ABSTRACT
Mitchell’s theory of media directs us to three essential questions about artworks. The first is to ask how new work participates in the theatre of life innovation. The second is to ask how these new states come about through a reconfiguration of relationships between different elements that constitute the work, including living bodies, tools, techniques, practices, institutions, legal systems, and so on. Active audience participation in the work might bring us even closer to this new understanding of media such that we – as living processes ourselves – become part of the medium under scrutiny. In the theatre of life innovation, it is not only living bodies that are subject to transformation into new states but cultural and social life as well. In reconfiguring relationships between living bodies, tools, practices, institutions, and so on, new work can point to different possible future states, each with its own characteristics and consequences.
