Performativity and image formation

This paper provides models for understanding how social agents affect our making as artists. How do social barriers and the modes of social temporality retrain our freedom of making? Taken Judith Butler‘ concept of 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution‘ that ‟the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social sign”; this paper provides models for understanding how social agents affect our making as artists. How do social barriers and the modes of social temporality retrain our freedom of making? On the one hand, artists operate in a field of almost limitless possibility and permission; globalisation and digital technology seem to collapse the boundaries of time periods, space, styles and concepts, allowing total freedom. On the other hand, we all seem locked into an inescapable economic, political and ecological endgame. This paper refers to the series of cross-disciplinary workshops titled You are conditioned that took place in collaboration with the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (February-June 2016). A two-channel video and series of performances was the outcome of collaboration with dancers Alina Pappi, David Rodriguez, Massimo Monticelli, Stephanie D'Arcy Collins, Evie Oldham and Olivia Thynne, which would be included in the presentation.