Say the Re- Editors:
Last week Tower Hamlet’s Council website crashed because of the volume of objections to a planning application by a New York hotel developer to convert the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a luxury hotel. People are always lobbying to preserve an original building or object somewhere. This is different.
Factum Arte’s prodigious industry since the mid-nineties means we will have to rethink what we mean by original, copy, and authenticity. Technologies developed under its aegis mean it is now possible to capture and record data about an artwork to an accuracy of 100 microns (100 million measured spatial points per square meter) – and for the first time, this year, these works can now be rematerialized to an accuracy of 20 microns. This is, as Simon Schaffer says, marks a ‘complete revolution in the last two decades’
What’s in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as ‘re-’? Does ‘re-’ really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a ‘postcritical’ reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, ‘re-’ complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
Her work, in her own words, is ‘to see Hamlet splinter and be reconstituted; serve as a mask, a megaphone, and a measuring stick; and tell a story as revealing of his host’s identities as his own’[1]. She explores the presence of ‘Hamlet’ in Arab contexts – as both a play and a character – in various forms, shapes and images, with the last chapter of her book examining six Arab Hamlet off-shoots staged between 1976-2004. The common denominator of these productions is how they reveal the political and social consciousness of the theatremakers staging the various productions.
The ‘Re-‘ network asks what repetition does. Why do we repeat, revive, re-enact, restage, reframe, remember, represent, and refer – to whom, when, where and why – and why is this a topical question in a digital era?
