Being scene-un/seen: Demonstrations, theatricality and community afterlives in technological mediation

Abstract

This article examines the visibility of communities of demonstration and protest in live happening and in digital reproduction – how a protesting community becomes seen, individuals unseen and how theatrical elements are employed and deployed to enhance and augment such visibility as a scene. Looking at protests by Extinction Rebellion (XR), I observe how heightened performance/theatricality saturates their demonstrations and spawns heightened visibility. This hyper-articulates their messages as optically charged, ready for representation in photography, video and audio that can echo through media channels. Instigated with an intention for a technologically reproduced and mediatized after-event – a digital afterlife. In this sense, theatricalizing the demonstration event as performance scene makes it, and any associated messages, ready to transcend event time–space and become a demonstration hyper-object, following Timothy Morton. That is, through theatrical performance their message/statement/community becomes part of a massive entity that exists beyond local scales of space and time. As accessible, temporally extensive data such communities and messages exist far beyond the live protest. While not an object per se, XR’s messages and their affective impact contaminate and spread by being commented on, seen, retweeted, hash-tagged, forwarded, printed and so on in print and digital media spaces. In so doing, they reach far greater audiences than those at the demonstration event, amplifying their virtual spaces with the community’s application of theatricality working both as a catalyst and carrier.