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Fair companions...Adventure is dead

Re:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting is one of a number of publications examining the recent practice and use of reconstruction and re-enactment in Contemporary Art and included articles by Jan Verwoert and Jennifer Allen. Dickinson’s invited contribution to this collection, ‘Fair companions... adventure is dead’, argues that different forms of re-enactment and restaging have always been at the centre of moving image production, including documentaries that purport to be an accurate and authentic depiction of actuality, home movies, video diaries, reality television, CCTV footage and web forums, social networking sites and other online activities. Drawing on work by Debord, Foucault and Zizek, the chapter analyses experiments by Philip Zimbardo and others to investigate the ways in which humans unconsciously perform for the camera and discusses how ‘performance’ is integral to various apparently artless activities. The notion of performativity connect these practices to the more explicit strategies of re-enactments that can make visible the artifice that constitutes the events and subjects they are representing. The article thus contributes to a fuller historicised understanding of these practices and opens out the whole issue of authenticity and mediation in the media.

The chapter articulates the methodology and theoretical understanding that underpins Dickinson’s practice and builds on discussions of Dickinson’s practice-based work in earlier publications such as Anke Bangma, Steve Rushton and Florian Wüst (ed.), Experience, Memory, Reenactment (2005) and Gabriele Horn, Inke Arns (eds), History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance (2007).