Actualizations of the human being. Reflections concerning some contemporary artistic languages from the practices of the Research Group Corpos Informaticos. Telepresence and teleperformance Art.

Performative Sites : Intersecting Art, Technology, and the body

Pennsylvania State University

October 2000

Actualizations of the human being. 

Reflections concerning some contemporary artistic languages from the practices of the Research Group Corpos Informaticos. 

Telepresence and teleperformance Art.

http://www.corpos.org/papers/performativesites.html

Maria Beatriz de Medeiros

My research group is named CORPOS INFORMATICOS (that means, in fact, COMPUTER BODIES). The group is constituted by artists in Visual Arts and Performance Art, originally from the University of Brasilia. It has been sponsored by the National Council for Scientific Research (CNPq) since 91, and by the brazilian Ministery of Culture in specific moments. We do exhibitions, urban interventions, performances, video-performances, and performances in telepresence throughout the country, the world, and via internet.

The group has developed research in Contemporary Art and the guideline of its reflections has been that of human beings "redimensioned" by omnipresent technologies: performance (human body in real time) – electronic images (color-light emitted in movement making mankind a support feature). The process reveals sparks of the symbolic convulsive ecology of the contemporary individual. Performances and exhibitions are presented not merely for the passive visual contemplation of the spectator, but rather to involve him and to make him part of a continuosly involving work of art. These presentations are held both with the scope of institutional art and in so-called public spaces. Exhibitions are not the interest of the group. Interaction, processes of interactive production and co-authorship matter to us.

Corpos Informáticos (numeric bodies, virtual bodies) is a philosophical impossibility, or an "incompossibility", as French philosophers would like. In cyberspace the body, the self, the other is "free" of his physical flesh: a resurrection?

             Through analysing the practice of the Group, we will discuss the Performance Art – body, live flesh –, the Net-art and the possibilities of the Performance Art in telepresence.

             Founded in 1991, Corpos Informáticos is a research group in contemporary art, art and technology. Its practices are the interactive artistic exhibitions, performances, video-performances, video-installations, and video-art. Its theoretical basis will be here outlined, aiming to reach a broader analysis of the contemporary artistic languages involving technology.

             The first objective of the Group was to question the possible relations between, on the one side, the real body, the flesh-body, the presence body, i.e., the body of the Performance Art language, the one that updates the actual time on an art close to the audience, an art not to be respected, but asks: "touch me, please"; and on the other side, technology.

            

             Being a pluridisciplinary, interdisciplinary work, it could only occur within a group where the individuality would bring about its specificity, and would also accept its promiscuity. In the group’s proposal there has always been a great interest in each one’s specific knowledge (theater, fine arts, computer science, video, photography...), and there has always been a research in all involved areas of knowledge by each member of the group, thus the researchers of scenic arts have been stimulated to be behind a video-camera and/or in post-production, and those specialized in video or computer science were brought to act as performers.

             The technologies can no longer be called or considered new, though daily renewed at an unreasonable speed.¹ The so called new technologies are today, in fact, omnipresent technologies, omnipresent in all domains. As we shall see, anthropogenesis and technogenesis happen simultaneously and if we accepted the existence of new technologies, we would also have to accept the existence of a new mankind, which, we are certain, is not true.

             Corpos Informáticos worked intensely with video-technology. We worked in galleries, museums, institutional spaces, i.e., in-situ spaces, but we strongly believed in an ex-situ work, done in public places, or as Abraham Moles states, the police spaces, the ones we believe to be public spaces: squares, bus stations... The typical of Performance Art is to take place live, in life, and to be open to the participation of the audience, making it sometimes a co-author. The Performance Art in public spaces, by taking the transient from daily life, re-dimensions spaces and, consequently, habits, and generates a greater participation of the audience. The interest of having numerical technology in the "communication" network is the possibility of real time interaction, aspect in which it encounters Performance Art. But can the network be considered ex-situ? Is every work done in the Net condemned to be in-situ?

It is proper of the artistic language to happen in life (in real presence and real time), and to be open to the audience’s participation, sometimes making it a co-author. Many performances have experienced limitations, the limitations of physical, psychic, emotional capacity; others have experienced the limits of life, defying it. Before the technologies are their limits, being frequently tested: new contents have been developed, but above all, the positive project of these technologies has been subverted.

