aesthetics and human aesthetics? How does the distinction between human and AI-generated art evolve as AI technology advances? Lev Manovich: First, there is no such thing as AI aesthetics. The term artificial aesthetics in our book refers to how generative AI impacts culture, design, art, and our understanding of artistic concepts. Second, AI aesthetics must be understood within the historical development of media. Every new medium goes through different stages, and each stage is associated with a dominant aesthetic. Early cinema in the 1900s imitated theatre, with actors performing in front of a static camera. However, this was not the essential aesthetics of cinema— just an early phase. By the 1910s, directors like Griffith introduced montage, editing, and reverse shots, revolutionizing cinematic language. A century later, cinema incorporates CGI, immersive effects, and dynamic camera movements. Again, this is not the definitive language of cinema—just one of its evolving forms. Similarly, what people see today as “AI aesthetics” is not an inherent quality of AI but a reflection of its current usage. Many AI-generated images resemble popular culture— manga, anime, fantasy illustrations—because untrained users rely on pre-existing visual templates. Social media platforms like DeviantArt and ArtStation are filled with similar artistic styles. Some might call this kitsch or vulgarity, but it represents the aesthetic choices of mass users rather than an intrinsic AI style. The more significant question is how AI will influence professional art, theatre, cinema, classical music, and high culture. One argument is that AI will have minimal impact on contemporary visual art. Since the 1960s, professional visual art has been primarily conceptual, driven by political and philosophical ideas rather than image-making. Artists function more as project managers and theorists rather than as traditional image creators. In this context, the ability of AI to generate high-quality images does not pose a fundamental challenge. However, we can push this discussion further. My perspective on this is provocative, but I believe in exploring radical ideas. Aleksandar Dundjerović: What is the Future of Human Art in an AI-Dominated World Lev Manovich: Recent scientific studies published in Science and Nature indicate that AI outperforms 95–97% of humans in cognitive tasks. AI has already surpassed profession The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 97 IN A DIGITAL WORLD al scientists in generating innovative ideas. A study by Harvard Business School found that AI outperformed top CEOs in creative business ideation. While no formal study has yet compared AI and professional artists, the logic suggests that AI could eventually surpass humans in artistic creation as well. This raises a profound question: What does AI mean for human creativity? If AI can create art as well as or better than humans, does art-making still hold meaning? This leads me to a radical proposition: Perhaps art, as a human activity, has fulfilled its historical function in our cognitive and social evolution. Just as societies have moved past older necessities—riding horses for transport, having large families for survival—art may not remain a permanent fixture of human culture. AI’s rapid advancement in cultural production suggests that human-created art could gradually fade, replaced by new creative activities we have yet to imagine. The broader implication is that many intellectual and creative tasks may become obsolete. AI is not just transforming art but redefining the role of human creativity altogether. If AI begins shaping our culture and entertainment, we must ask whether art is an essential human need or simply a historical phase. We have already delegated many artistic functions to industries like fashion and media. The next stage may be full automation, where AI-generated culture replaces traditional human artistry. Aleksandar Dundjerović:You’ve just told me I’ll be unemployed soon. Lev Manovich: Oh, you are already unemployed. You just do not know it. Society changes very slowly. You will still get your salary for 200 years. Aleksandar Dundjerović: We have a solution. Very soon, we are going to have a World War III. And then no technology, no humans. Audience question - Ivan Pravdić: Where is the audience with this hyperproduction of any media material? What is going to happen to the audience? Will we need any more TV series, visual material, animations, or visual arts? Lev Manovich: The number of people involved in professional cultural production 600 years ago was small. There were also fewer people. If you look at some European cities, like the Netherlands, in 1450, like Ghent or Antwerp, there were 150 painters in the painting guild for the whole city. They include people like Bosch and Breuer. A variation of geniuses to normal artists was also pretty good. Today, we have hundreds of art biennales and hundreds of fashion weeks. We have this ideology of post-industrial society. In an industrial and consumer society, including the The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 98 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS capitalist, communist, or socialist version, you were supposed to have a good life, acquire commodities, and follow certain templates. Then you have these particular people who are artists, and their job is to be creative. But in the early 2000s, society changed into a post-industrial, knowledge-based, or aesthetic society. Suddenly, companies were told there was global competition. If you want to survive, you have to be creative and avant-garde. You have to be disruptive and innovative. The values 100 years ago reserved for avant-garde art have now become general values in society. You’re supposed to fashion your identity from all the different choices. In the contemporary period, everybody is supposed to be the artist. In other words, the worst thing you can be today is not being creative and fashionista. In marketing and mass media, creators tell everybody to be creative. Why not just follow a template? Why not go to IKEA? Why not just have a good life? No, it is no longer meaningful. It is almost immoral to be non-creative. Society almost pushes everybody to become an artist. We have billions of photographs being taken every day, and people spend lots of time looking at these photographs. Yes, there are more films and TV series, but people also spend more time watching TV dramas. I live in Korea, which has been having a fantastic moment since 2002, with the Korean wave—the incredible global success of Korean music and cinematography. We have a Korean writer who is getting a Nobel Prize, so somebody is watching all these TV dramas. The fact that we will have more films, more artistic images, designs, and fashion done with the help of AI means most of it will remain unseen. There will be a very sharp curve, but this phenomenon is already happening in digital culture. In 2004, the editor of Wired magazine published an influential article about the socalled long tail. He got the data from Apple and the iTunes store, and Apple told him that they had two million songs in our store, and during the last quarter, every single one was purchased by somebody at least once. He said that was a fantastic development. We have more culture being created or more culture being available because it is not a physical store where you have to select what you will put, so you only put the bestsellers—but it has online stores. We have this long-tail phenomenon: the top and the most popular people will get the audience’s attention, and everybody else in the distribution will also get this attention. This was a big argument around 20 years ago, but after that, people started looking for data, and the argument continues. Some people say he was right, and what happens with digital culture is that more cultural products get at least a niche audience just because they are all available. Some people say that is not how it works. The curve is getting more extreme, and the so-called top 40 phenomenon, the fact that a small number of producers are getting 90% of the audience, is becoming more extreme. The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 99 IN A DIGITAL WORLD AI is making this whole volume of cultural products more significant. We have to study it empirically. There are billions of photographs published online every day, millions of artworks being created every day by professional or non-professional artists. It does seem that a small number of producers, whether they are Hollywood or Bollywood or Korean or some influencers, are getting a larger chunk of the audience, and the rest disappears. Partly, society is guilty because we have not created mechanisms to get more different products in front of people. Aleksandar Dundjerović: What is the Future of Theatre and AI ? Who goes to the theatre today? What are the demographics? I am looking forward to creating theatre using AI. I want to write text prompts and create images or short animations. I want to be able to create virtual actors and virtual sets and write plays. It is not going to be a physical play; it’s going to be on a screen, but more people will be able to create virtual theatre as directors. We will see what happens in the theatre. Aleksandar Dundjerović: I need to jump in. We have a question from the chat, from our global audience following you on this talk. Zoom question: As a creative practitioner, space is the essence of my work. During the pandemic, I started experimenting with digital space. I was especially interested in how the physical experience of space could be communicated digitally, as that was my non-creative language. After the pandemic, audiences have asked more for physical and experiential immersive events. How do you think AI and digital space will converge with physical spatiality in creative practices in the coming years? Lev Manovich: At the beginning of the 20th century, artists, designers, architects, and filmmakers created new, dramatically different ways to use and represent space in the arts. In visual arts, we have Cubism, Picasso, Braque, and multiple perspectives. By 1913, we have pure geometric abstraction, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and so on. With abstractions, we have hundreds of different visual languages. This is how visual art deals with space. In architecture, we also have dramatic new ideas about space. Architects reject symmetry. Le Corbusier creates open plan. Other architects create expressionistic architecture. If you go to Prague, you will find Cubist architecture. There was already theatre that did not use realistic but abstract sets in 1900. Later, you may have an audience sitting around the stage or actors emerging from your audience, later using projections. The whole 20th century was about creating new types of spaces, new aesthetics of spaces, and new languages of spaces. And then this avant-garde