Performance art:

informative phenomena, semiophore and immortal’s fabrication

Abstract

It discusses performance art as an informative phenomenon that maintains conceptual relationships with the notions of semiophore and the fabrication of the immortal. It addresses the definitions of event, information, and evidence brought by Michael Buckland; the meanings of performance art proposed by Renato Cohen, Amelia Jones, RoseLee Goldberg, Kristine Stiles and Peggy Phelan, the definition of semiophore proposed by Krzysztof Pomian, the concepts of memory developed by Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Jacques Le Goff and Paul Ricoeur, and the idea of the fabrication of the immortal presented by Renata Abreu. It analyzes performance art as an event – an informative phenomenon, defined within the scope of the intangible (information-as-knowledge), which can generate products recoverable in information systems (information-as-thing), that do not replace the work but represent the traces of its materiality. It also discusses the concept of semiophore and the paradox that the approach presents in the field of arts and in the fabrication of the immortal. It concludes that performance art is placed outside the circuit of utility, acts at a symbolic level, presents multiple meanings and exists only through the presence and action of the artist. This artistic manifestation denies the permanence represented by the object, realizing itself as a work only in the present and, therefore, presenting challenges for the processes of memory creation and preservation.