Ashley asks how time and pacing help reinforce the “reality effect.” The “reality effect” “explains that something that seems unmediated seems and, therefore, becomes more ‘real.’” 

To examine this question, I again want to refer to Eugene Minkowski's quote: “the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space" (from Bachelard's The Poetics of Space). A piece of artwork becomes more “real” therefore, when this “feeling of participation” is shared between the performer/s and audience.

Last night I watched the HBO documentary “the Artist is Present.” "The Artist is Present," was a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which Marina Abramavic sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her (wikipedia). We have discussed this is class and so I won’t bother giving a deeper explanation of her work. What I would like to highlight is something that occurred two months into her performance. One day in late April, just as the museum was closing, Marina decided to do away with the table that stood in-between the two chairs. She said later that this removal made the connection between her and the people sitting opposite her, more vulnerable and immediate.

I thought about this documentary as I read Ashley’s post. Most of us live lives mediated through meaning. It is very rare that we share in an immediate participation in the flow of life. I would argue that "art" in its purist form, attempts to break through these layers of mediation in order to bring one face to face with the mystery of existence. How is this possible?

In the Twitter plays, the point is to accurately re-produce life “real-time.” Twitter theatre can reproduce a more thorough realism because “the means by which one observes and interacts with characters is in face identical to the ways one follows the lives of actual friends.”

Forced Entertainment, on the other hand, uses long performances in order "to place the audience in a world rather than describing one." It seeks "a theatre that disrupts the borders between the so-called real and the so-called fictional.” One way that this is achieved is quite simple: the long duration of these performances cannot but result in the exhaustion of the performers. Audiences therefore, are not watching actors “pretend” to be tired, but real exhaustion.