Performance Art: Actualizing Science Fiction

The article examines examples of live performance art that explore themes related to the genre of science fiction, and argues that in significant ways they make concrete and actualize the narratives of sci-fi. Works by artists including Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Hayden Fowler, Fakeshop, Orlan, Norman White and Laura Kikauka are simultaneously political gestures, technical feats, and embodied art processes that both look forward to becoming the future and actualize a version of it in the present, live in front of us. As potently as any sci-fi novelists or filmmakers, performance artists have taken on what Braidotti calls "the visionary and didactic role" of science fiction to enact, with corporeal bodies in real time and space, a powerful "post-humanist, bio-centred egalitarianism" that estranges and displaces our world-view and establishes "a continuum with the animal, mineral, vegetable, extraterrestrial and technological worlds." (Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, p. 183).
Citation:
Dixon, Steve. "Performance Art: Actualizing Science Fiction." The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 263-276.