II. Where is performance cinema?

An obvious point to the geographic "where" question is the fortuitous position of San Francisco – located between Skywalker Ranch in Marin County to the North and Silicon Valley in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties to the South, it is only logical that this symposium should happen HERE. It could just as easily have happened in London, Berlin, New York or Chicago, but there are very few places on earth that presently have the same density and distribution of creative, cinematic, musical, computer, and technology workers, artists, programmers, and performers that the San Francisco Bay Area is presently blessed with. As I noted, SF is not uniquely blessed, but, like some of the other cities I noted, generously blessed, so it makes sense that we are Here today, and not in Amarillo Texas or Nome Alaska.

This is an interesting question as it also has a number of political considerations that should be clarified over time. While it is obviously starting here, due to the reducing costs of video technology and the relentlessness of Moore’s Law in that regard, it shan’t be too much longer until other less technologically developed countries create their own cinematic performances that will exhibit qualities and characteristics peculiar to their immediate conditions and cinematic histories, which can only serve to deepen and inform the practice as a whole.

Another point of "Where" is : where Performance Cinema sits aesthetically. As I mentioned earlier, I see it very much sitting somewhere between cinema, theatre, and music – drawing from elements of each, but not explainable by any one in specific. It may be fruitful to locate Performance Cinema as a fundamentally interdisciplinary art.

A big question is how one would distinguish performance art from Performance Cinema. I see them as overlapping sets. Not all Performance Cinema is Performance Art, and vice versa. One obvious signifier is the necessity of motion pictures. Performance Art exists without the necessity of that requisite feature. As the performer in Performance Cinema has a variable exposure to audience cathexis, those with the least or decentered exposure make it debatable as to whether their particular form of performance cinema is necessarily performance art, except in the most broad and absurd sense possible. Hence, I see Performance Cinema as a discipline requiring its own discourse (be it formative, formalist, aesthetic, practical, etc.), and the historical necessity of this symposium.