Discussion as part of the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, exploring the emergence virtual choreography; on the occasion of John Gerrard’s exhibition Exercise at Kunsthall Darmstadt.
Technologies such as digital character animation and motion capture have stimulated a fascination with the ability to digitally record, recombine, and replay gesture, to abstract movement into code and to propogate it from body to body.
Manifestations of dance in popular and social media reveal an aspiration to match the exactitude and dispossession characteristic of these digital bodies; in parallel, military research uses the same technologies to extend the scientific objectivation of the human frame in view of its monitoring and optimisation.
What are the consequences for choreography when we experience the body as a media player, rigged to the keyframes of popular spectacle and ready to be possessed by archival playback? Can we foresee an expanded field of choreography in which the boundaries between display and entertainment, empathic response to images of the body in motion, scientific knowledge of human physiology, biopolitical monitoring and intervention, and military violence become increasingly unclear?
