This article takes up the concept of performativity prevalent in the humanities and applies it to the design of installation arts in mixed reality mode. Based on the design, development and public access to two specific works, the concept is related to a form of research by design. We argue that the concept of performativity may be further usefully employed in investigations (design and research, artistic and public) into digital arts where complex intersections between concepts, technologies, dramaturgy, media and participant actions are in flux and together constitute the emergence and experience of a work. Theories of performativity are related to these two works in an argument that further suggests there is room in research by design to also include 'performative design'. The article is the result of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaboration and aims to convey some sense of that in its reporting style, content and analysis. Keywords: installation art, performativity, research by design, practice-based research, mixed reality, performative design Contexts Art, design, practice & performativity In one way or another, our daily lives are shaped, filtered and filigreed with digital tools and technologies. These are often lodged in our material practices of information search and retrieval, and they are connected to a variety of activities in work and learning, commerce and play. When we think of digital environments we commonly think of desktop interfaces, game worlds or seamless contact via mobile phones. In each of these domains, as users we have direct, active relationships to screen based spaces and the media within them. Alongside such spaces, however, are those realised in and as electronic artworks. Digital art pieces often play with and seek to fissure and deconstruct interface conventions along with our expectations and comfort as participants in which our embodied interaction is central. In such artworks, the aesthetic is often relational. Their poetics is centred on emergence rather than fixity. Self-reflexive qualities often become part of their materiality. They entail performative contributions from visitors as well as ones enacted by the technologies through which they are mediated. Such digital artworks implicate us in the interplay of technologies and the texturing of communication that is made possible by design for participation and through engaged performativity. Many contemporary installation type spaces use a mix of media, static and dynamic, linear, nonlinear and generative. They may be characterized by a type of participative play that involves us as active and implicitly collaborative co-actors and not merely as static, spectatorial audiences. Our embodied engagement is also realised in shifting performativity relations between the immediate context and the distributed character of digitally mediated communication. Andrew Morrison et. al. Designing performativity for mixed reality installations Figures 1 & 2: (Above) Dislocation-on site in the construction of a multi-layered space f...

Discovered during a media-archeological investigation into optical illusions, trick photography, and discarded memorabilia, the photo-multigraph technique opened the door to an enchanted world of cloned appearances orbiting in a self-reflective solar system. Shapeshifting into our preferred artistic medium, this turn-of-the-century photographic technique becomes the video-multigraph. It is bizarrely noteworthy that self-isolation would become not only the subject of the piece, but also – due to the unforeseen spread of a recently mutated virus – the prevailing circumstances under which the work was to be completed. In Verfünfungseffekt, we use the medium of video to create a kaleidoscopic portrait-in-motion where the perspective-shifting shards of ego are recorded in a synchronized performance of solipsist intersubjectivity. The video-multigraph allows for the compositing of tiny offsets in time-shifting delays applied to one, or several, of the mirrored selves – shattering the cloned perfection, as well as the conformity, of the multiple presences. This optical illusion necessitates reflection on how media alters our perceptions of time and space; it thereby arouses wonder about our place in existence. Keywords: Photo-multigraph, fivefold-portrait, mirror photography, video-multigraph, crisis of presence

This essay traces the resurrection of the fotoescultura, a three-dimensional photographic portrait popular in rural Mexico in the early 20th century, as interpreted in recent works by Performing Pictures, a contemporary Swedish artist duo. The early fotoesculturas were an augmented form of portraiture, commissioned by family members who supplied photographs that artisans in Mexico City converted into framed sculptural portraits for display on family altars. We compare these »traditional« photographic objects with “new” digital forms of video animation on screen and in the public space that characterize Performing Pictures work, and explore how the fotoescultura inspired new incarnations of their series Men that Fall. At the intersection between the material aspects of a “traditional” vernacular art form and “new” media art, we identify a photographic aesthetic that shifts from seeing and perceiving to physical engagement, and discuss how the frame and its parergon augment the photographic gaze. The essay is accompanied by photos and video stills from Performing Pictures’ film poem Dreaming the Memories of Now (2018), depicting their work with the fotoesculturas. Keywords: fotoesculturas, frame, parergon, vernacular photography, videoart

This article examines a 5-year collaboration between the Stockholm-based video artists Performing Pictures and Talleres Comunitarios, a studio based in the Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache where local artisans employ traditional skills in the restoration of religious artifacts. In images and text, we trace the exchange of skills, knowledge, and aesthetic sensibility that took place as these two groups of artists collaborated in producing a series of video animations of venerative objects, against a backdrop of religious, social, and political tensions that characterize everyday life in Zegache. In the article and the accompanying series of three short films, ''Wonder & Veneration 1Á3'' (http://vimeo. com/album/2682070), we examine how the artists negotiate questions of aesthetics and religious belief as their collaboration unfolds within the context of the Zegache community, where the Talleres contribute skills of carpentry and painting, while Performing Pictures provides skills of film, animation and microelectronics. The processes and practices involved in creating three works provides the framework for this examination: the first, an animation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as she appears to a simple peasant, and the second, produced 2 years later, an animation of Santa Ana, local patron saint and mother of Maria, as she teaches her daughter to read the scriptures. Whereas both figures are central to the syncretic religious belief of southern Mexico with its challenge to the entrenched authority of the hispanicized clergy, the local figure of Santa Ana carries even more complex meanings for the community of Zegache. These meanings are embodied in the third work we examine, a small solarpowered chapel that the artists built to display the Santa Ana animation. With the mayor's support and located at the entrance to the town, the chapel embodies a shift of power away from the church, standing as an example of indigenous empowerment in civil society.