Self-reflexive performance: Dancing with the computed audience of culture

Keywords Culture Reflexivity Computing Audience Identity Meta-audience Offstage performance Typically performance is a display for others, and is time-limited. But if we also regard everyday life as a performance, we see that it is a continuous improvisation—a multi-faceted dance with an audience that is our social and cultural milieu. In moments of self-reflection, we ourselves motivate this performance, seizing these occasions to explore and debate our relationship to culture and our reflexive situation within it. This article introduces a digitally mediated framework for real-time self-reflexive performance, called the Identity Mirror. Here, the audience is a computational model of culture himself—his moods complex and shifting constantly according to daily happenstance. The mirror shows the performer her dynamic and panoptic reflection against culture, which she can negotiate through dance. The article goes on to unravel the politics of self-reflexive performance—exploring the ideas of cultural persona, facets, and shadows, and gestating a future where these performances can be sustained as a daily dialogic, and co-performances can be had amongst friends.