Live Art in the Age of Animation

I am delighted that my research proposal The Remediation of the Gods: Live Art in the Age of Animation has been funded by the NSTC (National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan). The research will unfold between August 2025 and July 2026 and considers my long-standing interest in Live Art in light of recent works of art and performance that collaborate with gods.

ABSTRACT
Contemporary art and performance engage with religion (i) to exert socio-political commentary, (ii) to critique through transgression, or (iii) to create spaces for contemplation (Arya). Indeed, ritual is a historic trope of performance, especially of Performance Art. However, it does not, generally ‘do’ worship, which is to say: that which culture designates as “contemporary” art practice, eschews religion.

In Live Art practices, something is astir. Artists from the Asian diaspora appear to be sincerely designating a place for the gods. The gods are “remediated” (Bolter & Grusin) in Live Art, refashioned for an art audience. This is not irony, critique, or refuge; it is worship. In their respective works, Choy Ka Fa, Lee Mingwei, and Hsu Chia-Wei engage with religion as a practice: they make the gods manifest. Teri Silvio argues that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from The Age of Performance to The Age of Animation. “Performance is a process of becoming. Animation is a process of making” (Slivio p.275). In making the gods manifest, these artists animate social others in a counter-colonial strategy which shifts the locus of power from West to East. In doing so they become subject to the power and the agency of the very things they have brought to life (Latour).

The analysis of these artworks helps us to reconceive the relationship of performance to post-human and new materialist discourses and to focus attention away from identity and onto the environment; it also offers a model of human non-human interlocution that can mitigate the “the real risks of psychological entanglement” (Eisikovits par. 24) presented by our encounters with AI technologies.

This research proposal wants to explore the way in which performance, as configured through Live Art practices, ‘makes god’. The works I wish to focus on are:

• CosmicWander, 2020-2024 by Choy Ka Fai (a project series in multiple venues)
• Spirit House, 2022 by Lee Mingwei [李明維] (Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
• The Marshal Tie Jia Project [鐵甲元帥], 2012-2016 by Hsu Chia-Wei [許家維] (In part commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum)

REFERENCES
• Arya, Rina (2023) ‘Locating religion in contemporary art’ in Religion Compass Vol.17, Issue 4 / e12457
• Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, 2000 (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press
• Eisikovits, Nir (2023) ‘AI isn’t close to becoming sentient – the real danger lies in how easily we’re prone to anthropomorphize it’ in The Conversation (published March 15, 2023) https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-close-to-becoming-sentient-the-real-danger-lies-in-how-easilywere-prone-to-anthropomorphize-it-200525 Viewed September 19, 2024.
• Latour, Bruno (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham and London: Duke University Press
• Silvio, Teri (2020) Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press ISBN9780824881160