onomatopoeiaarchive-blog

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Time structures on the research video

On the research video with Victoria, make a rule for when the videos overlap or not. Every 30 seconds they switch between overlay and side-by-side? See what kind of chance-semantics that produces? An intervention into the timescape of the original footage? Add a third screen sometimes of a blank space? Something more abstract and less directly related. Could illustrate a different concept of the work--the introduction of a third element into this otherwise simple equation.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

A collaboration also exists with the viewer of the archive, unknowingly perhaps, taking on a responsibility for the representations that are consumed. The viewer becomes part of the extended archive, collecting, preserving, sharing stories that could possibly disappear, and neglecting others that are disappearing.

Jayce Salloum. "Sans Titre/Untitled: The video installation as an active archive" 2006.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

I wish this all wasn't on a tumblr. I don't like that tumblr owns the content, that thevproject is indirectly supporting their bottom line. But I guess it mirrors my work as a dancer. In both cases I'm working within frames created by other artists or entities. Still, it would be better if I could write my own code for the blog to actively define its frame rather than wearing the blog platform equivalent of an Urban Outfitters tee shirt.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

In my work, photography is a subject before it is a medium. I would rather work on photography as opposed to with photography, which becomes a site of an intervention.

Alarm Zaatari. "Photographic Documents/Excavation as Art" 2006. Am I using the process of documenting dance on video as a subject more than I'm using it as a method, a medium? I think so. The project is very much about what is left out, it uses the translation from live to video as material.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition - its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to regroup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of Utopia.

Hal Foster. "An Archival Impulse" - maybe onomatopoeia is about recouping Paxton's original desires for CI, his "failed vision," into a possible scenario of alternative physical relations today. There is something utopic in the way I want to emphasize the kind of action demonstrated in the video of Magnesium.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

The work in question is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.

Hal Foster. "An Archival Impulse."

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Use the process of learning as structures to navigate in the score

Track our own processes of how we learn each segment--how many times we re-watch a certain clip, what its duration is--so that we can create structures in the dance of replaying the exact process we used to learn each segment. Some parts require pausing the footage, some can just be watched once, some require constant rewinding. Track what we have to do for each segment to be able to repeat that when we do the dance.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Douglas Gordon

Research Douglas Gordon's use of Hitchcock films in his own work--the way he uses familiar sources to ensure a legibility that can then be disturbed. That's what I'm doing.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Plagiarism as a strategy?

Maybe I should just call the project Magnesium as a gesture of rewriting the archive. Create a fictional account of real events. The "fake news" of dance. But then it's extra focused on the archival artifact, it gives it more authority rather than questioning that authority. But no matter how you cut it learning the material and using it as a score probably gives it more power. Unless I use the material and make no reference to its source. Plagiarism. This would parallel the kind of image and music sampling that is central now to how we use the internet. Curator as artist. Sampling the movement of another dance to create a new one without referencing the original. Saving images from google image search that other people created and using them for your own ends. But the project as I imagine it is more directly referential to its source material than that.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Touch and play

Went to CI jam today, a guy there talked about Touch and Play as a practice of everything at the edge of contact improvisation, that which is not invited into a jam space: power, sexuality, play-fighting, etc. somehow relates to this project. Just some food for thought. People have been thinking about the exclusions of CI for a long time and there are other conversations out there that are working through this. Not sure how much that is a part of this project but might become less a part of it.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Why Paxton?

So when I was at Captiva last month I gave a presentation about this Magnesium-related research. Adrienne Edwards asked me what I think it does to make work that focuses attention on another artist. Her point was that Steve Paxton already has more than his share of historical attention. Is it really worth anyone's time to make a piece that emphasizes his role in the canon? I've been thinking about this. I see her point. I don't have an answer yet, other than that this project is more about investigating the archive of a legacy I'm a part of and the narrative that has been written about that legacy from archival materials.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

NYPL for the Performing Arts - March 16, 2017

I started the research on all of this when I went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to watch the video of Magnesium on March 16, 2017 after rehearsal with Heather Kravas. I knew I was going to use my concept of learning the material of Magnesium as set choreography to apply for a slot to show work at Judson and needed to start digging in. 

At the library I started by recording the periods of time that two different dancers were in and out of the frame of Steve Christiansen’s footage. I recorded about twenty instances of being in the frame of the camera for two different dancers. Hard to do much more than take notes at the NYPL. 

I asked the librarian if it was possible to get a DVD or other kind of copy of the material. She scoffed, did some research, and then told me that yes, the footage is on a DVD that can be purchased online. 

I ordered the DVD from Contact Quarterly on May 2, 2017. I had originally thought to wait until I heard back from Movement Research about Judson to order the DVD but then decided to just get to work regardless of the outcome of Judson. 

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

I went to Strand today and bought The Archive (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) to have more background for understanding and making decisions about this blog project that I currently am referring to as an archive of artistic process. 

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Danielle chat

I hung out with Danielle Goldman earlier today and the Magnesium/Onomatopoeia stuff came up. We chatted about the question that Adrienne Edwards raised on Captiva, which I haven yet to write about: about what it does to focus our attention on a figure and what it means, in this case, to focus attention on someone like Steve Paxton who has no shortage of historical attention. I’m going to send her the video that I’ve made so far. She mentioned a reading she came across that raises the question of what the translation from improvisation to set material does--to what extent can one discern when something is set vs. when something is improvised and what difference does it make? She’s going to send it to me. 

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

Meeting with a videographer on Friday

I'm meeting with a videographer on Friday this week 7/21/17 to talk about shooting video for a cleaner and more composed version of the video overlay that I did. A sort of "final draft" of that iteration of the project. Craft the camera work more on the recordings of my dancing.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

I’m taking Jennifer Monson’s MELT workshop this coming week about building scores. Curious to see how it might inform the way that I’m starting to imagine a score for Onomatopoeia.

I envision a version of the dance that includes 3-4 dancers and features a score that allows them/us to move forward or back through the choreography in real time. The piece will operate as a kind of video that can fast-forward or rewind itself. Then we can produce, live, the kind of micro repeated-watching that is required to learn movement from video.

Dancers will engage the score for communicating how to navigate the material (move forward, move back, pause) in the moments when each dancer has no set choreography because they were off screen in that moment of Christiansen’s video recording.

[onomatopoeiaarchive-blog]

In March I applied to present some of my research for Onomatopoeia at Movement Research at the Judson Church in fall 2017. I was calling the project “Atomic Number 12″ at the time. I heard back toward the end of June that my application was not accepted.