Mediation and the Technologies of Representation*<\/strong><\/h4>\nIt is my intent today to be unashamedly utopian, to address how we look at, how we discuss, how we circulate and inscribe images of dancing bodies in a pluralistic world, a world that is increasingly mediated by technologies of representation, by social media, and by numerous interfaces that distance us from primary, real time experiences of humanness. I will talk about dance in a relational framework, situating dance within a larger conversation, as a discipline within a system of discourse, signifiers and conversations. These are conversations about mark-making, about presence and about bearing witness to a particular<\/em> kind of humanness that places itself somewhere on the spectrum from sacred to profane. This humanness is performative and has the potential to speak about both democracy and egalitarianism as it both conforms to and reforms the esthetics of contemporary culture. It is a particular kind of humanness that presents its desires, and that often performs desire; that subverts or inscribes desire; and that states such desires in a way that is part of a new paradigm: one that is caught between the modern world and the end of art. In a pluralistic world, dance is a subset of a larger art world. And for today, I would like to ask, \u201cWhat if?\u201d. What if we leave behind the grinding economic and quotidian demands of a career in the arts and fanaticize about the possibilities of art? What if, for today, we think about art not as entertainment but rather as something sacred? A kind of agreement or social contract in which we agree to allow ourselves to be touched, to have our hearts opened to the gracious gifts of the creative spirit? What if art were a gift, an offering of hope, of love and of transcendence?<\/p>\nWhat does it mean to be utopian? To be idealistic? To believe that art and art practice does not simply add value to life, but actually has the potential to alter the human landscape; to make human-ness a sustainable, creative endeavor? These questions seem overwhelming. To be such a utopic idealist may mean that one\u2019s expectations are often undermined by the realities of contemporary life and that, at times, the desire for transcendent creative experiences may be met with less than transcendent outcomes. It may mean exquisite failure. However, it also means that at times, when the numerous possibilities for failure are overcome in some mysterious way, transcendence does indeed occur: the spectator is moved beyond words and the alchemy of creativity produces a momentary portal through which pours a kind of divine connectedness. I think these moments actually occur more than we imagine but they are contingent on our ability to be present and mindful enough to acknowledge them and to make space for them in our lives. I am mindful of the fact that much of what I am describing is relational and contextual: that the viewer brings a certain amount of data to each engagement and that if that data synthesizes with the data of a performance or a painting or a piece of music, there may occur a kind of synergy. Artists gestate and birth countless creative gestures, at times without consideration for their eventual reception by spectators or viewers. However, when an artist begins the creative endeavor with a sense of absolute purpose and with intentionality, the interface between public exhibition and private practice often carries a particular sense of clarity. When artists are truly present in the truthfulness of their work, our interface with that work can seem to be a most intimate encounter.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/douglas2-600x471.jpg\")
<\/a>The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramovic<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn Marina Abramovic\u2019s recently completed three-month performance at MOMA New York, the artist was quite literally present in the museum, continuously, all day, every day that the museum was open for a period of three months. In this case the artist was present in a prescribed physical location, where she could be found easily by anyone wishing to sit quietly with her in public communion. Abramovic literally carved out a space in her life and in the life of the museum to be present with<\/em> people whom she did not know or have any previous relationship with. However, she did this in public space in the presence and gaze of an ever-changing community of witnesses. In this project, Abramovic opened her practice to the possibility of absolute failure. What if she could not complete the grueling three-month commitment? What if she became bored or no one showed up to sit with her? What if the people who came were not the people she imagined? Abramovic sat, available and present for each participant, eyes dropping at the end of one encounter, her consciousness cleansed prior to the next, day after day after day. What occurred in these encounters, which began and ended at the decision of the participant, was at times evocative, transformational, and emotionally charged. At other times it was, I am sure, profoundly pedestrian. But taken as a whole, the intent of this work and indeed its ultimate realization was a kind of blessing. What does it mean to be so<\/em> present, so<\/em> available? It was a work that most certainly tested the limits of Abramovic\u2019s commitment to a durational, social art practice. And viewers clearly projected their desires onto both the artist and the whole of the work as well.