activity, the heroic period, sometimes called modernism, seems to die out. It got quiet The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 100 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS by the 1980s. The so-called new media art and art was the last breath of avant-garde. It was the last kind of global movement, and people were exploring the idea of new media. The 21st century is excellent in terms of lifestyle. More people have access to high-quality services. We have a new global class emerging in the 90s and 2000s. And people like it. People have never lived as well as today. For most of humanity, humans were miserable. That is why humans had religion since it offered them hope. We live extraordinary lives. We have medicines, we have vaccines, we can travel, we have Zoom conferences. I see a different intensity of experimentation and innovation in the arts regarding formal strategies - new configurations of time and space, new ways to represent human experience. In 2007, I published a short article provocatively titled Jump Over Proust. Proust as Marcel Proust. This year, I am reading Proust’s masterpiece in a great Russian translation. I finally realized why Proust is amazing. People like Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, and many others who invented new ways to represent human subjectivity, which I do not see happening today. We see AI being used already by Hollywood and billions of people to create animation, simulate video, photography, images, and all kinds of styles to write music. This is based on existing cultural forms. We can say that AI and media are inherently conservative. Because computers are being trained, but on what already exists? A big question is constantly being asked around AI: Can AI create something inherently new if it is being trained on what exists? AI technology may be appropriate for our time of cultural conservatism. We have art about identity, discrimination, migration, climate change, and all these important social progressive issues, but why can’t it also invent new languages? AI is a revolutionary, very important new production tool. However, it will not lead to new forms of representing human subjectivity, memory, space, or time just because we are not now. Will this avant-garde moment come back? I am still waiting. I hope it will happen during my lifetime, but I am still determining. Audience question - Maja Milatović Ovadia: You said that AI will create better art. In your work, you are finding ways to collaborate with AI to overcome the stereotyping and cliches that AI is producing or the super-realism that AI is producing. You are finding a way to introduce glitches. Can you talk more about that? Lev Manovich:You are right. I did not want to say that AI will create better art, but it will create art that could be better than 95% of art students. This is based on papers people publish, when we compare AI with the performance of students or professionals in other areas; it has yet to be done in the field of art because art is sacred in contemporary culture. People don’t think of it as just another type of activity. With experiments, people find that the top humans are actually better than AI. This summer, I was using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or my favourite, Claude AI, which helped me edit my The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 101 IN A DIGITAL WORLD book. My experience is that at one moment I am better, at another moment AI is better, but I do not use it to write new sections. “Here is my text, offer me ways to improve it, to improve clarity and flow.” Often, AI rewrites my text or rephrases my sentences, and it is much better, but often, it is not. I found that AI is not as good as mine, and even simple text tends to introduce cliché and overgeneralize. Sometimes, it produces meaningful sentences, but when you read them, they make no sense. How to fight it? The way I fight it during editing of my text is to say, this is what AI wrote, and I change it. Alternatively, I ask AI to change sentences I do not like. Eventually, I change them. If I make images of other people and develop particular techniques for doing it with images, there is a price to pay. AI is trained on billions of images, and in this accumulation of visual data on the web, specific images, aesthetics, and compositions dominate. If you say, “Make something and simulate the look of a particular camera, photographic style, or exposure,” this part works out perfectly because AI has seen billions of photographs. However, If I ask AI to make something I have never seen before, something strange in a subtle way, I run into problems. Images look very convincing at first, but the details can be very generic when I look more closely. It is like it creates a world out of Lego blocks. What is very frustrating and crazy about AI is that you never know what you will get. One day, you will get something; at one moment, you will get something unique, something very precise, something better than you; the next, you will get something generic. It is very unpredictable. I have developed various techniques to guide image AI tools towards particular aesthetics which I like; for example, I give it reference images, and the reference images which I am giving it are very different. When I use the MidJourney tool, I can give it four, five, or six different reference images. I may give it photographs of my drawings, 16th-century paintings, close-up photography, or architectural renderings. The idea is to confuse it, prevent it from being very confident and corky, and give you these clichés. These techniques may be different, depending on the media. One interesting question is: If you are going to start making virtual influencers, like Youth in Fashion or spokespeople for companies, Europe is behind. However, it is huge in Asia - China, Korea, and Japan. Similarly, you can make theatre with virtual actors or characters in VR or through film. You want to make them unique and idiosyncratic. You do not want them to be generic. What techniques are you going to use? The last thing I want to say is that it is not really about glitches because the idea of a glitch is with this system; the system is working, and then sometimes the system fails, and we want to exploit it. However, AI is different. But this fantastic AI ability to make The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 102 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS realistic images in many different styles and edit and summarize text go hand in hand with what we find annoying about AI now. The fact that it can generalize, over-generalize, and produce clichés is too optimistic. AI has a bit of a communist bias. It fails as much as it is very successful, and maybe there is also a particular specificity with media where we have to accept that it is making mistakes and gives us generic things. How to exploit this behaviour of AI? At the beginning of the 20th century, artists, designers, architects, and filmmakers revolutionized the use and representation of space in the arts. In visual arts, movements like Cubism—pioneered by Picasso and Braque—introduced multiple perspectives. By 1913, pure geometric abstraction emerged with artists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, leading to hundreds of different visual languages. Architecture followed suit, rejecting symmetry in favor of radical new ideas: Le Corbusier’s open-plan designs, expressionistic structures, and even Cubist architecture in Prague. Theatre, too, embraced abstraction, with non-realistic sets and innovative staging techniques. Throughout the 20th century, the avant-garde continually explored new spatial aesthetics and configurations, but this wave of experimentation seemed to subside by the 1980s. The so-called new media art was, in a way, the final breath of the avant-garde, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. The 21st century, in contrast, excels in lifestyle. More people than ever have access to high-quality services, a new global class has emerged, and technological advancements such as vaccines, travel, and Zoom conferences have transformed daily life. However, I see less intensity in the formal innovation of the arts—fewer groundbreaking explorations of time, space, and human experience. In 2007, I wrote an article provocatively titled Jump Over Proust, referencing Marcel Proust. This year, while reading his masterpiece in a superb Russian translation, I finally understood why Proust is extraordinary. Writers like Proust, Faulkner, and Joyce invented novel ways to represent human subjectivity—something I find lacking in contemporary art. Today, AI is already a dominant force in Hollywood and among billions of users who generate animations, simulations, and music. However, AI’s reliance on existing cultural forms makes it inherently conservative. Can AI truly create something novel when it is trained on past works? AI may be the perfect tool for an era of cultural conservatism. While contemporary art tackles crucial social issues—identity, discrimination, migration, climate change—it rarely pioneers new artistic languages. AI is undoubtedly a revolutionary production tool, but will it lead to new ways of representing human subjectivity, memory, space, or time? I remain hopeful that an avant-garde moment will return within my lifetime, but I am uncertain. The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 103 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Audience questionMaja Milatović Ovadia:You mentioned that AI will create better art. In your work, you explore ways to collaborate with AI while overcoming the stereotypes, clichés, and hyperrealism it produces. You also introduce glitches. Can you elaborate on this approach? Lev Manovich:I did not mean to say that AI will create better art, but rather that it could outperform 95% of art students. Studies comparing AI with professionals in various fields have demonstrated this, though the same has yet to be extensively tested in art. In contemporary culture, art is still considered sacred, beyond mere technical proficiency. Experiments in other disciplines show that top human performers still surpass AI in creativity and originality. This summer, I used AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude AI to help edit my book. Sometimes, AI suggested superior edits, improving clarity and flow. Other times, its suggestions were cliché, overgeneralized, or simply nonsensical. To counter this, I revise AI-generated text, modifying it sentence by sentence. Similarly, in visual art, AI tends to produce generic compositions due to its training on billions of images dominated by mainstream aesthetics. When I attempt to generate something truly unique or subtly unconventional, AI struggles. Its results often appear coherent at first glance but lack depth upon closer inspection—as if constructing a world out of Lego blocks. AI is unpredictable. Some