Computational Performance: A Praxis of Doing as Knowing

Abstract

Computation is a theoretical and creative practice involving coded interaction with electromagnetic signals to represent or simulate the world. While machinic code is often considered an imperative language—one that instructs signals to perform specific tasks with minimal deviation—this dissertation reconsiders code as a set of formulas that actively give form to the world around us. Reframing computational performance as it is used in industry as a measurement of optimization, efficiency, and efficacy, the dissertation proposes “computational performance” as a way in which code produces and reproduces forms of counting, color perception, and spatiotemporal dimensions. Computational performance as a framework relies on performance studies questions of appearance and disappearance and doing-as-knowing, Black studies questions of matter and flesh, as well as the media archaeological argument that material, extended to atomic matter, shapes knowledge and the possibility for knowledge. This dissertation presents computational performance as a useful analytic for how computers continue racialized, gendered, and otherwise colonial logics, as well as for the promise of techno-social tools to re-form counting, color perception, and spatiotemporal dimensions away from such logic. Turning to my arts practice in the game engine Unity, as well as other media artists, I propose to think of new media art as computational performance, as giving-form-to the world.