Fear of missing out: performance art through the lens of participatory culture

Abstract

This research project set out to examine FOMO through the curation of a performance art event. Referring to the ‘fear of missing out’, FOMO is posited as symptomatic of the ways in which embodied subjectivities are performed through participatory cultures. With the insidious co-option of such cultures by powerful multinational companies, come new ways in which the body is commodified in late-capitalist economies. This paper examines modes of prosumption emergent from digital and social media and considers strategies of performance in this context. It could be argued that performance art practices might resist or intervene in such discourses through a powerful ability to re-establish human connection through a live and affective performing or spectating experience (O’Dell 1998; Phelan 2005). However, liveness, affect and human connection are themselves enmeshed in digital cultures. This paper will consider how performance can think through the ways in which embodied subjectivities are produced through FOMO and ask whether in this context performance art practice can reclaim the affective body.