The video technology, used in its specificity (recording, transmission, reception in a time very close to real), allows the performance to happen in real time; however, in a ghostly, spectral presence we call it "telepresence". The interest of having numerical technology in the so-called "communication" network, the Internet, is this possibility that the performance happens almost in real time, and is interactive; aspects in which this technology encounters, more fully, the Performance Art language. Then, the so-called communication Net, which is in fact only information, becomes a communication net through this possibility of interaction. We could say the communication is only communication when there is Performance: real interaction, thus, communication.

The research thread is an investigation about the possibility of "digital bodies", of "numerical flesh-body", the possibility of survival of a sensual and sexual body turned into image, or rather, a body turned into presence only by the bombarding of luminous rays, generating the sensation of ghostly movements; a desire of real presence. Is the perception of the existence of the other’s desire already capable of generating pleasure? Is the perception of the existence of the other’s desire, for me, already capable of generating aesthetic pleasure? Is beauty accomplished in the other's image on the screen (of a video or a computer) or is it accomplished in my knowledge that the other is there because he wishes to be with me?

             Since 1996 the members of the group, formed in Brasília, lived or have been living in different cities, in different countries. So, since then, the group has worked via the communication net, on this possibility of being together without being physically real, though being present. We work "together" through electronic means. And saudades (longing for each other) is no longer good: it is a necessary, an irreductible contradiction.

Teleperformance turns the body "present"; it turns current the absent body. But we use also the telephone, because after various e-mail messages something more dynamic became necessary; a closer talk to fill in the blanks that only voice intonation permits to unveil. In Wittgensteinian terms, we would say that we probably needed the phone for a desire to live an aspect of dialogue, for a desire to pick up the resonance of the inarticulated language. The tone, the intonation which is not articulated in the sentence, which is not said in words. A dialogue in the other’s physical presence would allow us to notice other aspects, expressed by the face, much valued by Wittgenstein, but also aspect from gestures, from the whole body.

The telepresence imposes itself broken; the quotidian seems to draw the other out of virtual space. Though being a desire, though being pleasure, though being an encounter, the bell-ring answer is physical, immediate, automatic, and it ruptures. There is no urgency in virtual communication: nobody leaves, nobody comes, we are always there-here, since we are not here-there. The dialogue evolves through syncope... and great encounters.

             The researches on teleperformance demand a higher engagement, for the equipment demands from the self to be with, demands presence. The television demands presence, according to McLuhan, the computer demands total dedication. Watching TV I lie, in the computer I grow rusty. I surrender to its still insufficient ergonomic design. Teleperformance demands presence, sometimes a rude presence because of the difference between time zones. Still it is the quotidian that shouts, which wants us; the quotidian, the tangible, are jealous of the telepresence, jealous of the virtual. Yet telepresence reveals itself real, that is, quasi-presence, quasi-gifted of touch, quasi-gifted of aspect, to speak once more in Wittgenstein’s terms. I have said that we would seek the telephone since it can rescue to us one more aspect of being that is lost in e-mails and electronic communications, that is, intonation, which articulated language lacks. On telepresence, with visualization and listening to the other, the others, we can confront ourselves with more aspects of unarticulated language. Although it is an impossibility, or an "incompossibility", the digital body, the numerical body is capable of quasi-performance, capable of communication, of affection. Precisely, through revealing more of those unarticulated aspects in articulated language, teleperformance is capable of encounter, capable of aesthetic pleasure. It is in this sense that, inquiring about icons and hypo-icons, Umberto Eco, referring to television in closed circuit, gets to the apparently amazing assertion:

"So, and always from the theoretical point of view, all that appears on a television screen is a sign of nothing: it is a specular image which the observer apprehends with that confidence we yield to specular image. " ²

             We shall understand along with Umberto Eco that a simple mirror is a specular image, that is to say, it is an "absolute double of the stimuli the our eyes would receive if we were before the object" ³. Type and occurence coincide in it. A specular image does not lie, and it is not a mark. A mark, as a photographic image, is a sign for "it sends a content, and a content is always more general" ⁴; to what we would add that television image either in closed circuit or on telepresence is also absolute double of what we would receive through our ears. On television, in closed circuit for Umberto Eco, and on telepresence for us, the quality of image is inferior to that on a simple mirror; therefore, there is some part of the television image character that would belong to the order of the stimulus of substitution. Nevertheless, in opposition to photographic or cinematographic image, which are indexes belonging to the universe of signification or communication, a television image in closed circuit is a prothesis, a paraspecular phenomenon and still an extensive and intrusive prothesis; and to what we would add that it is, moreover, a magnifying (démultipliantes, in the French translation) prothesis. So, concluding along with Umberto Eco, that would explain our tendency to trust the television image, to consume it without limits, not perceiving its interpretative strategies. Television, not being a sign as photography and cinema, would lead us not to mistrust it, for "we do not (almost never) mistrust our perceptions." ⁵ Umberto Eco’s analysis confirms what we have asserted along with Wittgenstein.

