Play

”Play is older than culture (…), animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men.” Johan Huizinga 1938: Homo Ludens.

AIBO: The most highly developed robotic dog designed and manufactured by Sony between 1999 and 2006. Using a variety of sensory receptors is reacts to touch, sound and the environment it sees around itself; it dances, plays ball, learns from feedback, and so on. The greatest number of Aibos were sold in Japan, where owners became very attached to them and even founded Aibo clinics for broken robotic dogs, for their ‘babies’.

A question and a proposal

Our time has been called the age of global performance; it has been said that performance and spectatorship define us living at the beginning of 21st century. At the same time we are living in an age of ecological crises, and many researchers consider the extinctions of animal species to be our greatest thread.

How would it be possible to find a way out of the performative society, or at least move to its periphery, and change the meaning of spectatorship?

A proposal: Create a performance with non-human actor(s), or create a performance for a non-human spectator. Other than human, as non-human agents, we mean here beings and processes of “nature”: other animals, plants, phenomena of weather, various durational processes. If you wish to share your experiences, you can do it via the Chronopolitics Facebook page. But public sharing might not be the most meaningful way to approach this issue in the performative societies. You can also contact Maus&Orlovski performance collective by e-mail: Enable JavaScript to view protected content.