days, it generates astonishingly precise and original work; other times, it churns out the mundane. To steer AI tools toward my desired aesthetics, I employ specific techniques. For example, I provide multiple reference images in MidJourney—ranging from my own drawings to 16th-century paintings, close-up photography, and architectural renderings. This mix forces AI out of its comfort zone, preventing it from defaulting to clichés. A pressing question arises when designing virtual influencers, digital theater actors, or VR characters: How do we ensure they are unique and idiosyncratic rather than generic? In Asia—China, Korea, and Japan—virtual influencers are already a massive industry, while Europe lags behind. The challenge lies in using AI creatively to develop distinct digital personalities rather than merely replicating established norms. Online question - Dwaipayan Chowdhury: I am not an expert on digital arts or AI because they are contemporary with my time. But you talked about them, and I want you to repeat them again because I found them fascinating. In answering a previous question, you talked about artificial intelligence as a negation of subjectivity. Lev Manovich: When we think about this period of modern art and modernism, we start with Impressionism, or start with people like Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, the second part of the 19th century, and maybe going up to maybe 70s, maybe 80s. A big part of this modernist period was creating new ways to represent human subjectivity and human experience in art. In painting, we have Cubism and Expressionism, and so forth. In The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 104 THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS literature, we have a stream of consciousness or encyclopedic texts, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust or Nabokov, with sentences that go on and on and can take you from one place to another. With cinema, we have a montage. You also have writers in the 1920s or 1910s or poets who will incorporate pieces of newspapers, writing or advertising slogans inside artworks - ideas to represent a specific human experience, a human cognitive and perceptual experience of a modern era. What I said earlier is that, for whatever reasons, this project is not also important today. Maybe I simply do not read enough contemporary fiction. I am reading a wonderful novel by a German writer, which won the Booker Prize this year. She really plays with language; it is quite innovative. However, in digital art, which has been my world for better or worse for a few decades, people are not interested in representing a human being. We are representing information, we are critiquing ideology, we are talking about other issues, but we do not represent the human being. And that is why digital art has never become very successful; it has not entered museums. If I look at some ancient Babylonian, Assyrian, or Egyptian art from 3 to 4 thousand years ago, and I see some human beings, or I look at Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt, or Picasso, images of human beings, human figures, and I immediately relate to it in a very emotional way. However, digital art was interested in something other than that. Are we interested in using AI to represent human experience in new ways? What does it mean to be human, but not what does it mean to be human on the intellectual level? How it feels to be human today differs from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. How does it feel to be human when you delegate your memory to the web? Now, we delegate our intelligence to a machine. AI is summarising information for me, and AI is finding things in my email. I have this daily assistant, I have this collaborator. In my case, I am using AI to edit my book, which is often smarter than me, but at the same time, it is unreliable; lies, and hallucinates. How does it feel to be human? Can we use AI as an artistic medium to represent this particular type of subjectivity, the new experience of human perception, and our doubts about whether I am smarter than AI or whether AI is smarter than us? I am interested in that, and I hope we see some artworks in different media that do this. However, I will also do it myself in my limited ways. One last note: My approach is not about exploiting “glitches” in AI. Traditional glitches result from system malfunctions, but AI functions differently. Its uncanny ability to generate realistic images and text is inseparable from its tendency to overgeneralize and produce clichés. AI oscillates between brilliance and failure, success and error—perhaps reflecting a deeper paradox within the medium. The real question is: How do we harness AI’s unpredictability and imperfections as creative tools? The future can be very bright. The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 105 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Biography Dr Lev Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He is recognized as one of the most influential thinkers in the world in the fields of digital art, digital culture, media theory, and digital humanities. After studying painting, architecture, and filmmaking, Manovich began using computers to create digital art in 1984. He has played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media and digital culture (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2005–), and AI aesthetics (2017-). Manovich is the author of 195 articles reprinted over 850 times in 37 languages and 17 books, including Artificial Aesthetics, Cultural Analytics, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, and The Language of New Media, which has been called “the most provocative and comprehensive media history since Marshall McLuhan.” His digital art projects have been exhibited in 14 solo and 123 international group exhibitions at many prestigious institutions, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Centre Pompidou, and the Shanghai Biennale. https://manovich.net The Aesthetics of Technology and Politics in the Digital Age: Lev Manovich 112 Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Multimodalni sistemi (MLLM) These MLLM systems based on machine learning have enabled the development of new forms of integration and advancement of artificial intelligence. This capability further enhances the potential of artificial intelligence and performativity, making AI actors increasingly resemble real people. The refinement of multimodal (MLLM) systems enables rapid adaptability to different users and their needs, thus creating a new dimension of performativity in different social and cultural contexts (Ivković & Stanković 2024). In addition, such systems enable the creation of fully personalized AI-generated actors that can respond to specific audience requirements in real time, further enhancing multimedia performance. It is precisely because of their multimodal peculiarity that they improve conversation and communication, which is therefore much more realistic. Based on LLMs, MLLMs have additional abilities to assimilate, reason, and output multimodal information that are based on textual or visual instructions (Liu, Li, Wu, Lee, 2023), and (Zhu, Chen, Shen, Li, Elhoseiny, 2023), and video (Li, He, Wang, Li, Wang et al. 2023) and audio input. Primarily multimodal agents have been developed to assist in real-world interaction, especially in the field of object and scene analysis, thanks to understanding and interacting with the 3D world (Huang et al., 2023). And yet, MLLM systems require refinement, as MLLMs can be misled to give a biased or desirable response (Shukang et al., 2024), as well as bias in interpretation. Figure 2.4.1 shows the structure of the MLLM system’s workflow, applying the desired photo, video, or audio input to the text, to transfer it to the modality encoder, then to the connector, the LLM, and then to a generator that creates an output according to the input medium. Figure 2.4.1 Flow structure of the MLLM system These models allow for more personalized interactions within digital environments, resulting in a higher level of user customization. Appreciation of locally autonomous AI models that generate visual or audio requests, adapt to the user or users, and enable the creation of new forms of performativity. This indicates that by increasing the ca- 113 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia pacity and improving the capabilities of these systems in the processing of larger and longer-lasting data, the field of digital personalities will significantly improve. Performativity through AI-AI Generated Actors Advanced applications of artificial intelligence in the field of new digital media content, arts and creative industries that include mechanisms of media expression and extend to the field of entertainment, social media and appearance in the context of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI). The perspectives of the application of the General Purpose AI (GPA) model raise a number of questions about ethical aspects in the use of autonomous agents in social and cultural processes. Designing digital personas and such performativity in this context involves questioning the boundaries between the real and digital worlds, as well as the impact that these systems can have on the formation of public opinion and social norms (Bucher, 2022). At the same time, the question arises, how can such performativity in the context of politics shape reality? Thomas explains that this points to the potential of creating synthetic performance from AI tools, along with other advanced digital technologies, and at the same time, raises important questions about ethical and responsible use. Therefore, considering the contemporary identity that becomes the subject of the practice of synthesizing in innovative and exploitative ways, thanks to deepfakes and false practices that alter the images and sounds of performers without consent, highlights significant questions about the responsible use of AI (Thomas, 2024) and co-operation (Bender, 2024). In addition to accountability, security and authenticity, the application of supplementation or substitution of AI technology in media display and performativity raises many questions concerning ethics, originality and copyright. Dermawan proposes Collective Licensing with an Extended Effect (CLEE) regime, in fact, a remuneration framework administered by Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) (Dermawan, 2024). Generating images or videos with human-like attributes, transforming traditional ways of displaying and indicating that the creation of digital personas such as stuntmen, influencers, models, AI avatars, Ai synchronization are creating a new form of digital presence, transforming the way performance, identities, and interactions take place in multimedia spaces are becoming increasingly present in various forms of digital media production. Virtual