             It would be necessary to say, at this point, that we live surrounded by fantastic images, hyper-produced images, more real than the real, much more beautiful than seen in life: images that cannot be seen by the naked eye, from the macro to the micro universes, but also images sometimes of our own cities, of our own neighborhoods, of ourselves, much more beautiful than the real; I use to refer to the eficaci®realidade, a word I created to link the concepts of an unreal reality, a real or unreal efficacy, a real unreality: eficácia e realidade, which word trick is lost in the translation. Then we feel not only small, but miserable, incapable of seeing what the images really show. In reality the waterfall is beautiful, wonderful, but in this place there are mosquitoes, bees, in Brazil, snakes. In the movies or watching a video at home, how comfortable! Then we feel somehow impotent to create, recreate, life as in the films. In telepresence the image is one of very low quality, the size of the screens is mininal, and the users stay there for hours believing to meet others. They believe in this image, because they are specular, as Umberto Eco says, but I believe that beyond this, in the presence of low definition, the user recognizes himself. Here is no super production, so there is a greater identification with the aesthetic results, consequently a greater commitment. The homely, incomplete, unfinished aspect would be a factor of identification as the user would be out of this world "more real than the real", out of this world of eficaci®realidade.

             Before we continue, it is necessary to return to the performance issue and its possibilities on telepresence since the term performance puts us a limit-problem, as Bert O. States adverts.⁶ The evolution of this term has been marked by a chaotic process which obliges us to rectify another detail.

             When we speak of performance on telepresence, we are confronted with the two applications of the term ‘performance’: that of the artistic language born in the 60’s and 70’s proceeding from the fine arts, theatre and poetry; and that of a machine, in this case, performance measured in terms of input/output (input: spent energy; output: production). An optimum performance of a machine is that which spends the lesser energy for a higher production. ⁷

             Many times performance art is optimum exactly when it does not utilize the best performance of the machine but, on the contrary, when it inverts its efficacy, unveiling the machine’s other face and possibilities. Performance Art shall be optimum when there is maximum interaction between artist-work-audience, when those three aesthetic elements of performance have their roles confounded. Both the artist’s and the audience’s physical effort shall be neither proportional nor inversely proportional to the interaction and communication "rate". The machine performs.

The fourth aesthetic element of Performance Art is time, as line and colour are aesthetic elements of painting. That fourth one does not represent any hierarchical order with the other three elements above mentioned; it may be that time is the first aesthetic element of performance, hierarchically speaking. Performance art happens in time; its ephemerality is a condition. Records shall remain records and, by remaining, shall be half-dead, though capable of resonances. Records are but an obscure reflection, a deafened echo of a stanched pleasure. They are indexes which we treat as signs, that is, which we mistrust, Umberco Eco would say. Documentation on videos and/or photographs are only fragments, temporal cuts, reflections in other languages, documental and/or artistic languages plenty of their technical specificities. Performance shall be irremediably over.

             As for ephemerality, we cite, to arouse reflection, Jean-Claude Ameisen, Professor of Immunology at the University of Paris VII, in his article "In the Heart of the Living Being, Self-destruction", printed in Le Monde, in which he affirms:

            "(1) The progressive aging of each cell, while it gives birth to younger and more fecund cells; (2) the brutal self-destruction of part of the cells to the joy of survival for the rest of the collectivity; (3) the aging of a body capable of generating new bodies: all those ends of the world, giving birth to new worlds, seem variations of the same theme." ⁸

             For us, ephemerality is a condition of Performance Art. The only form of live art, that is, an art capable of dying.

             An artistic performance, in our opinion, must be a unique and irreprodutible gesture, that is, non-machinal, non-automatic, non-mechanical. Differently from various artists and thinkers of Performance Art, we do not consider rituals and folkloric manifestations as arts of performance. Take Foucault in A ordem dodiscurso (The Order of Discourse): ritual is "the most superficial and visible form of systems of restriction" ⁹, it (the ritual) designates both the persons who speak and their gestures, behaviors, circunstances, signs, rhythms, etc.

