Intimacy Across Visceral And Digital Performance

Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance is an edited collection designed to address a diverse set of critical responses to and practical interrogations of the notion of being intimate in emergent and hybrid performance practices, aiming to elicit connectivity and provoke debate about the potency, nature and agency of intimacy in contemporary performance.

Lauren Berlant suggests that 'intimacy (...) involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared' (2000, p. 1). Sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the private experience to the public sphere. Within the current climate of intense global political, social and financial insecurity and unrest, at a time infused with both hope and fear, artists appear to be demonstrating a desire for intimacy and closeness with the Other.

Those public figurings of intimacy - staged through contemporary performance, visual culture and digital art practices - become the cultural fuel which, when placed alongside political potentialities, can ignite debates and provocations such as those contained herein. Review: 'This book offers terrific insights into performance and intimacy by exploring and yoking 'visceral' and 'digital' performance(s), each of which can significantly affect the nature and experience of intimacy.

The authors use inventive approaches to generate critical and innovative discussions of intimacy in/and performance.' - Professor Joanne Tompkins, School of English, Media Studies, and Art History, University of Queensland, Australia