influencers people like Mil Miquel or Hatsune Miku, who are completely digital creations, become new personalities on social media, advertising campaigns. Although their performance is absolutely virtual, this does not limit them from having such strong influences in shaping popular culture or consumer trends as real public figures. The advancement of Gen AI technology has enabled digital manipulation to adjust voice acting (Bhawani, 2023), facial expressions, but also lip movements, which has so far posed a challenge to this technology (Helm, 2023). Moreover, it indicates that not only can they 114 Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS replicate the physical characteristics of real people, but they can increasingly reproduce behaviors, styles, and craft new identities and personas. New Personalities and Display Strategies The use of AI technology and software such as deepmotion enables the creation of extremely realistic models, which are active, suggestive, synchronized and come to life in the digital environment. They are not limited by physical reality, space or location, as well as by form, gender, race, thus opening up new reinterpretations of performative identity and a new culture of existence. In the example of Synthesia’s AI video generation platform, which transforms text into video (TTV), it actually generates a text input into a realistic rendered video with a photorealistic virtual character. The recreation of an avatar that speaks naturally and reads a certain text assigned to it is complemented by an additional realistic representation of the ambience in which this digital character is placed by adjusting the scenes as needed. Figure 3.1 shows the facial expressions of the applied avatar that are convincingly applied in certain contexts of elaboration by this AI-generated actor. Figure 3.1 A stream of changes in facial expressions during the presentation of a digital avatar on the topic of explication of AI-generated actors using the Synthesia.io platform In addition to Synthesia, there are other platforms that generate image and voice avatars or actors, such as Neuralactors.com. Neuralactors allows you to generate videos in which actors walk and speak in a real-world environment, or they can display footage of multi-recorded video in real-world conditions. Figure 3.2 shows AI actors speaking in a video in selfie mode. 115 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia Figure 3.2 AI actor in selfie video mode taken from Neuralactors.com The platform Arcads.ai which offers the possibility of using Ai actors, as well as CreatorKit, which offers AI actors who display emotional gestures. AI-generated models create space for a radical transformation of performative identity. Instead of just representing human figures, they are able to constantly change their characteristics, reactions, and behavior. AI-generated models create space for a radical transformation of performative identity. Instead of just representing human figures, they are able to constantly change their characteristics, reactions, and behavior. Figure 3.3 shows an AI actor with a pronounced facial expression of the CreatorKIt platform . Figure 3.3 Emotive AI actor of the CreatorKit platform 116 Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS The action and emergence of these identities redefines the concepts of new performative strategies. Which allows a single person to coexist in multiple digital environments or worlds, characterized by different peculiarities, appearances, intentions, requirements, among others. In this way, a multiverse presence and action is possible. In a cultural context, the application of AI technology enables the creation of new criteria of aestheticization, identity, which are also transferred to the social level of interaction that redefines authenticity. Such an impact on society through the individual and his or her identities, but also in political expression. The performativity of politics can have a significant impact on ethical and cultural awareness caused by the consequences of shaping truth and security. Performativity can thus depict political actors, the media, but also institutional activity through speech, images, videos that intervene on the perception of the audience. Equally, the creation of appropriate content indicates the application of a persuasion mechanism in this context considered from the aspect of placing unsafe, unethical, or deep fake content, which, in addition to influencing AI and the reproduction of true, authentic content, can have far-reaching consequences, thus blurring the distinction between reality and its representation. Conclusion A growing body of research shows a deeper understanding of the process of more authentic representations of AI-generated performers in a digital environment. Their operation within multiple digital environments, in different realities and representations. The new culture of representation and existence raises very important ethical questions, questioning the authenticity and truthfulness of the representation, and the performativity of the personalities that are shown to us. The advancement of AI technologies will reduce the gap between real images and those generated by simple prompts. This can have a far-reaching impact on contemporary realities, but also on the perception of them, and thus not only culturally, socially or politically affect the shaping of the reality of the digital sphere and the representation inside and outside it. The use of AI technology for the mass production of propaganda, which is very convincing, raises concerns about the security and impact of such technologies on society and the individual, especially more vulnerable groups. Advances in the field of neuromorphic and autonomous computing open a new chapter in the creation and shaping of digital identities, which further requires a deep understanding of the ethical, technological and social implications, but also further analysis of this field as well as its representations, with the possible limitation of the possibilities of application. 117 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Stanković Design of a new performativity: AI-generated actors in the digital multimedia Abstract: Digital multimedia spaces allow artificial intelligence to interact more deeply with the digital environment, which can be further customized through personalized AI models. The incorporation of locally autonomous, personalized AI models into design and digital culture creates new user experiences, enabling more advanced interactions between humans and machines, especially in the context of multimedia displays and the formation of digital identities. Artificial intelligence now not only recognizes and interprets emotional responses, but also reproduces facial expressions and emotional signals that accompany the audience’s cognitive responses. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of human reactions, which allows AI-generated actors to become actors or personalities of a new digital culture, creating realistic performances. The reproduction of reality using new trained models enhances presentation by integrating locally autonomous, personalized large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) models of AI, as well as multimodal (MLLM) systems, enabling faster adaptability to different users and their needs, thus creating a new dimension of performativity in different social and cultural contexts [4]. Also, such systems enable the creation of fully personalized AI-generated actors that can respond to specific audience requirements in real time, further enhancing multimedia performance. 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Teeny, J.D., Siev, J. J., Briñol, P., Petty, R. E. (2021). A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion. J Consum Psychol. 31: 382–414. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1198 Thomas, S. (2024). AI and Actors: Ethical Challenges, Cultural Narratives and Industry Pathways in Synthetic Media Performance. Emerging Media, 2(3), 523-546. https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543241289108 Touvron, H. et al. (2023). Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models. arXiv:2307.09288 [Preprint] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.09288. Usman, U., Kim,T., Garvey, A., Duhachek,A.(2024). The Persuasive Power of Ai Ingratiation: A Persuasion Knowledge Theory Perspective. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 9:3, 319-331, doi:10.1086/730280 Zhang, S., Roller, S., Goyal, N., Artetxe, M., Chen,M., Chen, Sh., De-wan, C., Diab, M., Li, X., Lin, X.,V., et al.(2022). Opt: Open pre-trained transformer language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.01068, http://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.01068 Zhu, D., Chen, J., Shen, X., Li, X., and Elhoseiny, M. (2023 ).“Minigpt-4: Enhancing vision language understanding with advanced large language models,” arXiv:2304.10592, http://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.10592 Biography Dr Vanja Stanković, born in 1980, has gained many years of work experience across a wide range of business activities in managerial and executive positions. Professor of Applied Studies at ITS, Information Technology School for IT in Belgrade, in the field of Master Applied Studies in Information Technology, teaching Applied computer Design, Design Theory, Art Direction, Application of artificial intelligence in multimedia and assisting in Web -design and Advanced Web Design courses. Participated in numerous national and international conferences, exhibitions, and workshops, including solo exhibitions. email: vanja.stank[email protected] PERFORMING CONFLICTS AND ACTIVISM 128 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is at the core of all almost existing cultures. Founding myths of nations are war victories and/or sacrifices, sometimes historically accurate but certainly narratively upgraded (Trojan War and Kurkureshtra battle, American independence and Civil wars, Opium wars, Kosovo battle, Srebrenica...). It is hard to find any epic literary work in the history of humanity (and epic is a society founding narrative) and later a novel that does not revolve around some war or consequences of one - Enuma Elish, Iliad, Odyssey, Mahabharat, many parts of the Old Testament to name a few. From the second half of the XX century, many prose texts have been written without the apparent context of war, but almost all were immersed in the shadow of Second World War crimes and the looming threat of atomic war, which is now closer than ever. Another term we inevitably associate with war is violence because war is the ultimate unleashed terror. If we look at history, from ancient times till now, it is about looting, appropriating the wealth of others, or primal accumulation of capital. How and why is violence being created and made justified by those who do it? Mahatma