• Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room

    Author(s):
    Joseph Dunne (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    CityLIS, Digital Humanists, Library & Information Science, Performance Studies
    Subject(s):
    Social media, Terrorism--Social aspects, Internet
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    #citylis, #theatre, #terrorism, #conspiracytheory, Sociology of terrorism
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/z7zf-1276
    Abstract:
    The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1671720
    Publisher:
    Informa UK Limited
    Pub. Date:
    2019-11-21
    Journal:
    Performance Research
    Volume:
    24
    Issue:
    5
    Page Range:
    65 - 73
    ISSN:
    1352-8165,1469-9990
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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