Technoparticipation: How to create a scene to explore the seen and the unseen through live Zoom performances during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond from the other side of the wall

Abstract

This article provides a reflective account of how, since November 2020, I have been developing forms of livestream poetry performance practice that, contributing to my ongoing critical digital pedagogy research project Technoparticipation, use Zoom as an immersive autoethnographic storytelling prototype. Emerging as a positive of using Zoom under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, it will theorize, articulate and demonstrate how I have explored the possibilities of Zoom to really enhance my creativity in what I am doing in terms of combining my performance, poetry and live cinema practice to create a multitude of regular livestream Zoom performances from the (at times, dis)comfort of my spare bedroom in South London. Innovative media re-use, text back and looping, voice layering and the use of filters on the Zoom platform result in a repetitive multi-layered multimedia socially specific creative live performance. Through colourful, immersive, structured, organic and disorientating collage, I narrate the experiences of many young queer people through my personal autobiography. Sharing these performances with other queer people and communities beyond, I generate, what I refer to as techno-empathy. They begin from the idea that queer existence itself is inherently performative; engaging the various roles that present themselves in a world of diversity. The world wide web introduces new possibilities for the construction of queer identity. In the manner of bricolage – building and constructing from what is at hand, piecing together images and visuals available on the internet and from my own personal archive of artworks as an artist of more than 25 years to explain one’s identity to oneself.