Gandhi made famous the seven social sins Father Frederick Lewis Donaldson recognised, which are prerequisites for violence. We can all do a check-list for the following: 1 – Wealth without Work 2 – Pleasure without Conscience 3 – Knowledge without Character 4 – Commerce without Morality 5 – Science without Humanity 6 – Worship without Sacrifice 7 – Politics without Principle Did we miss anything? I believe everybody scored 100%. We usually consider diplomacy the opposite of war. When all diplomatic options are exhausted, war is the only option. When we act, another performative verb, are acting diplomatic, we try not to insult others. It shows a tricky trait of hiding our true thoughts, opinions and intentions because it is likely that some of these might insult and disturb someone. Sincerity is something society is most of the time afraid of. Truth hurts. Post-truth, as a synonym for 129 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative performative, is the utterance directed not to the truth but the success of its sometimes-hidden intentions, which may cuddle the expectations, feelings, and beliefs of the party we address. We do not openly state our beliefs, opinions, plans and needs, which usually conflict with the interlocutors’. The diplomatic approach manipulates others into believing that we are on the same side by hiding our side if we have any. Moreover, if we do not, we are in a position of an enslaved person. If we have our own hidden agenda, we deceive the opponent who is, at least we can hope, unaware of our true intentions. This diplomatic deceit is a part of the art of war. There are numerous historical examples, but I will be diplomatic enough not to name any. Performative utterance is the concept that language can function as a form of communal action and have the aimed effect of change. This definition can also be applied to posttruth, which is, at least to say, deceit. In conclusion, war is performative, as is the arts! Why didn’t anyone tell us this before? Let us never forget how good and significant war is: 1. War has always been a motivator and promoter of technological advancements. For example, touch screens have been used in radar facilities since 1965; jet engines were first used to bomb Hitler’s enemies. 2. Defensive war is what almost every human considers legitimate and moral to do. We could even state that the only just war is a defensive bloodshed on one’s doorstep. Shooting between neighbours happens mostly in civil wars, which turn out to be extremely severe and crimeful. Defending our privacy with firearms could also be against the government as well, but do we have a term for that kind of war? The state would call it a fight against domestic terrorism, while armed people would call it self-defence. Furthermore, by looking at the mass media, the most justified defence war is the one we perform or fight several thousand miles away from the territory we defend. Although we theoretically associate war with game-like equality with rules and regulations by opponents with more or less similar strength, the millennia-long history of wars shows just the opposite. No one attacks until feeling superior. Johan Huizinga recognises this war without playfulness, which we see as a prevailing practice of cunning tactics of sudden attack, Blitzkrieg, ambush, terrorising, bandit raids, severe retaliation, invasion, 130 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS extermination, and genocide3. The will to live, thrive, dominate, and win is undoubtedly stronger than self-control and obedience to the game’s rules. Asymmetricity is so prevalent in the contemporary world that it reveals brutal cognitive dissonance, where anti-colonialists, to some people, are terrorists to others. To be precise, while colonisers, in the name of liberation and emancipation, are terrorising the colonised, anti-colonialists are terrorists to collonizators. Anticolonialism has, so far, been anti-European and anticapitalist. It’s celebrities like Patris Lumumba (Congo), Moamer el Gadafi (Lybia), Thomass Sankara (Burkina Faso), Hafiz al Assad (Syria), and Taliban (Afghanistan) were all declared tyrants by both Western politics and academia. Former colonisers try to academically appropriate anti-colonialist discourse to control these historically liberating narratives and processes. However, even liberation is a very tricky and slippery term. Freedom fighters to whom the movie Rambo 3 was dedicated, to the gallant people of Afghanistan, were brave and liberating forces against the USSR. However, later, their quest for liberty threatened liberation supporters, and their liberation from liberation supporters did not turn out to be liberal at all. Later, liberation proclamators had to proclaim the war on terror that annulled liberty in their liberal homeland. After the proclaimed war on terror, global terror has increased many times in all areas of life: economy, health, and media. We tend to perceive history as a linear process, but it shows many dramaturgical twists and turns. The dramatic twist is, according to Aristotle, the development of events against expectation because of each other or turning of the action contrary to what is intended! This means that causal processes are prevalent in the motivations and intentions of characters! The logic of the story is merciless towards pawns; revolution eats its children. Narratives, as we see, as much as they reveal and share, they also hide stories. Further3 During World War I, Serbia lost almost one-third of its population, making it the percent-wise highest victimised country (450,000 soldiers and 650,000 civilians out of less than 4 million people died not from natural causes). During the Second World War, again, more than one million Serbs were killed (occasionally, German occupiers shot 100 civilians for one killed German soldier), including several hundred thousand in concentration camps in Croatia (hosting the only concentration camp specialised for children). Half a century later, in August 1995, during Operation Storm, 250,00 Serbs were expatriated from Croatia, 2,000 killed, 78 churches burned down, and 181 graveyards demolished, 25,000 houses destroyed. That is why the Serbian government and the majority of the people will not consider (3,000 to 8,000 military-capable male) victims in Srebrenica as genocide. Mere numbers make this appalling massacre non-comparable to the more than 90% decline in the Indigenous population in North America and Australia, one million dead in Ireland, 100,000 in Namibia, 10,000,000 in Congo, 2,000,000 in Persia, 100,000,000 in India, 90,000 in Kenya, 3,000,000 in Rwanda, or even more than 40,000 corpses in Gaza in just months, all including women and infants, which was not the case in Srebrenica. 131 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative more, what are stories made of? Fragments of human experiences! So, when we narrate, we show some and hide some; in choice and order, we wish to show some ethics – how will some and not other actions provoke some reactions and not others. We can track this structure of behavioural examples back to narratives of the Old Testament or Ancient Greek tragedies, whose goal was to create and promote a system of beliefs. That is why motifs and structures in narratives can reveal the intents of a storyteller or any discourse teller. In his short video from January 18th, 2024, Yuval Noah Harari tries to convince us that very few wars in history are about objective material things. People think that we fight like wolves or chimpanzees over food and territory. This is not the case. At least in the modern world... We have two or more conflicting stories in the minds of different people, and they can’t agree on the story. They can’t find a common story that everybody would be happy with, and this is the deep source of the conflict. Not accidentally, Yuval does not merely confuse cause for effect but cause for the means for the justification and motivation propeller. We who create performing stories in theatre and electronic media know that the cause of specific behaviour is a need or, even more, an urge. Someone’s greed is that person’s urge, and that destructive structure or temperament precedes the narrative and ignites the story. Stories are made from fragments of human experience, so new stories appealing to all, which Harari suggests, are impossible because we have different beliefs and experiences and respond to a variety of motifs. Traditional literature, on the other hand, enables plurality Harari fails to recognise that even trans-human narratives exist in ancient cultures and mythologies around the world – from hybrids and chimaeras, titans, golems and homunculus to transgenderism and even trans diversity in the cases of Tiresiah in Greece or Shikhandi4 in Mahabharat, to name the two most known. Needs create narratives; the more someone is ready to sacrifice and the more challenging the obstacles are, the more dramatic and appealing the story is. A century ago, theoretician of literature Medvedev defined a novel (complex story) as a super-ideological system because in stories, we recognise and most commonly conflict different sets of beliefs (while in poetry, especially hymns, we celebrate and exalt one). By choosing who wins and what the narrative consequences between beliefs are, we set up an understandable example. Stories are created by beliefs to create and promote beliefs. To reproduce a system! 4 During the war, it is a trans person, Shikhandi, who is the only one capable of killing the most revered warrior in history, Bhishma. 