             Let us remember: the image of the other on the screen is ascetic, it threatens not, it is not capable of biting, it sweats not, it smells not.

             Artistic performance demands recognition of oneself in the other. What are the possibilities of involvement with electronically re-produced images and sounds?

             Before continuing I would like to introduce a concept thought by the Corpos Informáticos Research Group. As a group, we believe in something we call "pronoia". (Nós – the Portuguese word for "us", nous, the french word for "us" - comes from the Greek noia.) Let us highlight that noia means intelligence in Plato, for in his view the thought happens within the dialog. The prefix para indicates "disordered functioning". So, the paranoid is one who has a disordered function towards the "us". For us, the "pronoia" is the opposite of "paranoia", which is a permanent feeling of mistrust toward others, a feeling of persecution. Thus "pronoia" is a feeling, existent in the Group, that at every moment someone is conspiring for, and not against, us. We are "pronoids". Utopia? Is this the place of pronoia, a non-place? Even though it may be utopic, in practice it has worked. It seems to me there is a saying in English which goes like this: "There is a difference between working in a team, and working as a team. In a real team one plus one is equal four". Among the French we found Jean-Marie Doguet and his concept of nous originaire. His seminar in the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris, from February 5th to March 26th 1999) was called "I, you, us: a contribution to a philosophy for interlocution". This work is still unpublished. J-M. Doguet worked on the concept of nous originaire. The concept of "us" is seldom approached on by western philosophers. Doguet, in an incomparable view of Kant (in Critique of Judgement), revealed the concept of nous originaire  that goes far beyond the understanding of a group work, or a specificity of the Performance Art language: a concept of "us" that could, if we were conscious, lead us to respect the other, and maybe, without hypocrisy, to the resolution of many ecological problems and even to world peace. And all this, through beauty, through Kant’s statement: "beauty is everything that gives pleasure, universally, without concepts".

             J.-M. Doguet distinguishes three categories of the person "us" in the language: the purely referential "us", as the one we are using in this text; the representative "us", which I have used here when I mentioned "us", members of the Corpos Informáticos Research Group, and the "us" of interlocution. The last is the one that allows communication, interlocution, the intersubjective relation. In interlocution there is an acknowledgement of the other and an equal, that is, the "I" recognizes itself as the author of the enunciate (the subject of the communication); it gives the other, the "you", the same quality and makes him realize it; it turns the other an interlocuter (making him participate in the community); it makes itself and the other responsible before reality; it gives this same quality to all users of communication and recognizes in them these attributions.

Continuing, J.-M. Doguet made a critique to Descartes (naming his philosophy "egopsychology"), and to Leibniz and his "monadology" (a philosophy in which the individuals do not recognize each other) and made compliments to Kant in the third Critique, where the faculty of judgement would imply in "going beyond oneself": "beauty is everything that gives pleasure, universally, without concepts". In Doguet’s interpretation of this notion of beauty, proposed by Kant, beauty can be universally shared, not universally in fact, but symbolically. In this "universally", in this possibility of sharing, in this possibility that there is an aesthetic sensus communis, the subject of the taste feels, and wants, to be a member of a community with the same taste, and for this to happen, elevates the other to the same status attributed to himself, that is, he sees the other ("you") as a part of the "us for interlocution". Or in other words, through the sense of beauty, the "I" feels pleasure, a pleasure that is felt as universally shareable, and consequently this "I" recognizes itself as part of a humanity, part of a nous originaire.

             Since it recognizes the other as an equal, the "I" also recognizes the other as a subject of the communication, that is, a possible author of an enunciate, among other precedent characteristics mentioned, thus it recognizes in the other the possibility of not feeling the beauty of something. The disagreement would not generate polemics, on the one hand, for it is universally shareable without concepts, and on the other hand, for the recognizing the other as capable of authorship.

To think the concept of "us", the possible existence of a nous originaire, to think and to make others thinks about "pronoia", about how to work as a team, is a current necessity of philosophy, and it is a current necessity of the world made unique by the new communication means, that shorten time expanding space.

It is worth to highlight that the view of J.-M. Doguet of Kant is a contemporary one, that is, "it is permitted to review Kant, after him, and despite him", according to Doguet himself. And still, that Kant in the Critique of Judgement, when referring to the quoted beauty, referred uniquely to art, and that Doguet extends this beauty to the natural, to the simply beautiful, whether it is attributed to art or not.

             If philosophy were able of a revolution… the nous originaire (Doguet) could found it. If art were capable of revolution… maybe "pronoia" could found it.

