A surviving camera: reorganized choreographies for the long mode of change

ABSTRACT

This article examines the choreographic sphere through the perspectives of cine-digitalities, archival memories, and camera mediations. I argue that our pandemic and post-pandemic Zoomscapes introduced a new cine-material plane that reorganized the choreographic process, as well as its presence and remoteness. I investigate how the web camera's distinct repository of temporality propels the dance archive forward, its complexity heightened by the pandemic. In all instances, rather than describing works of dance, I focus on how they emerge in this particular digital constellation, while delineating how they occur as complex events: as kinetic objects, kinetic surfaces, and kinetic proceedings, conjoined and choreographically labored by the camera.

KEYWORDS:

• choreography
• web camera
• dance studio
• dance archive
• pandemic
• earthquake

Introduction

On June 17, 2020, while working on Zoom for the choreographic project with dance collaborators in Zagreb (Croatia), Berlin (Germany), and Columbus (US), an earthquake hit Zagreb. The sudden and sharp rattling of the equipment was followed by people halting mid-sentence and jumping away from their notebooks. Throughout, all our web cameras were broadcasting while the Internet and Zoom didn’t skip a beat. Not sure what to do next we opted for what felt comforting: we kept working and stayed online. Held together by data, the digital site became our space of reliance. However, this reliance hinged on one crucial mechanism of mediation – the camera, or more precisely, a web camera.

According to film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, the camera cuts through material reality in a specific way. Kracauer argues that film and photography emerge as a result of friction or co-constitution between material reality and its photo-cinematic uptake (Kracauer 1960, 36). Following this lead, I discuss how camera, both as a process and an apparatus, can be understood through a specific refolding of the camera’s interiority and exteriority into a separate and all-encompassing plane. I argue that the web camera choreographically reformulates the site it captures, changing its mode and re-relating its elements. My intention is to show how a webcam, as a procedure and a photo-ontological plan, contributes to the choreographic process. In this sense, I understand choreography as a lens as well as a conclusion rewritten by those relations.

A choreographic process that we were working on resulted in two outcomes: a dance piece titled koreografska fantazija br. 5: Architectures of Time and a series of performances titled five dances for camera, dance studio, and a city. Both were developed from several physical locations connected through Zoom and were presented to online audiences as asynchronous camera recordings from the Zagreb dance studio. The earthquake that occurred during rehearsals was inscribed as an experiential component of both. Another event that informed the process was an archival element that surfaced online around the same time, opening up resonances in choreographic thinking: the 1968 dance film A Choreography for Camera and Dancers, created by Krešo Golik and Vera Maletić for Radio-Television Zagreb.

By connecting these asymmetric components, all mobilized by the camera's specific digital repository of temporality, I investigate how the analogue archival collides with the digital archival as the pandemic reorganized everything, shuffling categories and timelines. In all instances, rather than describing dance works, I focus on how they emerge in this specific digital constellation and how they take place through conceptual uptake by the camera. I understand this conceptual absorption as the result of a specific choreographic reorganization, which included rethinking the choreographic site as the remote choreographic. Moreover, I consider all components as complex events, understanding them as kinetic objects, kinetic surfaces, and kinetic proceedings, brought together and choreographically labored by the camera.

Choreographic reorganization and its multi-temporal interiority

The first few weeks of May 2020 were packed with communication. We had planned to meet in Zagreb to develop a new choreographic work, but the unforeseen global pandemic disrupted our schedules and project plans. As deadlines drew closer, it became evident that we would need to make considerable modifications to our initial plans. But what kinds of changes can we make, and, more importantly, are even possible? Not able to travel, we gathered online, from our dwellings in the United States, Germany, and Croatia, to discuss how to proceed. After an hour of discussion, we came to two conclusions: shifting the choreographic process from its single physical location will require a reformulation and reorganization of the site through which choreography operates. And if the site includes, moreover, if the site is a Zoomscape, the choreographic process will need to involve digital mediation. In this case it will need to incorporate a webcam as part of the choreographic process.

We immediately recognized Zoom's conceptual questions as being closely related to the issues of the choreographic plane, duration, form, and mediatization. On the one hand, we felt prepared to take on the challenge in terms of choreographic practice. The discussion about mediatized dance, on the other hand, reminded us of previous decades, when performing arts expanded in method by including and working with technological developments in connectivity and media. Furthermore, this unusual beforeness-returning-as-the-present appeared to be intertwined with the overall mood of the pandemic year. Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen periodize the post-2000s as the in-between period of the broadly shared, complex, sensibility. As remote contour discoverable in art practices, the sensibility becomes communicable as experience (Akker and Vermeulen 2017, 7).

In other words, beforeness-as-the-present could be understood as a tool with which different elements (choreographies, ideas, concepts) are visible precisely because they shift and transform through different sensibilities and temporalities. In this sense, both challenges included thinking about elements are neither indexed nor fixed, but rather slide across, expanding the categories to which they belong. According to Nancy K. Baym, communication about technology is productive in and of itself because it generates new meanings for technologies, new uses for technologies, and even new technologies (Baym 2015, 23). She investigates digital media concepts such as interactivity, communication's temporal structure, replicability, and mobility, as well as how digital technologies shape our interactions. Baym carves out a comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics that define personal connections in the digital age, while also shedding light on the ways in which these factors contribute to the ever-changing landscape of digital communication.

