Dancing with and within the Digital Domain

Abstract

Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding dance as an ungraspable event towards conceiving of dance as a tangible process that can be collected, transmitted, repeated and packaged or archived as an object. I look at two dance works – Matthias Sperling’s Loop Atlas and Siobhan Davies and Anri Sala’s Solo in the Doldrums – that trouble conventional notions of embodiment and its relationship to both presence and absence, at the same time they challenge how computational media fixates on figures and gestures that can be traced, mapped and calibrated.

Objective reality in the digital age

“…However, the ethical dimension remains: does this digital resurrection detract from the film's authentic experience, and are audiences being subtly deceived? Drawing an analogy from Ravetto-Biagioli [6] , just as dance, an inherently ephemeral art form, resists true capture, so does the essence of an actor's performance. No matter the sophistication of digital recreations, they might never genuinely encapsulate the original actor's nuances and emotions, leading to ethical concerns about authenticity and the potential dilution of the actor's craft.…”