After Trash: When Underground Sex Cults become Surveillance Theatres, where do we go?

My paper explores how trash, waste and excess have been taken up as a generatively queer methodology in expanded performance practice. From the compulsive and anarchic ‘mouldy labours’ of Jack Smith – a pioneer in Performance Art in the 1960s – right through to its more recent re-deployment as compulsory performance in the ‘If Facebook had a nightmare, it would look like this', movies of Ryan Trecartin. Using Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of ‘para-cinema’ in media studies to describe the underground practices of trash cinema, I map out a shift in intent, purpose and status of trashy performance in networked cultures. In doing so, I aim to pose questions about the renewed uptake of the trashy, low-fi, and the poor in surveillance capitalism, and to propose an alternative to trash's incorporation/sublimation into the neoliberal agenda via examples from my own performance practice. I argue that the potential of trash to be re-valued and transformed into something else denotes its appeal and power to activate the collective imagination.