Performing the web: negotiating affect and online aesthetics

• Main Author: Roberta Buiani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2014-04-01
• Series: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture
• Subjects: activisms; aesthetics; affect; platform politics; performance
• Online Access: http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/download/23699/33431

On October 1, 2011, following its public debut at a gallery in Toronto, the Sandbox Project made its appearance online, timidly emerging from the bursting folds of the popular Wordpress Content Management System (CMS). The Sandbox Project is an itinerant community art and activism laboratory consisting of a series of live events and a complementary online platform, both conceived as a collaborative effort of countless individuals. The project explores ways in which respectful and anti-oppressive processes of collaboration, the formation of alliances, and new lines of solidarity may occur between activists and artists working with different media and creative tactics. Now in its third year of existence, the website combines different CMS formats to experiment with new forms of online interaction and to respond to the diversity of interventions featured during the live events. Rather than functioning as a space that simply records and documents each event, the website took it upon itself to play with the live events (the laboratory) dynamically: it sought to give the visitor a sense of the vibrant atmosphere that the participants had been experiencing during live events, in order to elicit further online interactions and initiatives among past and current participants. The website and the live events aspired to complete each other, to become together one continuous and contiguous performance. But to what extent can the vibrancy of human behavior be played and conveyed online? This paper critically reflects on the difficulties in incorporating the project into today's manifold, yet homogeneous and homogenizing, online publishing options. In acknowledging this difficult process of mediation, it urges to reflect on the material and conceptual complications emerging from the involvement of diverse and far-apart communities and individuals.