December 5, 2009 at 9:29 am · Filed under Events
This month the email list -empyre- continues a conversation on viral networks with Patricia Zimmerman, professor of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, and Program Director at WITNESS. I have so enjoyed Patty and Sam’s thoughts on viral media as it relates to ethical, political and social issues and look forward to to any resonances between this discussion on -empyre- and today’s forum. I will be thinking particularly about Patty and Sam’s points that:
**In the current environment of the user-generated, imagined virality, and circulatory vortex of Web 2.0 media, the capacity to produce and share media, testimony, and visual evidence is more widely dispersed.
**Amateurism has been redefined and reconfigured not as an adjunct to other forms of media but as an infiltration of other forms of media. Media practice, therefore, is no longer solely and exclusively about visibility: circulation and aggregation have acquired equal if not greater importance.
May 21, 2009 at 11:55 am · Filed under Artworks, Theory, Thoughts
I recently read Patricia Zimmerman and Dale Hudson’s “Cinephilia, Technopilia and Collaborative Remix Zones” published in the latest issue of Screen. Zimmerman and Hudson perform what they call a “radical historiography” to indulge “interventionist pleasures.” This methodology has me thinking about remixing history in dance and what this is.
If I were chose a movement to return to it would be Judson. How can we reengage avant-garde activism in today’s digital culture? Trajal Harrell seems to do just this drawing not only on Judson, but also on voguing and European tanztheater. In his most recent “Quartet for the End of Time.” He takes what has happened and pushes it forward, remixing and opening potentiality in critical movement practice.
This remixing is not a repetition, and appropriately so. Can movement be repeated? No. When I wave my hand in the air I perform the same choreographed action (a wave of the hand) multiple times, the movement that I perform morphs with time based on variables such as body fatigue or rhythm. Rather than perform an exact repetition of my movement, I loop the choreography. When I loop choreographed movement it is not repeated, but layered. The movement is the same, but calling my movement a loop as opposed to a repetition shifts a perception that enables progression within and beyond repetition. It seems that the historiographic remix enables movement loops.
