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The study of time in performance is a complex undertaking for the artist and scholar alike. Timing, temporality and temporalisation are distinct emphases on the nature of this dimension we call time, and thus demand diverse methods and responses for inquiry. Within performance, measured time is a structural device in the making of a performance work, sharing an equal significance to "where' and "how' a body moves in space. In particular, time used as a system of counts (time-as-timing) is a useful tool for structuring choices in the construction and composition of a theatre or dance work. Timing constraints can elicit transitions between two actions, provide cues for change, or order the relationship between two or more moving bodies — whether blocking actors in a theatre work, or developing interactions between dancing bodies. Time-as-timing sets rhythm and pace, and provides a precise measure for the structural segmentation of a performance event. The essential character of time understood in its objective sense should not be dismissed, nor should a scholar focusing upon objective-measured time in the study of performance be thought to hold a simplistic or naïve perspective. For this chapter, however, I place objective-measured time aside to take up time in its most subjective sense as temporality. Influenced by the phenomenological tradition and such thinkers' undertaking of the problem of time experience and time perception (how we experience time passing co-relative to measured time),¹ I intend to focus upon a specific phenomenological conception of time to understand the temporal dimension of an aesthetic event in digital performance: a moment of touch and otherness between one "fleshly finger' and one "video finger' (Kozel, 2007, pp. 93–4).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137410276_12

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