The Non-Fungible Body? Performance and Digitalisation
Performance and Digitalisation
Francisco Carolinum Linz

The Living Body in the Digital Age

Performance has been a key medium in contemporary art for years. Artists have charted diverse approaches and added novel forms and variants of expression to the conceptual understanding of performance established by the pioneers of the genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Questions raised by today’s technological developments concerning documentation, archiving, and the relation between performance and digital media mark the point of departure for the project The Non-Fungible Body?

The catalogue gathers extensive visual materials and writings by Freda Fiala, Geraldine Juárez, Rose Lejeune, and Bruce Quek to explain the project’s innovative design: it convenes artists who examine the cultural significance of live performance and the living body’s relation to the virtual economies of our time with a view to the fairly recent phenomenon of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). The title The Non-Fungible Body? serves as a leitmotif for speculations on performance and digital technology. While the body and the digital tools it employs are ever more difficult to tell apart, physical identities remain important vehicles of multifaceted and contradictory social and political processes.

Participating artists 

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Marita Bullmann, Yun-Chen Chang, Beatrice Didier, Jan Hakon Erichsen, Maria Kulikovska, David Henry Nobody Jr. in conversation with Anika Meier, Sara Lanner, Sajan Mani, Boris Nieslony, Yiannis Pappas, Jianan Qu, Xavier Le Roy, Sarah Trouche, and Rong Xie (Echo Morgan)