Il corpo sullo schermo: trasformazioni della presenza nella performance tra mediazione, immersione e datificazione

In 1971 Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm; in 2007 Eva and Franco Mattes restaged the act inside Second Life. This thesis traces the trajectory between them: the transformation of bodily presence in Performance Art, from its origins to Digital Performance, shaped by technological mediation, virtual immersion and datafication. In the Performance Art of the 1960s-70s, presence coincided with physical co-presence between artist and spectator. Video and early telepresence unsettle this: presence can be mediated by technology without dissolving, following Fischer-Lichte’s distinction between bodily presence and presence-effects. Virtual reality pushes this further: Hayles’s critique of Moravec’s posthumanism tests the idea that the body could be replaced by pure information. The trajectory reaches the computational body, where performance — in surveillance, social media, interaction with AI — becomes an ordinary social condition: the body is tracked, quantified and translated into data. Through historical works (Abramović, Acconci, Klein, Sermon) and contemporary ones (Ulman, Barr, McCarthy), the thesis argues that the body does not disappear: it is continually reformulated, its vulnerability shifting rather than disappearing. The research asks what it means to be present when the body no longer necessarily shares the same space and time with others, and how Performance Art and Digital Performance redefine the relationship between body, technology and presence.