Elly Clarke

Is my Body Out of Date? The Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age

I want to know what you did last year,
I want to know how you wore your hair,
I want to know what you feel about current affairs.
Share it! Share it all with me.
Give it! Give it all to me.

Acknowledging drag as simultaneously a performance (dragging up) and a burden (dragging down), my practice-led PhD examines the drag of physicality in relation to three key objects of study: templates, physicality, and the archive. As a verb, drag is a force in two directions at once – a tug forwards, and backwards, and it is with/in this tension and contradiction that I am working.

In the context of widespread smartphone ownership, machine learning, AI and surveillance, I explore how drag and dragging could be a means of exploring and exposing, playing with and resisting some of the snapping to grid that interactions with/in digital templates invariably bring about. Drawing from the fields of media, performance, live art (history), queer and (cyber)feminist studies, my project makes a case for (staying in) the blur and for the space for not-knowing as being a generative and legitimate mode of knowledge production in an increasingly precarious context.

The research is performed in collaboration with my own online/offline, digital/physical (drag) alter ego #Sergina - a multi-bodied drag queen with a bunch of songs, who, in one place or several at once, on stages and on screens, alone and/or assisted by a rota of trained-up agents and backup buddies, through and across a variety of digital platforms, creates performances about love, lust and wellbeing digital age, gathering (and selling) data as she goes… But who will be eventually archived as part of this [/her] submission.

The thesis is presented across three chapters with sub-chapter responses. The Drag of Templates teases (apart) some of the prohibitions and possibilities offered by templates through which digitally-connected identities are (de)constructed and performed. This is followed by Blurspace. The Drag of Physicality focusses on the flesh and blood body we are (still) dependent upon to exist and considers it in relation to the data it discharges and how it can (still) offer a mode of resistance to the tracking and tracing of identities. Next comes Glitch. Finally, informed (and performed) by an online/onsite exhibition I curated at Pratt Institute Library in 2023, The Drag of the Archive offers embodied, auto-ethnographic research focussing on Franklin Furnace’s first decade as a ‘virtual organisation,’ where it commissioned artists to produce performance to be livestreamed as Netcasts, in the mid 1990s.

Interspersing the chapter duos is a set of collaborative encounters with three artists: Clareese Hill, Liv Fontaine and Kit Kuksenok, demonstrating collaboration as a(nother) (generative) form of drag/ging and blurring, which, like #Sergina’s character, releases the grip of single-person authorship.

• Listen to Sergina's Datafic(a)tion on Soundcloud

Supervisors

• Vikki Chalklin
• Sarah Kember

Websites

• ellyclarke.com
• soundcloud.com/ser-gina

Is my Body Out of Date? Episode 2, November 2018 - with Vladimir Bjeličić

Traces of a Performance [Promotion for a gig at Yo Sissy! / Is My Body Out of Date? 2016 / 2018] 2021, Giclee prints on Rag Paper, 50cm x 31