<\/p>\nHowever, the clarity of the vision to create, as she calls it, a \u201ccharismatic space,\u201d overwhelmed any external pressures that may have compromised such a vision. In the work that resulted from her artistic generosity, Abramovic created a sacred space within the constructs of a public art museum, blurring the boundaries of spectator and participant, artist and public. In the generous atmosphere of The Artist is Present<\/em>, concerns extraneous to Abramovic\u2019s intentionality evaporated, allowing the viewer an empathic interface with the artist, one that was a product of esthetic and ethical choices and one that was not separate from the work but was indeed contingent on and synergistic to it. But when we think of interface generally (in the contemporary world), we think about digital culture<\/em>.<\/p>\nJust as raw materials do not become technology without engineering, technology alone (digital culture) cannot effect change; social or cultural change does not occur in a vacuum. It is the application of creativity to technology and of technology to creative impulses that often initiates seismic paradigm shifts.<\/p>\n
Digital technology allows us to see more clearly; it can extend and amplify the optics of vision in such instruments as the telescope and microscope. Cameras and screen-based technologies also extend the possibilities of vision and do so as they record, re-record, stream, playback, distribute and archive performance of all kinds. Dance has long relied on such technologies as a kind of forensic proof if its own existence. As a culture we tend to trust pictures more than memory, moving images over storytelling, and mediation over live experience. Media and the technologies of representation and distribution are valuable tools for dance artists; these tools are the means by which culture circulates beyond live performance. I have written about my desires for a kind of media that is pristine and clear, that is a representation of bodies and of performance that is of the highest definition and that exhibits a mastery of technique and virtuosic ability. But I also realize that such a desire precludes the possibility of a truly democratic use of media. I am torn between the pull of an often-hierarchical use of media as a way to mediate and circulate performance, and one that is more egalitarian.<\/p>\n
The artist and writer Hito Steyerl proposes what she calls a \u201cpoor image\u201d: one that, as it is circulated through the internet and through the diaspora of digital visual culture, proudly bears the marks of such a journey as a kind of homage to its own wanderings. She says:<\/p>\n
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of\u00a0distribution.[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/h6>\nDigital culture is open source culture; it denies and rejects authorship. To commit a record of one\u2019s work choreographic work to the digital world (either as an archive or as a screendance) is to tacitly acknowledge that ownership of ideas and creative capital is moot, that creativity is a global collaboration. We can liken the process of uploading and linking URLs, blogging and YouTubing to a kind of digitography: gesturing or writing in digital space.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/douglas3-600x477.jpg\")
<\/a>Under the Skin, Douglas Rosenberg and Hope Mohr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAs digital citizens in the twenty-first century we are the inheritors of Roland Barthes\u2019s prophetic description of the death of the author in Image, Music, Text<\/em>, from 1977: \u201cWriting is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing\u201d (pg. 142). Barthes suggests that public writing, or writing made public, enters the collective consciousness and becomes errant and diasporic to the point that ownership of the generative idea and the provenance of its originator are not only irrelevant but largely made absent. He made this claim in an era that predated the internet and digital culture. He was speaking about books, texts, and the products of analog cultural production. However, it is apropos of contemporary culture and our immersion in digital communication and representation. How we think about ownership and authorship is part of an evolving definition of what it means to be an artist in the digital world. It is part of a new definition of artistic citizenship and requires us to be a part of a new discourse and a new dialog that, while building on older historical models, must also break with traditions that are no longer functional.<\/p>\nTo be a digital citizen and an artist engaged with digital technologies in a pluralistic culture is neither a promise of creative communication nor a guarantee of social fracturing and isolation. It is however, a challenge. To be \u201cconnected\u201d digitally and to be connected in the fleshy, corporeal way that suggests an embrace or an enveloping may require some negotiation. It certainly will require intentionality. The overwhelming appetite of digital culture and the corresponding burden of being a participant in it tends to wither the resolve of even the most technologically facile among us. It simply takes an unreasonable amount of time to tend to all the screen-based requirements of daily life. As the boundaries of digital life and art facilitated by digital culture have seemingly dissolved, how do we separate the two? How do we create visual distance between pedestrian digital communication and maintenance of daily life and career from our distinct creative projects that take advantage of similar technologies? Perhaps an answer lies in thinking again about the nature of interface, of prosopon<\/em>, one face facing another. There is beauty in difference, in the reflective moments that art in its most basic function can provide. To be reflective is to both ponder one\u2019s existence and purpose and also to mirror the world as it is. Reflection is made possible by the most basic of technologies, a still smooth surface, an interface that both receives and responds to our projections and our desire to be seen, to be witnessed. Perhaps that is the purpose of art: to reflect and to create spaces for reflection. Perhaps dance, in an ideal world, freed from the weight of commerce and the marketplace, fulfills a similar purpose both for the artist and for the viewer as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