             In actual time, we had seen its possibilities through revealing aspect, through being paraspecular. Therefore, when the Net is communication on telepresence, it becomes world communication Net (without quotation marks). What about pre-recorded, set, trick images of bodies? We cannot deny that printed images, films, videos and erotic sites excite. The number of consumers of those images and visitors to those Net sites confirms their capability of exciting, of provoking desire to be with. Desire for the other, or the other of desire? Possibility of uninterested pleasure? Kant would certainly respond that erotic images, cheap reproductions, are uncapable of giving aesthetic pleasure.

Does knowing that the other desires me, does feeling that the other desires me make more present than the real? Quasi-presence, quasi-real. Those characteristics are not particular of communication mediated by new technologies. Somehow, that quasi has always been there.

             Jean-François Lyotard believed that no encounter was possible. Wittgenstein, referring to what cannot be said through articulated language, spoke of a remainder, a sort of debt of articulated language to what exceeds it and what shall remain from it. Is it not so that the remainder also reveals itself on the quasi of quasi-real, quasi-presence? That unspeakable (Barthes) is what philosophy and arts pursue, each one in its own specificity. But science also pursues that unknown. That pursuit is conscious of the impossibility of final satisfaction. That unattainable has always been there, or dejà-là (Heidegger, Derrida), whether as aspect (Wittgenstein), whether in presence or in absence. Articulated language, though we include there gestures and screams, cannot reveal it.

             We could also, borrowing words from Lyotard and Deleuze, refer to the "unmeasurable distance" created through the mediation between what is the other (subject or object), and the self. After all, it is a fissure both in presence and on telepresence, fissure plenty of desire (the place of desire?), desire for satisfaction which we feel-know is unaccessible.

            For Heidegger, technique is dévoilement (unveiling), that is, discovery, disclosure of the real, provocation of dévoilement.

            From another point of view, technology and technique are hominizing elements par excellence. Leroi-Gourhan does not distinguish the origins of man from the origins of technique, as Bernard Stiègler very well summarized in his colloquy at the Collège International de Philosophie, which I cite:

"Leroi-Gourhan placed in the heart of his hominization analyses the concepts of program and process of exteriorization, which largely destroy the new stage of the Derridian thought that On Gramatology expounds.

"Leroi-Gourhan showed that it is impossible to dissociate anthropogenesis from technogenesis, that technogenesis pursues the conquest of mobility, that is, life, through other means than life, (...) the technical exteriorization of the living assigns the very origins of man, the technical object constitutes as such a memory support (and the condition of what Plato named hypomnesia), (...)" ¹⁰

Anthropogenesis and technogenesis happen simultaneously. When human being leaves his mark, he seeks to resist the devastation of his mortality (Hannah Arendt), and that mark becomes part of that (those) person(s), so part of what the human being comprehends as oneself, as the other, as the world, a world of which one is just a part of, for one is already impregnated with the marks of the past, with the past marks. Stiègler denominates them "tertiary remembrances" (souvenirs tertiaires). Each mark makes the universe more complex; they are marks that one infringes upon matter, but also infringes upon oneself, and lets oneself be infringed by.

            Thus every trace, every mark left by human beings, all of one’s works are implants already, human’s actualizations as such. That infinite anthropogenesis (senseless only if one does not take the social into consideration), which seeks to attain the unaccessible, has always been there. It is the very search, interminable, of one’s immortality, it is a search for the unspeakable, a search for ransom from the remainder. It is a search for encountering oneself, which is only possible – always remaining just a promise – through encountering the other, encountering the other in the bosom of the nous originaire.

            The new technologies, the omnipresent technologies, every technique, have always sought that unaccessible, which has always been there. To have conscience of its existence is what makes one human, it is what distinguishes the human being: the promise of encounter (unattainable), the promise of integral communication in actual time.

           

Before finishing, I would like to take this opportunity to mention another great concern of the Corpos Informáticos Research Group. It is about terms extended by metaphors, that is, by dangerous metaphors. To introduce this quick speech I will quote Nietzsche:

"What then is truth? A moving troup of metaphors [...] which after long being used are taken as solid, canonical, credible by a people: truths are illusions that we forget to be so. " ¹¹

I am talking about the "post-biological era", so frequently used by artists of the art accomplished through technologies. I am worried about terms that have their meaning extended, through non scrupulous use of metaphores, until the complete loss of their meanings. An irremediable death. The creation of new terms would be appropriate for new dimensions (fractal dimensions).