132 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS PERFORMING AND PERCEIVING IDENTITY We are what we believe in. Moreover, who we are? How do we define ourselves? How do we attain identity? How do we achieve the power of narrative that we are more likely to die for, let alone kill, than change it? When we define anything, us, for example, we need to acknowledge what we belong to, the Genus to which we are subordinated, and who created us. Then, we describe Differentia specifica, what makes us special, unique, and different. What do we choose to belong to? This was not a question of choice for many millennia. We were apparent genetic, biological, economic and cultural extensions of our family and our direct ancestors. Later, we included culture as the same language and customs and then often imposed nation and social class. Nowadays, we belong to a subtly imposed / freely chosen specific sub-culture as a marketing target group. Target is a very military noun. Marketing tries to convince us that we can change our target group to buy more different services and products each time we change. Convincing and convicting us to permanent subtle cognitive and identity dissociation is the most suitable for the flow of capital. Who are we most likely to choose to identify with? Aristotle told us that we are most likely to feel compassion for those who undeservedly suffer! Victimisation is a tremendous cohesive force for slave classes because the victim masses have been narrated to believe that it is not moral to be an oppressor. We pity the weak, wishing to protect them when we have some illusion of superiority or if we are weak and fearful, we will fear for those who are like us! Instead of either/or logic, we can apply and/and logic, so the best is to both fear something terrible not happening to us because we witnessed bad things happening to someone alike and that this one like us suffered for no other reason than being like us! It is hard to be threatened and/or victimised if no one is doing bad things to us. Hardships and crises are wonderful for promoting group identification, yet one more procedure is crucial – blaming the targeted enemy for the problem! Identifying an enemy drives stronger group cohesion than personal similarities. To be a person and a subject, one must take responsibility, show bravery, and risk conflict to become a subject and make decisions independently. It is far easier to immerse into collective security and share a common identity, no matter how limited it is. For a century now, marketing strategists have claimed that people do not like choices. The more choices there are, the greater the probability of making a mistake. Two choices are excellent, yet when one of the choices is a threat, a choice has already been made, and we feel safe. Identity works, and our belonging to the herd is justified because it protects us from, at least, being alone, isolated, undefined, and unidentified. 133 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative Although creating identity sounds like an emancipatory practice, when we look into history, especially after the late 19th century, creating identity was more part of the divide-and-conquer imperial policies than anything else. Even today, we see new languages being identified, new nations emerging, new states being proclaimed, and new global subcultures determined, similar to target groups in marketing strategies. The atomisation of society is a part of the same divide-and-conquer strategy against the culture as a whole since culture is a communal activity of people. The described process is even more apparent with the use of AI when we do not need people any more, not even for communication or work. For example, we witness almost no new music bands, only solo artists with accompanying musicians or, even more, only DJs. Identity comes from the word identical, meaning the same as something. Now, it is used to differentiate some people from others, which is, again, the divisive path of and in societies. Divisions will enlarge differences to the level of conflicts. Aggravating contradictions will lead to animosity and sometimes violence and destruction. Defending our collective identity under threat is what almost every human considers legitimate and moral to do. One of the most crucial contemporary identity strategies is to promote dissociation with any stable identity (national, biological, family...) so that we do not believe we belong to anything. In this way, we will have nothing to defend or to fight for, and we will easily surrender to slavery, which is being appropriated into somebody’s capital. Snapchat and TikTok provide these changeable self-identifications governed by promotions and a need to identify with some group and/or trend. In the clinical psychological sense, identity is a framework of attentional prioritisation and action that enables you to function well in the natural and social environment. So, it is a frame (like in movies) in which we focus on what we exchange with an environment. Environment, thus, if it is appropriately and precisely set, enables or disables what we can or cannot express as identity. In theoretical discourse, identity consists of what people, individually and collectively, think of themselves, and identities are culturally constructed! In permanently changing societies, permanent revolutions of Marx, Engels and later, Trotsky’s concepts, our identity is in the continuous process of construction and de(con)struction, constantly exploring new beginnings. Traditionally, identities have been forged and transmitted for generations, while nowadays, we change many identities during a single lifetime, even a single day. In the 21st century, acquiring gender and/or rebranding national identity is successfully achieved. What these definitions fail to acknowledge is that memory is actually a prerequisite for identity. But if we continually forget, erase or change who we are, is it identity any more? Performativity in creating identity is easily visible. Not only does it use costumes, songs, and social roles, but the primary utterance of identity-creating states: I identify, which is a synonym for I pretend to be, which is acting, taking on a particular role proposed 134 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS by a director. The best director is the one who makes actors think they have created everything by themselves. Moreover, the best dramaturgs, my primary discipline, make directors think they have created everything by themselves. Unlike the arts and theatre, people in real life tend to take their roles far more seriously. On stage, when we do not get applause and when our role does not get recognised, we do not get angry with the audience, we do not insist they must take our acting as successful. We need to act well, learn techniques, and play; thus, be aware that we are merely performing, no matter how much we and the audience enjoy it. Nowadays, it is more advisable to change the audience than bad actors and their wrong methods. Identifying as labelling into a, b, and c target groups are all marketing strategies—also a military term. Against whom is this campaign going? EXPANDING CAPITAL THROUGH PERFORMING SPECIAL WARS Since the war is the quintessential instrument of the capital, the capital itself also shows performative qualities. Capital becomes representation through the following historical movement: exchange value becomes autonomous, human beings are expropriated, human activity is reduced to labour, and labour is reduced to abstract labour. This occurs when capital rises on the foundation of the law of value. According to Jacques Camatte in 1973, the next step is that capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being. After analysing-dissecting-fragmenting the human being, capital reconstructs the human being as a function of its process. The rupture of the body from the mind made possible the transformation of the mind into a computer which can be programmed by the laws of capital. Today, we witness these processes of mass and individual mind and body mutilations and reintegrations that we can despise, admire, and/or be horrified by. We tattoo, pierce and operate the body not as a Tailoristic production piece of machinery but as a discourse of self-destructive consuming black hole connected to the simulated collective consciousness of the internet. In the first half of the 1990s, in the Civil Defence and Protection program at the IX Belgrade gymnasium, we learned about special warfare, and I still keep my notebook. Levels of warfare are structured from the most immediate and weak to the most extended term but most potent. As material weapons, we can recognise: 1 – Tradicional warfare of destruction with guns, soldiers, aeroplanes, missiles and drones... 135 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative 2 – Destruction through genocide: drugs, alcohol, poisoned food, genetic alterations... 3 – Destruction by economic means: debts, inflation, sanctions, stock exchange malversations... Information warfare includes: 4 – Ideological warfare of introducing invasive and, to some communities, destructive religions, technologies, and political systems. Ideology can be defined as social technology. 5 – Chronological warfare involves colonising, rewriting, or erasing local histories and knowledge. 6 – The highest form of warfare is a methodological war on the concept of the world and life, philosophy, and abstract notions like truth, justice, love, and value. Interventions in culture, primarily through education, media, and the arts, are among the most subtle yet effective forms of war. Special warfare has been a massive advancement since Sun Tzu defined three types of warfare in ancient times. At the lowest level, troops murder each other. The second type was fighting against the enemy’s concentration of forces, disabling the opponent’s ability to gather resources to fight and even to make alliances. The most advanced type of warfare was against the enemy’s plans, against opponents’ ability to think ahead, to recognise and react to dangers. With all of our cultural and historical knowledge, our contemporary ignorance is often hidden behind euphemising academic correctness; it is still hard to recognise even bloodshed, the lowest doctrine of organised violence, as war. POWER OF DRAMATICAL SEMANTICS Naming and semanticising are processes of consciousness that connect reality with discourse and abstract notions. Languical changes of terms hide and reveal changes in applied meanings. It is magical because magic is when our audience does not know how we 136 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS do something, how we magically create discourse, how we semanticise and how we reate settings, rules, and characters5. As Philip K. Dick recognised, The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words; defining the meaning of the words is the basis for the later directing of discourse, the themes we focus on, and then the glamour as images we get fascinated by, frustrated and miserable about because we cannot attain them. For example, we can recognise that the first type of armies were people’s armies, self-organised people of some area, defending people on that territory. After people’s army, national armies took their place. Here, we see one appropriative identity responsible for fighting against other identities. However, since identities became fluid under shapeshifting imperatives of capital, the professional army was introduced to a distinct payoff armed executive force that does not care about identity questions. These developed into corporate (private) armies, gaining more power due to their mobility, ease of access to funding, more direct line of command and lack of legal responsibility because corporations are limitedly responsible yet highly efficient in doing all dirty work. Divisions in conflictious societies are indeed more dramatic and artistic than in peaceful and boring societies. The global success of Neue Slovenische Kunst and Marina Abramović in high art or Avengers, Star Wars franchise or Inglorious Bastards in popular culture... shows that people appreciate shock aesthetics, ask for invocations of violence and praise totalitarianism. Performativity and dramaticity of war and other crimeful miseries are far more attention-captivating than any other aesthetical approach, and we witness that in mass media all the time. Everything is tragic, disturbing, and dramatic. We can even recognise the yearning for peace as a means of pacifying slave/victim classes while ruling classes use war tactics occasionally or often, if not always. As an example of an approved-for-all audiences franchise, especially in the animated for-kids edition Clone Wars, Star Wars reproduces a systematic belief that there were and always will be wars. Episode 1 starts with trade blockades/sanctions that are regularly an introduction to endless war. Sounds familiar? Furthermore, recent Star Wars spin-offs tend to idealise and give more attention to former imperial villains, than small-scale rebel terrorists who were heroes of the main narrative line. 5 When different meanings of sex and gender are named with the exact words, this causes confusion, which was determined by the choice of using such a discourse. Even more, if gender and sex differ, why is changing sexual organs crown evidence of gender identification? Confusion is deliberate since we have much social confusion; thus, we arrived at this point because we have been heading this way. Contemporary anti-teleological concepts of thinking that try to program us that circumstances appear without purpose are opposite from the deterministic sciences of mathematics, physics, and cybernetics. 