VIDEODANCE NO PLACE

Revista Vista , 2022

This paper seeks to reflect on the emergence of video technology and its use as a medium for artistic expression. Focusing mainly on the period between the 1960s and 1990s, we analyse the relationship between television and other institutions within the cultural-artistic sphere and their role in developing artistic practices through video. Thus, we have established international and Portuguese examples for a plural and diverse analysis. Therefore, this work elaborates on some theories, main ideas and research concerning the role of video and television in late 20th-century society. Special attention is given to some ideological and philosophical traits transversal to the different artistic practices, authors and agents within the contemporary cultural sphere to reflect on some aesthetic elements of the works from this period. Based on a selection of works and artists, this study seeks to explore the social dimension of video, which has often operated as a democratic medium, an instrument of social and political contestation and a medium for the artist’s personal reflection. In this way, an approach to the presence and representation of the body in video works and other technical and aesthetic elements is articulated to understand the theoretical dimensions involved in the imagery production of this medium.

Život umjetnosti, 2020

The paper is a case study of Jasmina Cibic's film The Pavilion (2015) in relation to the theory of screendance. The first part of the paper discusses the definitions of the term screendance by various researchers, and its position to related terms choreocinema, cine-dance, dance cinema, dance for the camera, dance on screen, dancefilm, and video dance. The second part of the paper is a close analysis of the film, synchronously focused on three key aspects: the choreography of the five female performers, the cinematic techniques, and the narration. The third part of the paper examines the role of the dancer Josephine Baker, to whom the film makes a reference. The paper concludes that the central choreography in the film is not that of the five female performers, but actually of the model of the pavilion which they animate. The choreography of the architectural model and the spatial reference to the body of Josephine Baker are as important semantic layers of the film as the choreography of the five performers. KEYWORDS screendance, dancefilm, choreography, Jasmina Cibic, architecture, space in screendance Original link to the paper: https://www.ipu.hr/content/zivot-umjetnosti/ZU_106-2020_036-051_Jankov.pdf Link to the journal issue: https://zivotumjetnosti.ipu.hr/106-2020/?fbclid=IwAR1OYKvh4CSNqSrt1pP6jWc09DFRyfLQeAsZTLHyQpYfiJr8eV1rBZYfQps

The arts of dance have a strangely compelling quality. Using the human body as its material and often its subject-matter, dance directs the body's vital forces through the manifold associations and powers the body inhabits and evokes. Sometimes the movement takes the form of a solo dance; sometimes it is shared. Sometimes it is shaped by narrative, sometimes by a theme. Often it delights in the possibilities of movement itself, always shaping the vital forces that carry the body through time and space. Indeed, dance exemplifies how, through movement, the human body creates its time and space. Dance may be thought of as an " ur-art. " Using no tool or instrument other than one's body, the dancer shapes and inhabits a world of movement. Dance is one of the first manifestations of the aesthetic impulse and the fulfillment of an aesthetic need. At the same time, the dance arts, like the other arts, respond to the possibilities of technology. This can be seen in the imaginative use of set design and props, but the technological possibilities of filmic techniques are irresistible. Dance film and video do not replace the human body but are means of enhancing and extending its possibilities, creating a new artistic modality just as photography and film have done. Painting and theater continue to flourish and to innovate in their own spheres, but new and distinctive arts have been born of the new technologies. The same is true of dance. In addition, film adds the possibility of preserving a dance performance, not only archiving it but making it repeatable to a new audience. In what follows I shall be concerned with dance film and video dance. The first was born of the manifold possibilities of chemical technology, while the second, surpassing film technology, exploits the rich possibilities of digital technology and its freedom from material constraints. Both technologies offer new possibilities for the dance arts, similar in many respects but different in some others. 1 And both develop and enhance the possibilities and powers of dance experience.

Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, 2013

Video art can be highly intermedial. The format allows image and sound to be recorded and projected simultaneously, giving the user the opportunity to create live, audiovisual work. I argue that the type of audience engagement encouraged by video work has changed significantly since the medium became commercially available in 1965; and that we can understand these changes in terms of two contrasting forms of liminality. The early period of video work was characterised by interactivity, intermediality and the closed-circuit feed. These site-specific works were often included as part of multi-media events rather than appearing on their own as a unified genre: as a result, we can place the early years of video work within a temporal, historical liminality. By contrast, more recent video pieces form a coherent, if varied, body of work. Often shown on flat screens in darkened rooms, recent audiovisual video tends to offer predetermined audiovisual narratives that immerse visitors entirely. Such works place visitors within a spatial liminality as they are asked to hover between video world and the space of the gallery. This chapter suggests that, although context is vital to both early and more recent styles of video work, the activation of space and the audio-visual relationships enabled within it are nevertheless articulated and activated in very different ways.

