Performance Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

A Conversation with Performance Artist Ipek Koprulu

Published in

Narrative Design Podcast

3 min readNov 14, 2015

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the way we view spaces, presence, and interaction. How is this change reflected in contemporary performance art? And do traditional notions of “aesthetic distance” and “unveiling of truth” still stand?

In this episode, Bonni Rambatan talks with performance artist Ipek Koprulu on how she navigates the landscape of performance art in the age of ambient networked technologies. How does she tackle these fundamental changes in art, and what boundaries does she challenge?

Although the title is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s book, we actually talk more Martin Heidegger and William Bullough in this episode, as Bonni tries to take Wordpress’s famous “Code is Poetry” saying way too seriously.

Ipek talks about her projects, especially Internal/External, and her Evolution Trilogy, especially Chapters I (The Beginning) and II (In the Flash of an Eye). We suggest taking a look at these videos first so the podcast and comics above can make more sense!

Internal/External

Chapter I

Chapter II

Ipek also mentions a bit about Jake Weidmann and argues that, although her work explores new possibilities with digital technology, it is also very important that we preserve non-digital artforms such as penmanship.

This episode’s music is “Hymne de Apophia” by L o W & Crocodile Tears, and fragments of “Seikilos Epitaph with the Lyre of Apollo” by Lina Palera, both of which can be found here. Original music scores were created by our editor and audio engineer CJ Camelia Jonathan.