Abstract of: Reflections on Pushing Against the Watershed: A Live Video Streamed Art Performance

Pushing against the Watershed was performed on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, located on the margins of the inner city and its sites of protest, clashes and economic juxtapositions. On the opening night of the Watershed: Art, Science and Elemental Politics conference, Neustetter, a South African performance/social artist, pushed a transparent plastic sphere containing 50 liters of water and an array of LED lights up the northern slope of the watershed that transects the campus of the university. The performance was livestreamed through YouTube from a cell phone by Doherty, a South African video artist and photographer. In our paper, we discuss the meaning in the context of Watershed and the implications for performance art when experienced as a livestream. Pushing against the Watershed was designed to illustrate a physical struggle with the geography of the watershed and with water as a scarce and contested resource....