Performing media

Abstract

Catherine Wood describes our society today as an entanglement between languages, time, space, intimacy, drama and diversity (Wood 2012: 10). Ian Chambers affirms that the notion of communicating or recounting with greater multi-­‐dimensionality, enacting or displaying more than one perspective at the same time, seems to better facilitate the complexity involved in communication itself (Chambers 2000: 25). Interaction in today’s context is therefore a complex experience that can position many modes of engagement in the same moment. The following dissertation explores the process of translating more than one visual language – here, painting and performance. It explores how the interdisciplinary nature of visual languages can interpret experience as multifaceted, lending greater perspective to concepts, issues and subject matter. Walter Benjamin suggests that this is only possible because languages “are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” (Benjamin 1969: 72). Benjamin’s text introduces the idea of translation between languages as a mode, a natural way of interaction. I will use his concept of translation to explain my interest in the conflation between painting and performance, and how this process reflects on a particular experience our current context.