Tiikeri: the social media turgy of rererepresentation
The Tiger is a representation of what it means to be a performance and a project of what it is to be a project. The tiger is an endless chain of affirmations, where every impulse is said yes and each yes branches out into new ones and existence swells over its edges. The Tiger deals with big structural questions and is monumental (or spectacular? Maybe more spectacular), but at the same time it’s wonderfully homespun and contains talk about poop and rags (here when you stay in a pile). Anything can be or happen within the Tiger’s frame of reference.
Tiikeri is the alter ego and social media personality of circus and performance artist Milla Jarkko. Jarko asks, as Tiikeri, or perhaps Tiikeri, what kind of way of being social media produces? The tiger as a social media personality is far from the polished illusion of the elevated everyday life of a social media influencer – it walks out on the streets and multiplies into cardboard images of itself, and images of those cardboard images, and images of those images, of those images.
Tiikeri develops terminology for dealing with oneself and proposes new concepts, such as rererere
Rererererererepresentation refers precisely to images of images, which are images of images, which are images of images, like opposing mirrors, whose reflections continue indefinitely, but the viewer still cannot see behind himself, because his own reflection comes in front of him. A presentation of a performance that presents a performance. The digital noise increases with each round and in the end everything is just a pixel blob, after which reality feels like Ultra HD.
Social media turgy, on the other hand, is a parallel or counter-concept to dramaturgy. Dramaturgy (often) strives for consistency and cause-and-effect continuity, whereas in social media, things are combined in more or less random ways based on an algorithm that is invisible to us. Reality is pushed into social media and eventually it starts to trickle back, but changed, reflected, perhaps distorted.
Tiikeri celebrates the transience of performance art and the continuity that stems from transience. Performances turn on and off, leave traces and are reflected in new performances.
Author: Camille Auer
Tiikeri’s stage work TIGER – It some@bility stage work, i.e. consertti and biennial The contemporary performance for the stage and other spaces will be seen at Studio Pasila on 19 May at 6:30 pm. The book includes an introduction with Camille Auer.