137 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative In the fourth book of the inspiring Dune saga, the only one without any war going on, the one I dramatised for theatre, Frank Herbert mentions war two times only, in the same dialogue. The Emperor Worm explains: Peace encourages aggression... tranquillity, a fertile ground for the growth of rigid classes and many other forms of aggression... the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression... If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people... But Duncan Idaho tries to argue: People don’t want war! The Emperor replies: They want chaos. War is the most readily available form of chaos. In his essay Vacation-War, Bora Ćosić, one of the most remarkable Yugoslav intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century in the Balkans, compares these two phenomena that disrupt the social order. Expelled from the boring integrity of everyday life, we are in a radically new situation that, even at the cost of the greatest dangers, brings loss of work purpose and neglect of the practical pressure of productive action. According to Bora Ćosić, war is an exciting and dangerous trip that offers a wide possibility for the unexpected, accidental and individual. Video games, as the most frequent leisure for the masses, are, in most cases, about wars. Video and computer games were even used for terrorist training, radicalisation and recruitment. Not to mention sports competitions and fights, which historically speak of, prepare for, or substitute war. These war substitutions of games and sports are the most giant motors of the economy — right after the war itself. The connection between war and economy, which is always very evident, is hidden behind notions of democracy, national interests, human rights, ideology, autoritarism... These performatives are so prevailing that they become awkward when we read, for example, the comedy by Boris Vian Generals Tea Party from the 1960s. Let us take a short dramatic brake or comic relief to share what people 65 years ago understood as a joke and laughed at: PLANTIN: Now gentlemen, the fact is that in France our industrialists and agricultural producers find themselves in the unfortunate position of having to go to war in order to absorb a totally unexpected and extremely regrettable overproduction pattern... I ask you one question frankly, gentlemen – would any of you like to take us on?... Damn and blast! So nobody wants a war? CHING: Nobody? Excuse me, honourable Plantin, if I laugh. What about Afrika? 144 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS They won’t suss us, they’ll never know Let’s start a war said Maggie one day ... You fight for your country You die for their gain Death and destruction all around Shops and houses are razed to the ground Bump out houses empty shells Here on earth it´s just a mortal hell How they died no-one will ever know They said they would save us as deterrents they would be used Except they brought destruction to an earth that grows no food Now we are gone for ever no tombs can hold your names Expressions of lower social classes show awareness that wars are cover-ups for the primary accumulation of capital/power by dividing and turning against each other, which leads to destruction and ruling over all. Counterculture looks at things from the downside and more easily uncovers or sees under the curtain or skirt of propaganda. It notices hidden motivations and agendas and sends brutal messages to sometimes wider audiences. One of the greatest contra-culture punk bands is Dead Kennedys. In their song We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now, from 1981, we can hear these lines: Welcome to 1984 (or 2024) Are you ready for the third world war?!? ... Don’t you worry, it’s for a cause Feeding global corporations’ claws Die on our brand new poison gas, El Salvador or Afghanistan Making money for president Reagan (or whoever president) And all the friends of president Reagan (or whoever president) 145 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative The chorus goes: California Uber Alles! Why California? In the probably most exemplary liberal city in the USA and the world, the city of San Francisco, in 1982, Jello Biafra and Dead Kennedys wrote, recorded and published the following lyrics. A role-play dialogue between the British prime minister and the US Secretary of War in the song Kinky Sex Makes The World Go ‘Round: Greetings, this is the Secretary of War at the State Department of the United States We have a problem. The companies want something done about this sluggish world economic situation... Profits have been running more than a little thin lately and we, we need to stimulate some growth... Now, we know that there’s an alarmingly high number of young people roaming around in your country With nothing to do but stir up trouble for the police and damage private property It doesn’t look like they’ll ever get a job... It’s about time we did something constructive with these people... We’ve got thousands of ‘em here, too. They’re crawling all over... The companies think it’s time we all sit down, have a serious get-together, and start another war... The President? He loves the idea! ... The Soviets seem up for it. The Kremlin’s been itching for the real thing for years: Want a little going-away present for Mr. Brezhnev? Hell, Afghanistan’s no fun... So, what do ya say? We don’t even have to win this war. We just want to cut down on some of this excess population. ... Give ‘em an hour or two to learn how to use an automatic rifle and send ‘em on their way ... El Salvador? How ‘bout Northern Ireland? Or a “moderately repressive regime” in South 146 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS America? We’ll just cook up a good Soviet territory in the Middle East; we need that oil We had Libya all ready to go, and Colonel Gaddafi’s hit squad didn’t even show up. I tell ya, that man is unreliable. The Russians had their fingers on the button just like we did for that one. Now, just think for a minute. We can make this war so big, so big! The more people we kill in this war The more the economy will prosper... I mean, look, war is money. The arms manufacturers tell me Unless we get our bomb factories up to full production The whole economy is going to collapse... If this is how liberal democracies and leaders of the free world speak about themselves, is there a blind spot to turn our glance elsewhere and notice that everything is all right? CONCLUSION Since war has been all-present (at least for several millennia of documented history) and it does not seem like it is going to stop, no matter how many times wars to stop all wars were proclaimed, the most important thing to recognise is who our enemy is. After we decide who we are, the next step is to determine who we should be afraid of and even try to destroy. One of the most influential answers states: In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall in into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human interventions in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. The previously quoted smart pile of discourse was published in 1991 by the Club of Rome, predecessors and inspiration to the policy-makers and trend-setters the World Economic Forum. What is interesting to understand here is not just that The real enemy then is humanity itself. However, how is this conclusion a false trap? In the preceding 147 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative sentence, it states: All these dangers are caused by human interventions in natural processes (what are civilisation and culture if not interventions in natural processes and do these interventions include GMO, population control, immunisation, weather modifications as progressive politics of the global revolution itself?), and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. So, the logical conclusion is that the enemies are attitudes and behaviours that intervene in natural processes, not humanity itself. Or is it? This is also an excellent example of dialectical cognitive dissonance when we confuse the reader with conflicting notions: We must unite against the threat. The threat is caused by behaviours we cause and propagate as progress. The conclusion and resolution of this internalised conflict is the externalisation that the enemy is the concept of humanity. And humanity is the communion of all people, so everybody is the enemy; all are the threat. Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own, or the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets. Whoever said it reveals the true intentions of war policies. Furthermore, giving (what an appropriate word) credits for restoration/renovation enables long-term debt, which is another word for slavery (economic and later political). These are all neocolonial strategies, which are, as postwar procedures, tools of war as a means of dominance. Teleologically speaking, if the purpose of war is the destruction of peoples’ lives and robbing their property (and we need stories to justify this apparent evil), all activities with the same expected result could be considered a means of war. Whether it is capitalistic promotion, creation and acquisition of debt, communistic nationalisation of property, or global population control politics... all could be defined as acts of war. However, who is at war? People against people, nations against nations, governments against governments or governments against civilians, narratives against narratives... are merely the facades. More precisely, we can determine two primary participants only: humanoids who believe that they are worth more than others, try to destroy or at least infect with their values people who try to believe that they can make their own decisions about their own lives. This has been experimentally proven by Phillip Zimbardo during the Stanford Prison Experiment. The slippery slope of evil instruments can differ (language, culture, history, guns, media, economy...), yet the structure remains6. The root of evil is the idea of dominance over another being. Where is the money going to? 6 1. Mindlessly taking the first small step; 2. Dehumanization of others; 3. De-individualization of self; 4. Diffusion of personal responsibility; 5. Blind obedience to authority; 6. Uncritical conformity to group norms; 7. