The Unmediatisable Eye Contact
If ‘unmediatisable’ is a word... If ‘mediatisable’ is a word... Actually, it could be argued whether anything can be mediatised without being altered. But at least on the reception end, sentiments can be evoked by a mediatised object (or work or thing) as much as the ‘real’ (or ‘original’ or unmediatised) one. Roland Barthes certainly felt emotional when looking at his mother’s photographs [1] . There have been a lot of discussions on the affect of online performances especially during the pandemic [2] . But what cannot be mediatised in the sense that without actual physical presence the feelings one normally experiences would fail to transmit through media? (Obviously with current technology, it is still difficult to replicate tactile, olfactory or gustatory sensations telematically, but they are not my major concern here because in the context of theatre, these senses are fairly rarely crucial elements of a performance.) Today I participated in a site-specific work produced by One St