ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at performances that utilize mobile and locative media to engage participants and performers in the tension over ideas of copresence and mediatized interactions. Performance has had a historic tension with asynchronous engagement, especially with recording technologies that, as Peggy Phelan has argued, transform performance into something else. The assumption that mobile devices only serve to reinforce copresent activities fails to acknowledge the intimacy fostered by asynchronous mobile communication, which often functions as the main, embodied space for social interaction. Embodied intimacy gained through the voice is done asynchronously in Rider Spoke, but this intimacy is achieved through an alteration of the ways mobile devices transform time. Mobile technologies have transformed the categories of synchronous “presence” and asynchronous “absence” into simply a social proprioception of “continual co-presence.” Increasingly, the mobile phone is becoming an important medium for this kind of exploration.