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference. 148 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS Toward Whom it is directed by the same Who? Invisible hand in invisible hand, where does the money end? Does this Who have a friend or the capital with interest blend all into the mindset of an obedient whore? Is anybody going to tell: nevermore? Greedy need indeed to unlimitedly own, does it have a flaw, does it even provoke a foe? Does this raw greed to expensively sell and buy cheap listens to the weep of the weak? Let the poor grease the wheels of private prosperity with more nepotism and protectionism than competence, competition and dexterity. Who collects all of the world’s debts? Cleverly, it’s planted that we take this nonsense seriously for granted. Even with obvious threats, we witness with silence the all-encompassing sickness of mass compliance. Through Foucault-vian lences, we can even recognise the contemporary architectural performativity of public spaces to resemble fighting with or war with humanity itself. Sport stadium, primarily used to concentrate the attention of many people, was used as concentration and even death camp in Chile during Pinoche’s rule. I was astounded not to find anywhere, in any text, academic or public, that even shopping malls, mostly without windows, with controlled and directed movements of people, occasional announcements of new information, standing in strict lines while approaching cash registers, resemble social structuring like in concentration camps. The same or more can 149 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative be applied to large music festivals, behind iron fences, with police at entrances, tagging with tickets, and strict economisations of tokens and coupons. How about all-inclusive resorts or tourist cruisers? As a preparation for smart cities, these are wonderful and long-term social experiments on strict governance and management or surveillance and obedience. However, rarely does anyone perceive them as such. War is a general and generic term, just like arts. Both use similar, if not the same, semantical, syntactical and pragmatical procedures to accomplish their intentions. War is deceit, just like the arts. However, what is the difference? Georgia, the ancient Greek sophist, claimed that spectators of an artwork are being deceived, but they have gained more than those who were not. While in war, those who are deceived, who are objects, have lost more. Although it is heavily simulated in media, war actually ends simulation in real life. While war brings destruction, Art is the force to nurture and ennoble peoples’ existence and, occasionally, their essence. 1. Arendt, H. (1967). Truth and Politics, The New Yorker, February 25th 2. Aristotel (1966). O pesničkoj umetnosti, Beograd: Zavod za izdavanje udžbenika Socijalističke republike Srbije 3. Aristotel, (1964), Politika, Beograd: Bigz 4. Aristotel (1987), Retorika, Nezavisna izdanja 5. Bloch, A. (1980), Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!, Los Angeles: Proce/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. 6. Bošnjak, B. (1983), Grčka filozofija (od prvih početaka do Aristotela), Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice Hrvatske 7. Camatte, J. (1973), This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, Anti-copyright @ 1995: Jacques Camatte & Autonomedia 8. Cavanaugh, J. R. (2015) Performativity, Oxford University Press 9. Ćosić, B. (1970), Mixed Media, Brograd: Nezavisno autorsko izdanje 10. Ferguson, K. & Kim, M. J. & Dobrowolska M. (March 15th, 2021) The Role of Video Games and Online Platforms in Terrorist Radicalization and Recruitment, Crime Team Week of Monday, https://www.counterterrorismgroup.com/post/the-role-of-video-games-and-online-platforms-in-terrorist-radicalization-and-recruitment 11. Herbert, F. (2020), God Emperor of Dune, London: Penguin Publishing Group 150 Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS 12. Huizing, J. (1949), Homo Ludens, London, Boston and Henley: Routlegde & Kegan Paul 13. King, A, & Schneider, B. (1991), The First Global Revolution - a report by the Council of the Club of Rome, New Delhi: Orient Longman 14. Makijaveli, N. (2009.), Vladalac, Beograd, Mono i Manjana 15. Medvedev, P. N. (1976), Formalni metod u nauci o književnosti, Beograd: Nolit 16. Roerich, N. (1932), Banner of Peace, in Roerich, N. Realm of Light, New York: Roerich Museum Press 17. Vian, B. (1967), Generals Tea Party, New York: Grove Press 18. Vyasa, (2003) Mahabharat, Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text by Kisari Mohan Ganguli [1883-1896] sacred-texts.com 19. Zimbardo, P. (2007), The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, New York: Random House SUMMARY Ivan Pravdić When Frank Zappa exclaimed that Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex, he merely recognised politics as a facade for war, at least in imperialistic discourse. To understand the performativity of politics, we must address its source and its ultimate goal through its representations: the primary accumulation of capital and the motor of technical and media progress through the performativity of war itself. Media avoidance of even mentioning the war in obvious mass armed conflict activities with a large scope of weapons causing tremendous destruction is transferred into formulations like military intervention and peace campaigns, while the word war is a part of every day‘s contextualisation of many cultural phenomena: economic war, cultural war, food war, war games, star wars. From Heraclitus and Sun Tzu, armed conflicts are inseparable from philosophy. Most myths and epics, as societies’ founding narratives, and almost all of human history, revolve around wars. How do we create narratives of and for conflict? How do we distinctively identify ourselves and our enemy? How do we direct and act armed clashes? How do we filter the suffering in mass media? 151 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Pravdić INTERDISCIPLINARY POETICS ON/OF ANTI-PEACE concept – language – narrative Antonen Arto defined theatre, in its ritualistic totality, as “an affective athleticism (athletics of affectations)“. Aristotle similarly recognised the aim of tragedy to provoke affectations of fear and compassion (and purge them). Affectations are emotions we cannot control, but they control us. Emotion in the Latin language means to put into motion. With affectations, we can move people without their conscious consent. Fighting for attention, appropriating or destroying the peace of somebody and acquiring someone‘s time as the ultimate personal capital, are the most basic and even final battles, which we can recognise in contemporary media platforms as the global playground of cultures in the XXI century. Keywords: war, performative, politics, media, identity, capital, attention, rock‘n‘roll Biography Professor Dr Ivan Pravdić Head of Doctoral Studies, Chairman of the Council at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia. Head of Polymedia study group at Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. Associated member of Center for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts at Birmingham City University, UK. Teaches Dramaturgy, Theater Dramaturgy, Radio Dramaturgy, Performance Dramaturgy, Poetics of Polymedia Arts, Creation of Polymedia Artwork and Time Design at Arts Academy in Novi Sad (basic, master and doctoral studies) and at Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies of University of Arts in Belgrade. With performances, drama, audience participation and texts he has participated at festivals and symposiums in Germany, Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey and the whole ex-Yugoslavia. Creates and develops Time Design. https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0002-0516-2311 www.timedesign.erich.biz THE PERFORMATIVITY OF POLITICS ARCHITECTURE’S WEAPONISING PERFORMANCE Dr Višnja Žugić Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Faculty of Technical Sciences University of Novi Sad, Serbia 153 IN A DIGITAL WORLD Introduction: A Provocation ‘Wake up, a house on the beach is not a dream’ 1 Harey Zahav real estate Company This is a quote from an Israeli real estate company Harey Zahav, published as a caption of a post on social media, on 13th of December, 2023. Appearing a few months after 7th of October, the post advertised pre-sale settlements2 on the territory of destroyed Gaza. The image of the post depicts a ruined city, overlapped with a 3D visualisation of a row of buildings. Within the image, above the simulation of this new urban structure, the written text states: ‘A house on the beach is not a dream’3. This paper focuses on architecture represented in this post, through the exploration of the different levels of textuality related to its physical form. Although approached from different theoretical standpoints, textuality of architecture can be observed as a phenomenon inherent to any built or unbuilt/visually represented structure, both as a pre-inscribed or gained quality of space. These various modalities and sub-categories of architecture’s textual function (Zeković, Konstantinović, Žugić, 2018) were identified through theoretical explorations of the spatial roles and qualities associated with the narratives and meanings of architecture. Two main categories essentially align with the structuralist and post-structuralist positions, which respectively see architectural narratives as static: pre-inscribed, consciously placed representations of previously defined meanings, and dynamic: meanings that are unstable in their nature, open and ephemeral, 1 Harey Zahav real estate Company on their Instagram account @hareyzahav, on 13th of December 2023 2 Prior to this post, on 11th of December, the company posted another image showing the map of the destroyed Gaza with a segment of a new urban plan, followed by the caption: ‘Now at presale prices! :)’ 3 The original text is written in Hebrew, the translation is confirmed by the Center for Holocaust Research and Education (CHRE) from Belgrade, Serbia Žugić Architecture’s weaponising performance