From interaction to intra-action in performing landscape

When we try to understand and articulate an artistic practice called performing landscape, it proves helpful to understand various (f)actors, such as, for instance, the wind, the tripod, the scarf, the body, and so on, as interacting collaborators within an assemblage of various materialities (Bennett, 2010). Prompted by Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) overview of the discussions around the posthuman, however, we could ask whether it is possible to understand the interaction more like an “intra-action” (Barad, 2007), where the entanglement of the various components is a pre-condition, rather than a result, of the action. Perhaps the split of the artist into a performer in front of the camera and a witness behind it could be understood as an agential cut of sorts? In the case of a previous practice — performing with plants — intra-action is intuitively easier to assume, due to the symbiotic interdependence of animals and plants in their exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. But could we understand performing for the camera, with a small swing attached to a tree, as an intra-action as well? And if so, what would be the methodological advantages of pursuing such an understanding?

This case study set within the field of performance as research and artistic research is related to the mattering of the digital, since the practice itself is to a large extent digital, although the main focus of the paper is on methodological questions.