ABSTRACT
This chapter asks a number of questions at the intersection of media and live performance studies. If scholars like Jussi Parikka have established the geologic life of media, what can we posit as the geologic life of performance? Can performance be a media remain? Is the hand that passes an object hand to hand —a coin, say, or a camera, or a phone – a media component? As such, is the hand part of the media that sloughs into obsolescence when replaced by new technology? Or does the hand remain as a kind of regenerative bio-matter when media sloughs? Is media, too, regenerative in the slough? What is the relationship of media obsolescence to performance remains? How can we think about gesture in relationship to media and mediatic remains? Looking at objects as recent as the iPhone and as obsolete as Roman game tokens and Paleolithic negative handprints, this essay considers bio-matter and technology as intra-active, entangled assemblages in a human/non-human obsolescence machine in which obsolescence is, paradoxically, continually produced anew.