*Excerpt from Keynote Talk presented at the Canadian Dance Assembly Conference, 22 October 2012.<\/p>\n
[1]<\/a>\u201cIn Defense of the Poor Image<\/em>\u201d. http:\/\/www.postmedialab.org\/defense-poor-image<\/a>.<\/p>\nCover photo: Still from Circling<\/em>, film by Douglas Rosenberg with Sally Gross.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflexiones","ediciones-loie-01","autores-douglas-rosenberg"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2000,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/2000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
What does it mean to be utopian? To be idealistic? To believe that art and art practice does not simply add value to life, but actually has the potential to alter the human landscape; to make human-ness a sustainable, creative endeavor? These questions seem overwhelming. To be such a utopic idealist may mean that one\u2019s expectations are often undermined by the realities of contemporary life and that, at times, the desire for transcendent creative experiences may be met with less than transcendent outcomes. It may mean exquisite failure. However, it also means that at times, when the numerous possibilities for failure are overcome in some mysterious way, transcendence does indeed occur: the spectator is moved beyond words and the alchemy of creativity produces a momentary portal through which pours a kind of divine connectedness. I think these moments actually occur more than we imagine but they are contingent on our ability to be present and mindful enough to acknowledge them and to make space for them in our lives. I am mindful of the fact that much of what I am describing is relational and contextual: that the viewer brings a certain amount of data to each engagement and that if that data synthesizes with the data of a performance or a painting or a piece of music, there may occur a kind of synergy. Artists gestate and birth countless creative gestures, at times without consideration for their eventual reception by spectators or viewers. However, when an artist begins the creative endeavor with a sense of absolute purpose and with intentionality, the interface between public exhibition and private practice often carries a particular sense of clarity. When artists are truly present in the truthfulness of their work, our interface with that work can seem to be a most intimate encounter.<\/p>\n In Marina Abramovic\u2019s recently completed three-month performance at MOMA New York, the artist was quite literally present in the museum, continuously, all day, every day that the museum was open for a period of three months. In this case the artist was present in a prescribed physical location, where she could be found easily by anyone wishing to sit quietly with her in public communion. Abramovic literally carved out a space in her life and in the life of the museum to be present with<\/em> people whom she did not know or have any previous relationship with. However, she did this in public space in the presence and gaze of an ever-changing community of witnesses. In this project, Abramovic opened her practice to the possibility of absolute failure. What if she could not complete the grueling three-month commitment? What if she became bored or no one showed up to sit with her? What if the people who came were not the people she imagined? Abramovic sat, available and present for each participant, eyes dropping at the end of one encounter, her consciousness cleansed prior to the next, day after day after day. What occurred in these encounters, which began and ended at the decision of the participant, was at times evocative, transformational, and emotionally charged. At other times it was, I am sure, profoundly pedestrian. But taken as a whole, the intent of this work and indeed its ultimate realization was a kind of blessing. What does it mean to be so<\/em> present, so<\/em> available? It was a work that most certainly tested the limits of Abramovic\u2019s commitment to a durational, social art practice. And viewers clearly projected their desires onto both the artist and the whole of the work as well.<\/p>\n However, the clarity of the vision to create, as she calls it, a \u201ccharismatic space,\u201d overwhelmed any external pressures that may have compromised such a vision. In the work that resulted from her artistic generosity, Abramovic created a sacred space within the constructs of a public art museum, blurring the boundaries of spectator and participant, artist and public. In the generous atmosphere of The Artist is Present<\/em>, concerns extraneous to Abramovic\u2019s intentionality evaporated, allowing the viewer an empathic interface with the artist, one that was a product of esthetic and ethical choices and one that was not separate from the work but was indeed contingent on and synergistic to it. But when we think of interface generally (in the contemporary world), we think about digital culture<\/em>.<\/p>\n Just as raw materials do not become technology without engineering, technology alone (digital culture) cannot effect change; social or cultural change does not occur in a vacuum. It is the application of creativity to technology and of technology to creative impulses that often initiates seismic paradigm shifts.