Raja Feather Kelly / The Feath3r Theory

DOOMERS by New York choreographer Raja Feather Kelly unfolds between performance, installation, and exhibition. It begins with questions of intimacy and desire, social media, the climate crisis, and existential uncertainty - and how these forces shape our bodies, relationships, and attention spans. Inspired by British art historian Claire Bishop's writing on contemporary spectatorship, DOOMERS explores how attention itself is changing in the twenty-first century.

DOOMERS spans the six museums of Kunstmeile Hamburg. Each performance is accompanied by a 45–85 minute installation in which performers are dispersed throughout the exhibitions as living objects, presenting elements drawn from the performances. The performances themselves then take place at designated locations within each museum (see overview), with some gradually dissolving back into installations.

Each performance stands on its own while simultaneously forming part of a larger constellation. Audiences moving between the museums encounter recurring images and movements in ever-changing contexts. The result is a parcours centred on the fleeting nature of live experience, in which the individual works continually reflect, expand, and ultimately blending into a single whole. Each performance station is also accompanied by diary entries that offer insight into Kelly's personal thought process.

JOURNAL ENTRY 14

I've been thinking about Claire Bishop's idea of "OS XXI" all day.

What I find compelling is that she doesn't simply argue that our attention is fractured or that technology has made us worse spectators. Instead, she suggests that we are living inside a new operating system—one with its own logic, expectations, habits, and possibilities. That shift feels important. An operating system isn't a moral failure. It's an environment. It shapes behavior before we're even conscious of it.

I keep wondering what this means for theater.

If audiences are no longer arriving with the expectation of singular, uninterrupted attention, then perhaps performance shouldn't be built around demanding that kind of attention. Maybe that's nostalgia masquerading as artistic rigor. Maybe the challenge is not to recover an older form of spectatorship but to understand the one that already exists.

If OS XXI is the operating system under which contemporary spectators live, then perhaps my work should stop resisting that condition and start choreographing it.

Maybe that is the performance.

Not simply what is happening onstage.

But the choreography occurring between the stage, the audience, memory, technology, emotion, and time.

Maybe the real subject isn't attention at all.

Maybe it's consciousness.

This journal entry was written in my voice by ChatGPT.