Image from:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/mar/11/should-eu-ban-pornography-in-old-masters [Accessed 22 February 2015]

This week’s reading was Theatre / Archaeology by Mike Pearson.

The reading identified how forensic science is performative. This is shown through the need to document every detail, representing how they are trying to keep this moment of past as present. This need for documentation, not just for science but for everyday life, is because the moment can never truly be repeated, “the object of documentation then is to devise models for the recontextualization of performance as text and second-order performance, as a creative process in the present and not as speculation on past meaning or intention” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 59).

This reading relates to ephemerality. Through site-specific performance however, we can keep the past performance in the present through documentation.

Works Cited:

Pearson, M., and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre / Archaeology. London: Routledge.