01.17.15 | Reading Response: Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art

I'll tell you right now, I totally thought this passage was going to be focused on some type of contemporary performance piece involving borderline electrocution as a means of pseudo-choreography (I was conflating "manipulation" and "convulsion"). But, I digress: the conclusion of the article isn't actually that far off from that, albeit in a fashion with a much stronger form of intent. Elsenaar and Scha really delve more into the mechanics of electrical manipulation, which - in contrast to some of the nitty-gritty educational passages as the course demands - is oddly refreshing.

Starting off with older ventures into experimentation with electricity from its nominal Greek roots to Einstein and Tesla's squabbles in business over alternating and direct current the article does a good job of getting readers up to speed on not just what electricity was at the time, but what it meant - and in many cases, it was simply a medium that hadn't been fully explored, and by proxy of that was prone to the same follies of any foreign element, such as fearmongering, in the case of the aforementioned AC-DC debacle with Einstein and Tesla.

That being said, the potential for an artistic medium was always there, as evidenced by later experimental "performances" such as the Stephen Gray static electricity demonstration. However, electricity serves as more of a performance-based art, with humans serving as the medium in many cases; the ability for the human body to serve as a conductor for electrical charge paved the way for multiple exercises in performance art where electricity quite literally served as the spark of the performance, rather than inherently being the medium itself. This could be as subtle as Gray's lighthearted parody / social commentary through running a current through two boys connected via metal or hand-holding, or as powerful as the employed lethality of Leyden jar discharges.

Ultimately, modern-day electrical performance art focuses more on the direct (now often controlled) manipulation of the human body through electrical current, given the science behind neurology is more or less electrical and biochemical in nature in the first place. Thematic subtleties are now generally foregone in favor of illustration of precision and control capable through electrode choreography, with a specific example in the text mentioning MIDI electric guitars accompanying facial movements in perfect sync. Electricity, in this sense, has an interesting leg up on other similar art forms in that digital manipulation of tangible analog forms represents a level of control across both aforementioned mediums, wherein the human body could be strung along to an accompanying digital performance just as easily. While the manuscript is from 2002, it obviously still retains significance today, and as the field expands and advances, the evolution of performance art will continue to accompany it in lockstep.