liveness and mediation

In reading Phillips Auslander’s Liveness, Performance in a Mediatized Culture, I came across an anecdote concerning The Doors in the early stages of their fame. Having been filmed playing on a television show, they wanted to be able to watch their performance as it was televised and so requested a TV be placed in their dressing room. As their segment had not yet come on before they had to play, they simply took it on stage with them and placed in on top of an amplifier with the sound turned down. When the segment started they stoped playing live mid song, turned up the television volume, and sat on the floor of the stage watching themselves, their backs to the audience. When their segment was over the resumed playing. The mediation of a previous event hence not only becomes part of the live event, it takes priority over it.

Traditionally a concept of the ‘live’ must remain in the present; the event happens simultaneously to the moment it is viewed. Most often the mediatisation of the original event does not take precedence, rather it is based on and around the authentic live moment. I am interested in how this can be reversed. How the ‘live’ or could I say the present action is dictated by the former recorded past action. In playing a past event simultaneous to a present event there is a sense of spatial co-presence alongside a temporal simultaneity. Past and present moments physically coexist. In (re)screen projection I projected the mediated on an opposing wall to the live action, forcing the viewer to chose between which they viewed, as despite being interdependent, neither could be viewed at the same time. When The Doors stopped playing to watch their mediatised performance there became a prioritising of the past event over the present.

Yet a television placed on stage with the sound turned up is not replacing the live performance. Rather through its smaller size and being re-viewed outside of itself (in the larger context of a seeing it on television, on stage, at a concert) it becomes abstracted. It becomes a prior performance embedded within a present performance. At this moment the crowd cannot experience the prior moment as it was but they can begin to realise the presentness of the particular situation which they are viewing, how it has been and continues to be modelled by a past performance and how this break in performance they are witnessing now, may model a future performance. The mediatised performance becomes a referent of the live and vice versa from one we can expect the other to behave in a similar way.