“In the world of Peloton, exercise-at-home apps, and dance classes on Zoom, is physical co-location necessary? Join us for a discussion about the ethics of using digital ecosystems for training performance artists.”
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit because it sounds like Luddite bullshit or your grandfather yelling at clouds: there’s something that happens when you’re in a room with another human being that cannot, CANNOT, be replicated by any screen, no matter how many pixels you cram into it, no matter how crystal-clear the audio, no matter how immersive they promise the experience will be.
It’s the breath. It’s the fucking breath. You’re sitting there and some performer is fifteen feet away and you can feel them pulling air into their lungs and you realize you’re syncing up, you’re breathing together, you’re both mammals in the same space burning oxygen and creating carbon dioxide and there’s this ancient, pre-verbal thing happening that your lizard brain recognizes even if your fancy neocortex is too sophisticated to acknowledge it.
When you watch Joel Osteen on your flatscreen in your dirty underwear, and God bless you if you’re into that sort of thing. Safe. Isolated. You can pause him mid-smile to go make a sandwich. But walk into a cathedral, any cathedral, hell, walk into a basement EDM set or a community theater production, and suddenly you’re implicated. You’re there. The performer can see you, can bomb because of you, can be transformed by your presence. You’re not witnessing anymore, you’re participating in some weird ritual exchange that’s older than any language.
The mediated figure is a fucking ghost. The live figure is meat and sweat and the possibility of failure. One is product. The other is sacrament. And yeah, it’s inconvenient and expensive and you can’t pause it to piss, but that’s exactly why it matters.
That’s exactly why it’s sacred, and why God invented adult diapers.