Not only are “prediction products” what “Zuboff sees as the true basis of the surveillance industry”, “which anticipate what users will do now, soon, and later”, but our behaviors are being shaped by technology firms, for us (Netizens or by media newly constructed subjects) to become even more predictable. (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-10/new-masters-universe) How do these predicted and even created actions connect to the “digito- analogic hybrid forms” and processes of today? (Critical Art Ensemble, Recombinant Theatre and the Digital Resistance, MIT Press 2016, p.153) I got to the point of asking: What is improvisation today within the time of technology and how are we being choreographed? Fred Moten says that music is the improvisation of organization. We can consider improvisation as the nexus of the digital (order from order) and the analog (chaos from order, order from chaos). Inventing the term “Monk’s Law” Fred Moten asks: “Is genious that which gives or that which breaks the rule?” and answers it by saying that giving and breaking are bound up with one another. (So maybe rather a Musizen than a Musician- considering the contingent element of improvisation – as an “encounter between a statement and situations or movements“). The “mode of deterritorialization” and “the unknown outcome” of the experimental Recombinant theatre carries the unpredictability within order as improvisation, and can therefore be put in conversation with Mark Poster’s Internet “containing the potential of new practices”, that “de- and reterritorialzes exchanges” and is interdisciplinary: “any point may establish exchanges with any other point or points, a configuration that makes the Internet very difficult, if not impossible, to control by the nation-state.” (p. 78/79 Mark Poster Information Please) Brian T.Edwards in his article Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie Determination of Nations, quoting Bill Pruitt talking about Trump on p.26: “You never knew what was going to happen exactly. It was like the greatest, grandest improvised theater with all the stakes woven into it.” I see Trump’s constant unpredictability as an important part and tactic of his political spectacle of power.
How do multiple fleshless bodies improvise with each other? It is true that “Social Media creates communities (…)” (p.38, Brian T. Edwards) and that “the internet contains the potential of new practices” (p.78 Mark Poster). Nevertheless, I believe that as artists, we share a common interest on understanding performing arts as a way to create places for gathering. “(…) the body is still the key building block of theatre” (p.163, CAE) and virtual communities through virtual theatre create a disembodiment that will prevent important and necessary social gatherings of flesh and bodies, of spec-actors from the contingent qualities of improvising together in the digital age- FLESHNETS.