Panel on “Data Bodies in/as Performance” (ASAP, New Orleans, 2018)

This paper explores the tangle of physical and digital bodies in screen performance today. Digital editing and animation techniques are entangling flesh with data in ever-more-baroque and -transformative ways. Rather than undermining the reign of realist acting, however, these techniques have only served to hyperbolize it. Stanislavsky and his American disciples taught actors to focus not on bodies but on the impulses animating them. Comparing this medial logic of the body to theories implied by digitally constructed acting (motion capture, face replacement, etc.) this paper asks: has realist acting always been posthuman?