Conscience is being redimensioned by technologies, however the repetition of the body extended by technologies (based on wrong comprehensions) bothers me intensely. A sattelite can make me conscious of fields unseen until today – to see, to watch and to punish (Michel Foucault), but I cannot pluck out my eyes. With a redimensioned conscience, with the symbolic ecology of the individuals and the society in ebullition, the real body is still the one that makes me conscious of my being, of the other and of the world. On the other hand, we are becoming more conscious of the complexity of the WEB, of the time arrow (Ilya Prigogine), of the hypertextual complexity, of the multidirectionality of human thought, of the non-linearity of the real and of imagination, of the development of scientific thought, of thought, of the eco-system, of time etc.. Thus I realize how innapropriate is the term "post-biological era". "Post-biological" would imply, on the one hand, in linearity (as proposed by Descartes, the Illuminism philosophers, the thinkers who founded the Aufklärung, as understood by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialethics of Reason ("thoughts of the progress", "philosophy of the progress"), and on the other hand, in the overcoming of the biological. A post-human era would only be possible after the last man’s death, as Derrida would say; a post-biological era would only be possible after the last biological being’s death. We propose, then, the era of foldings (Folding era ©). Not an unfolding era, but one of folding (and we confess our deleuzian inspiration: in this era the biological folds itself over the technological, the anthropological over the sociological, the ecology folds itself over the anterior folding, and so on (physics, chemistry, geography, history). Starting from this thought we created the Corpos Informáticos site, which can be visited today at www.stas.net/crocha/corpos .

            Notes

            1. Initially it was an American race of technological development for the world control of information, for the world's Net of information. It was a race already won by Americans, but which remains a race, for those and for others, an infinite race in infinite acceleration. I have said "world's Net of information", since information is not communication, on the contrary, the two oppose each other. Information, once verified, dies. And yet, can we call that watery stew of given nonsense information? To inform, more than some photograms of disasters, wars, or the burial of kings, the wedding of princesses, is demanded... To communicate means to communicate with. And it means the communication of knowledge, of feelings, of sensations. The Internet was born wanting to be a space for freedom, or at least calling itself a space for freedom, wanting to be a space for interactivity between individuals and societies; today the Internet is full of filters and tolls. And it still tends to become a numerical television, half-unilateral, of "information". The "triumph of the market spirit", wrote by Dan Schiller in his article: "Bataille mondiale pour le contrôle des réseaux", Manière de voir, #46: Révolution dans la communication, ed. Le Monde diplomatique, July, August 1999, pp. 12 to 15, p. 15, translated from French to Portuguese by ourselves.

            2. Eco, Umberto, Kant et l'ornithorynque, ed. Grasset, Paris, 1999, translated from Italian to French by Julien Gayrard, p. 384, and from French to Portuguese by us. In the translation to Portuguese (ed. Record, 1998), by Ana Thereza B. Vieira, we read "Thus, and always from a theoretical point of view, what appears on the television screen is not sign of anything: it is a paraspecular image, which is understood by the observer with the faith we bestow on the specular image", p. 313.

            3. Ibid., p. 377.

            4. Ibid., p. 378.

            5. Ibid., p. 384.

            6. States, Bert O., "Performance as metaphor", in Theatre Journal, March 96, pp. 1 to 21.

            7. We could still speak of Austin's term of "performative enunciation", resumed by Lyotard in The Post-modern condition, but since I have done that analysis in profundity on the text "Rarefied borders of Performance Art language and its possibilities in technological means", published in the "Performance" magazine, ed. Universidade de Brasília, 1998, organized by the group TRANSE, under coordination of João Gabriel L. C. Teixeira, I refer to that publication on that matter.

            8. Ameisen, Jean-Claude. "Au coeur du vivant, l'auto-destruction", Le Monde, october 16 1999, p. 16), translated by us.

            9. Foucault, Michel, A ordem do discurso. Inaugural class at the Collége de France pronounced on December 2nd, 1970, ed. Loyola, São Paulo, 1996.

            10. Bernard Stiègler, colloquium at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, "Derrida et la Phénoménologie". Stiègler's intervention was entitled "Fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prothesis of faith", translated by us.

11. Nietzsche F. cited in Kunzmann, Peter; Burkard, Franz-Peter, and Wiedmann, Franz. Atlas de la Philosophie. La pochothèque, Encyclopédies d'aujourd'hui, Paris (1991) 1993, translated by us.