In November, 2002, I was invited by EYEBEAM for the occasion of their symposium on The (Re) Structured Screen to moderate a panel on 'Conversations on the New Moving Image'. The topic was Screen Based Environments which you can find described below. At that time I was trying to see what computation might bring to cinema. I was interested in image and sound and time as mutable and elastic. In the following years I made a good many films using algorithmic procedures including 'This Battle of Algiers' commissioned by the Tate Modern and The Whitney Museum. For the symposium I was grateful to have an opportunity to think through and have conversation on the dispersion and circulation of the moving image. There has been much writing since than including Seth Price's, 'Dispersion' and Hito Steyerl's, 'The Wretched of the Screen' both of which examine the image in this ubiquitous circulation. My interest here, was thinking of the film projector as once being an instrument that gave forth a particular logic to mise-en-scene, shot followed by shot, becoming now a new computational instrument, in the network, that could give forth the possibility of an all-at-once elastic instrument, allowing for a multiplicity of simultaneously and re-writable events on any number of screens for any length of time. But how to think and organize this new space, this new montage. This new plurality of screens, now computational and networked, would bring forward a new relation to representation and to the archive becoming more performative and less representational, becoming ever re-mixable. In the paper I look back at the history of experimental film, how it is taken up by contemporary art and eventually online and how the screen and projection is very much part of this asking how do we think this new space. *Screen based environments and Information based architecture are becoming pervasive in culture. Formerly the stuff of living rooms and theaters, screens now permeate our clothing stores, cell phones, museums, crossroads, wrist watches, churches and amusement parks. As the medium explodes from a two dimensional media to a three dimensional environment, artists, architects and curators take on new challenges to mediate these environments. November 11, 2002, 7:30

2018

Contributors: Horea Avram (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Ulrike Gerhardt (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany), Sozita Goudouna (New York University, USA Robert Lawrence (University of South Florida, USA), Liviu Malița (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Raluca Mocan (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), Rodica Mocan and Ştefana Răcorean (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Wheaton College, Illinois, USA), Georgina Ruff (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), Miruna Runcan (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Paul Sermon (University of Brighton, UK), Erandy Vergara (McGill University, Montreal, Canada). The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners of different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (that asks for a “poetics”), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the chapters in this volume is the focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual studies, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues such as: the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the body–image complex relationships, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.

This research focuses on the notion of dance as an art of embodied placemaking from the perspectives of Transitions Dance Company (TDC) 2015 members who have undergone the creative processes and performances of 3 diverse pieces, investigating the performer(s) experience and understanding of place. (be)W.here is the culmination of this investigation, a filmed exposition offering a shared space between audiences and TDC performers as they question their sense of placemaking within the triple bill as three distinct choreographic dwellings. An autotopographical approach is adapted in the event, embracing the performative body as an archive of places. A central concern of (be)W.here is the continual process of uncovering the nature of placemaking within the context of dance performance. This is executed through the verbalised thoughts and intentions of the performers, all of which were encapsulated in W.here to(be), a creative documentary of the event. Drawing from concepts of space, place and the act of making, this thesis is presented in conversation with the resultant documentary. It aims to synthesise the many areas of theoretical and practical exploration that make up the exposition into 3 distinct chapters on place, the placemaker and the act of placemaking. This research ultimately advocates a form of platial practice as a way of facilitating the construction of authentic experiences for performers and audience alike. Link of creative documentary, W.here to(be): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgGmcr8yO8Y

There has been always an interest from artists in the study of optical phenomena beyond the framework of classical media, such as film and video, considering the aesthetic possibilities of filmmaking. The expanded concept of media art makes the boundaries of the transmission of the image itself obsolete and provides another means of expression and interpretation in the artistic process, for example, in media installation art. The invention and search by the viewer of spatial and temporal contexts within an organism undergoing transformation acquires the status of the creative process, and is configured as the exhibition itself. This shift completely reconfigures the role of the spectator, developing his own spectacle in his wandering throughout the installations of the works of art. Therefore, and due to the transfiguration of the spectator, we find immanence where the audience now becomes the spectacle and produces spatial and temporal context. This paper will address issues of time and place in the representation and presentation of time-based media works of art. We focus on case studies of artists who explore filmic languages in their work, like Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas and Gregory Chatonsky.

2014

In this essay, I try to point out how Thierry De Mey's films (including his collaborations with choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) construct a poetic vision of the world in which bodies and spaces closely interact and entwine. Indeed, De Mey's screendances always pay close attention to how dancing bodies inhabit and are intimately related to the various environments in which the film medium allows them to be immersed and to evolve. This is one of the most fruitful possibilities that the site of screendance opens up to the choreographic art: a strategy of "deterritorialization" that provides alternative settings to a stage, including complex milieus that can induce new kinesthetic qualities and original corporeal states. De Mey's films take maximum advantage of this possibility, which explains why the location is paramount in them. His film locations are always carefully chosen for their poetic and aesthetic characteristics that echo, or more often further or even renew, those of the dance by giving the movements a new universe and hence new qualities, significance, and connotations. The natural environments or architectural sets in his films are not, therefore, shot as mere backgrounds. De Mey is concerned with capturing the relationship between locations and bodies, between spaces and beings: the environments he chooses often appear to alter dance movements and bodily states so much that they create unprecedented choreographic qualities that could not be achieved in the flat, geometrical stage context, which is at once spectacular and neutral (plain and featureless). Reciprocally, dancing bodies in his screendances are shown to affect their environments in visual, haptic, and aural capacities, sometimes to such an extent that they modify or reshape them. These close, mutual interactions between dancing bodies and their spaces of perception and action evidently call for a phenomenological reading: more particularly, I will argue that De Mey's screendances represent poetic illustrations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theories of the body as open to the world (or to its environment), being both receptive and responsive to it, impacting on it and influenced by it. Ultimately, I will examine how this induces the highly sensory and embodied qualities of De Mey's cinema.