About

This practice-based project investigates how postmedial (Bay-Cheng, 2016) writing for performance can be considered an ecological practice. A key concern in my research is how we carry screen images in our day-to-day lives. As we use multiple screen devices, we are more than ever connected to an ongoing loop of screen images. This image loop is now actively drawn from and referred to in performance, either as subject matter or as imaginative material used by the audience to conjure what is being described in performance. This project’s overarching purpose is to investigate how writing for performance is shifting as practitioners and audiences are increasingly referring to the image loop. Furthermore, I hypothesise that the shift in writing for performance engaging with screen images instigates an ecology of performance that can be aligned with current concerns in ecotheory, exemplified in the discourse of Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton and Rob Nixon regarding alternative modes of representing the world in a time of climate crisis. Through the lens of ecotheory I will analyse my own practice to explore how writing for performance that is integrating screen worlds is enacting what Donna Haraway describes as a kind of ‘composting’ of organic and screen matter and in doing so conjuring ‘unexpected collaborations’ between the human, the technological and the fantastical.