Atame: performing the dismantled mechanical body

Abstract

This essay explores Brazilian digital author Wilton Azevedo’s work Atame: a angústia do precário in view of its multiple versions – as live performance, interactive DVD, and video-poem – and the possible implications of these different modes of operating. At the same time, I attempt to read the work as marked by the character’s bodily fragmentation in a post breakup scenario, in which her dilacerated body becomes materially present to us by means of how we navigate through the work. What we have is thus a double articulation in which the multiple versions of the work and the character’s attempt to reconstitute a lost body are presented as invariably frustrated by a tension between human and machine which ties the character’s and the work’s final mode of being.

Keywords

• Wilton Azevedo
• Atame
• Performance
• Ação