Institutional email: swinglerjenny@gmail.com
This
practice-based project investigates how postmedial (Bay-Cheng, 2016) writing
for performance can be considered an ecological practice. A key concern in my
research is how we carry screen images in our day-to-day lives. As we use
multiple screen devices, we are more than ever connected to an ongoing loop of
screen images. This image loop is now actively drawn from and referred to in
performance, either as subject matter or as imaginative material used by the
audience to conjure what is being described in performance. This project’s
overarching purpose is to investigate how writing for performance is shifting
as practitioners and audiences are increasingly referring to the image loop.
Furthermore, I hypothesise that the shift in writing for performance engaging
with screen images instigates an ecology of performance that can be aligned
with current concerns in ecotheory, exemplified in the discourse of Donna
Haraway, Timothy Morton and Rob Nixon regarding alternative modes of
representing the world in a time of climate crisis. Through the lens of
ecotheory I will analyse my own practice to explore how writing for
performance that is integrating screen worlds is enacting what Donna Haraway
describes as a kind of ‘composting’ of organic and screen matter and in doing
so conjuring ‘unexpected collaborations’ between the human, the technological
and the fantastical.