80 Laura PAVEL Laura PAVEL Aesthetic Negotiations of Identity – Between Embodied and Disembodied Performance Abstract: The study focuses on the aesthetic and ethical relevance of the hybrid nature of a few multimedia artworks, taking Klaus Obermaier’s performances as significant self-reflexive and also trans-artistic processes. The visual, musical, choreographic, and simultaneously digital and corporeal “stories” displayed by these artworks contain an ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of performer’s own artistic identity in-between fictional worlds, media, bodies. At the same time, by equally exposing a radical – sometimes trans-human – alterity, the performances call for a critical rethinking of a few aesthetic categories and of rigid theoretical dichotomies. Plus, the embodied and alternatively dis- embodied performances could be analyzed as an enactment of a “chaosmic” production of subjectivity (to use a formula of Guattari’s) and thus they reveal a live matrix of artistic creativity. Finally, such hybrid artworks are revealing for the ontological condition of non-captive spectators, namely those challenged to have an agency when confronted with the artistic process. The ethical value of the intermedia performance sometimes resides in the spectator’s possibility to opt, to express choices regarding the different layers of meaning, as these are embodied on stage. This is not a matter of effectively performing an option through some actual physical intervention in the stage area. It is instead an aesthetic and critical option and one pertaining to the ontology of art and to the spectator’s own paradoxical, “hypermediated” status. Keywords: creative (dis)embodiment, hybrid multimedia performance, aesthetico-ethical option, a new ekphrasis, Klaus Obermaier. If we were to credit certain theorists in the fields of the aesthetics and technoculture of virtual reality, it would appear that today we belong to a postsubjective, posthuman era. The idea that we share a posthuman condition is adopted by some with enthusiasm and by oth- ers with skepticism. Apocalyptic theories also reverberate in art. The condition of the author-demiurge, en- dowed with uniqueness and artistic exception- ality, has passed, in recent decades, through EKPHRASIS, 1/2015 CREATIVE BOYCOTT pp. 80-90 Laura PAVEL Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca Email: laura.pavel@ubbcluj.ro Creative Rhymes of Interdisciplinary