<\/p>\n Digital technology allows us to see more clearly; it can extend and amplify the optics of vision in such instruments as the telescope and microscope. Cameras and screen-based technologies also extend the possibilities of vision and do so as they record, re-record, stream, playback, distribute and archive performance of all kinds. Dance has long relied on such technologies as a kind of forensic proof if its own existence. As a culture we tend to trust pictures more than memory, moving images over storytelling, and mediation over live experience. Media and the technologies of representation and distribution are valuable tools for dance artists; these tools are the means by which culture circulates beyond live performance. I have written about my desires for a kind of media that is pristine and clear, that is a representation of bodies and of performance that is of the highest definition and that exhibits a mastery of technique and virtuosic ability. But I also realize that such a desire precludes the possibility of a truly democratic use of media. I am torn between the pull of an often-hierarchical use of media as a way to mediate and circulate performance, and one that is more egalitarian.<\/p>\n The artist and writer Hito Steyerl proposes what she calls a \u201cpoor image\u201d: one that, as it is circulated through the internet and through the diaspora of digital visual culture, proudly bears the marks of such a journey as a kind of homage to its own wanderings. She says:<\/p>\n Digital culture is open source culture; it denies and rejects authorship. To commit a record of one\u2019s work choreographic work to the digital world (either as an archive or as a screendance) is to tacitly acknowledge that ownership of ideas and creative capital is moot, that creativity is a global collaboration. We can liken the process of uploading and linking URLs, blogging and YouTubing to a kind of digitography: gesturing or writing in digital space.<\/p>\n As digital citizens in the twenty-first century we are the inheritors of Roland Barthes\u2019s prophetic description of the death of the author in Image, Music, Text<\/em>, from 1977: \u201cWriting is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing\u201d (pg. 142). Barthes suggests that public writing, or writing made public, enters the collective consciousness and becomes errant and diasporic to the point that ownership of the generative idea and the provenance of its originator are not only irrelevant but largely made absent. He made this claim in an era that predated the internet and digital culture. He was speaking about books, texts, and the products of analog cultural production. However, it is apropos of contemporary culture and our immersion in digital communication and representation. How we think about ownership and authorship is part of an evolving definition of what it means to be an artist in the digital world. It is part of a new definition of artistic citizenship and requires us to be a part of a new discourse and a new dialog that, while building on older historical models, must also break with traditions that are no longer functional.<\/p>\n To be a digital citizen and an artist engaged with digital technologies in a pluralistic culture is neither a promise of creative communication nor a guarantee of social fracturing and isolation. It is however, a challenge. To be \u201cconnected\u201d digitally and to be connected in the fleshy, corporeal way that suggests an embrace or an enveloping may require some negotiation. It certainly will require intentionality. The overwhelming appetite of digital culture and the corresponding burden of being a participant in it tends to wither the resolve of even the most technologically facile among us. It simply takes an unreasonable amount of time to tend to all the screen-based requirements of daily life. As the boundaries of digital life and art facilitated by digital culture have seemingly dissolved, how do we separate the two? How do we create visual distance between pedestrian digital communication and maintenance of daily life and career from our distinct creative projects that take advantage of similar technologies? Perhaps an answer lies in thinking again about the nature of interface, of prosopon<\/em>, one face facing another. There is beauty in difference, in the reflective moments that art in its most basic function can provide. To be reflective is to both ponder one\u2019s existence and purpose and also to mirror the world as it is. Reflection is made possible by the most basic of technologies, a still smooth surface, an interface that both receives and responds to our projections and our desire to be seen, to be witnessed. Perhaps that is the purpose of art: to reflect and to create spaces for reflection. Perhaps dance, in an ideal world, freed from the weight of commerce and the marketplace, fulfills a similar purpose both for the artist and for the viewer as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *Excerpt from Keynote Talk presented at the Canadian Dance Assembly Conference, 22 October 2012.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a>\u201cIn Defense of the Poor Image<\/em>\u201d. http:\/\/www.postmedialab.org\/defense-poor-image<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cover photo: Still from Circling<\/em>, film by Douglas Rosenberg with Sally Gross.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflexiones","ediciones-loie-01","autores-douglas-rosenberg"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2000,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/2000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/douglas2.jpg\")
<\/a>The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of\u00a0distribution.[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/h6>\n
<\/a>