How Digital Hybridization Creates New Performance Practices

How Digital Hybridization Creates New Performance Practices

Blog Article

In this paper, we examine a new set of hybrid ludic practices utilizing cross-media narration that emerged with the rise of the Internet commonly called Alternate Reality Games.However, we propose to coin Tape Measure the term Alternate Virtuality Games (or AVG) as a way to distinguish these digital practices from their real-life counterpart.Viral online AVGs like This House Has People in It (Resnick, 2016) or Ben Drowned (Jadusable, 2010) are emblematic of a horizontal relationship between work and spectator, as well as performance outside of art institutions.The immersiveness of AVGs is unbound by the space and time of a specific happening, and is rather experienced by a multitude of agents at different times and places.

This characteristic of being an extra-individual experience as well as being independent from institutions also places AVGs within liminal Galaxy S20 experiences such as studied by anthropologist Victor Turner.As such, we analyze these hybrid games as a mean for the 21st century spectator to overturn societal status quo through newfound agency.These performing agents get into a subjective state where they can experience and criticize our relationship to digital devices in a society of information and control, without being subjected to it.