The article explores the digital innovations that are being used in a folk performance in West Bengal, namely the Chhau dance. The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded the relevance of digital space across disciplines. Being an expression of the collective experience of the people of the Purulia district, Chhau dance is commonly associated with fostering and perpetuating folk and mythical beliefs through its extensive use of masks and dance movements steered by the Jhumur songs. While the common urge to archive the traditional (...) dance-drama form in its ‘authentic’ essence precipitates a digital turn within the performance, the digital contact paradoxically reorients the ‘authentic’ identity of this cultural practice. The present study seeks to use the ‘identity–authenticity’ interplay in the context of globalization as the crux of the article. Within this framework, the article analyses how a folk cultural practice like Chhau dance, with its recent innovations in masks and performances mandated by the pandemic, problematizes the debate. It further strives to recognize the implications of the digital presence of the performances as well as the performers, which, for many of the traditionalists, might have jeopardized the ritualistic practices that were considered the ‘essence’ of the performance. The research was conducted through ethnographic methods gathered through fieldwork to gain first-hand knowledge of the ground reality. (shrink)

This issue of Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (TA) encompasses eight articles by artists and scholars from around the globe who engage with methodologies of art practice within research that reflects on technological and ecological change, contributing to the discourse on the inclusion of subjective experience in research. The articles by authors Dulmini Perera, Kate Doyle, Nora S. Vaage, Merete Lie, Nikita Peresin Meden, Kristina Pranjić, Peter Purg, Nicolaas H. Jacobs, Marth Munro, Chris Broodryk, Semi Ryu, Rahul Mahata, (...) Doreswamy, Sana Altaf and Aqib Javid Parry form a collection that crosses disciplines and genres to engage in fundamental critique of existing modes of enquiry and conclusion. The texts situate art and design methodologies in particular cultural contexts and in relation to frameworks defined by research methodologies of the sciences and humanities to gain agency for critique and to counter a sense of inevitability that has come to mark the most recent crises. (shrink)