Angelos Floros

Presented: 2nd International Forum of Performance Art, Drama Film Festival, Drama, September 17-20, 2020, link

The lecture takes McLuhan's division of media into hot and cold and turns it on the body.

For McLuhan, media differ in how much of us they demand. Some mobilise the sensory apparatus barely at all; others activate almost everything at once. The distinction was never about content — it was about what the medium asks the body to do in order to receive it.

The talk asks the same question of bodies themselves. If a medium can be warm or cold according to the degree of involvement it requires, then so can a body: present or withdrawn, exposed or insulated, available to be affected or closed against it. Performance is where that temperature becomes visible.