Simultaneously, digital modalities that accelerated during the pandemic could be viewed through the lens of revitalization of the topics covered by early cinema theories. According to Thomas Elsaesser, new media practices do not emerge in opposition to older ones, but rather subsume them; additionally, some structural aspects of digital media have direct predecessors in older media. As an example, according to media historian Vilém Flusser, the distribution of grain in any photograph ‘already prefigures both the dots of the video-image and the numerical grid of the digital image’ (Elsaesser 2006, 16). Similarly, Lutz Koepnick argues that some of the early theories of photography, for instance those by Siegfried Kracauer, are still relevant in discussions about digital media. Koepnick writes that Kracauer was interested in a dialogue ‘with the material dimension of inner and outer life – with the sensory, the nonintentional, the unshaped, and indeterminate’, developing a broader discourse about engagement with the medium (Koepnick 2012, 120).

Theories of the early cinema but also early digitalization have found renewed significance in the context of the pandemic's reliance on Zoom technologies and connectivity. The emergence of cinema and photography introduced new ways of capturing and representing reality, enabling the creation of visual narratives and the exploration of perception. Similarly, the early theories of digitalization and connectivity, which emphasized the transformation of communication, manifest in the widespread reliance on video conferencing tools during the pandemic. These theories provide a framework for understanding the impact of digital technologies on our social interactions and the ways in which we navigate and adapt to a digitally mediated world, reflecting the ongoing relevance of these early insights in the face of challenges posed by pandemic.

Additionally, such critical engagements with the digital are influenced by the mode of the digital itself. Jenna Burrell argues that the terrain of the digital contemporary research needs to be understood as constructed while the fieldsite can be seen as ‘a heterogeneous network’ (Burrell 2017, 53). Along with George Marcus, she proposes thinking in terms of entry points rather than locations, objects, or themes. But also, and due to the infinite size of the networked site, one has to make sure to find the way out. ‘One simple way of determining when to stop’, she suggests, ‘is when the time runs out’, because such sites presuppose a certain kind of incompleteness – as a feature (Burrell 2017, 53). In this sense, the research assumes a mode of inquiry that works with the ever-changing site built horizontally and across, offering temporary, almost transient conclusions.

Thus, the reorganization of the choreographic site is conceptualized as occurring both horizontally and across: the choreographic process (which is simultaneously the working process, conceptualizing process, and performing process), the webcam with its systems (configuration, technicalities, connectivity, data distribution), and the archival objects with their historical referentiality (past histories, current histories, micro histories). Additionally, all elements continuously produce numerous additional subsequent effects, affects, and consequences in terms of both process and performance. Framed in this way, the reorganizational gesture under discussion could itself be considered and defined as the choreographic, while distinct from the choreography itself, that it nonetheless constructs.

But what is ‘the choreographic’? In broad terms, the choreographic is a particular constructive procedure, with or without an outcome, that is distinct from something choreographic in terms of properties. Jenn Joy defines the choreographic as dance trespassing into modes of discourse, with which choreography makes visible its own capacity for knowledge production and distribution, ‘an economy of transversal ideas’ (Joy 2014, 15). The choreographic constructs a different economy of attention (Joy 2014, 168) while shifting choreographing to choreography, complicating relations between them. Moreover, as Megan V. Nicely writes, the suggestion is ‘that we do not just look at art, it also looks back, and by recognizing art’s “sensual address”, we open a space for dialogue where we might see, organize, and write our experiences differently’ (Nicely 2016, 175).

In this sense, the choreographic refers to the mode of address as well as the calibration that governs the relationships between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork (Wilcox 2015). It extends beyond the literal meaning of choreography to include its internal dynamics, which may or may not be visible or perceptible. In other words, the choreographic is a form of choreographic dimension that organizes encounters with a work of choreography while encouraging a more nuanced engagement with it. The essence of the choreographic as a force is thus a system of perceptible absences and latent presences, moving bodies and ideas, and spectral qualities of the work (Wilcox 2015), the whole of which exceeds the sum of its parts. Similarly, Claire Colebrook theorizes movement in itself, ‘movement as such that is released in always singular bodies though never reducible to those bodies’ (Colebrook 2005, 13). In both cases, it might be argued, there is a surplus or overspill that can, with specific conceptual investments, emerge as the choreographic, as choreography's own knowledge potential.

Engaging the choreographic entails mobilizing the entire sphere in which dance takes place while understanding such mobilization as belonging to the mode of choreography. Frédéric Pouillaude theorizes that to dance is ‘to construct new spaces that are more complex and better mastered’, in order to play with ‘improbable orientations, and to establish them as a movement vocabulary’. The space of dance is archi-striated, Pouillaude argues, while ‘being constructed around contingent spatial discontinuities and fleeting motor distinctions, without which there could be no shared choreographic practices’ (Pouillaude 2017, 32). The choreographic can thus be understood as a mode of choreographic engagement invested in its own improbabilities and discontinuities, which it highlights as novel engagements of the body with the environment while expanding the conceptual possibilities of both. In his case, the choreographic as a sphere spans multiple instances and connects multiple concepts. All of this comes together to form the choreographic here.

A camera as in-betweenness and mediation

If our choreographic process necessitated the reformulation of its physical context, the site in which choreography was laboring became an important vehicle of its conceptual drive. According to Siegfried Kracauer, photographs do not simply represent (or re-represent) the objects that they have captured; rather, they transfer them to the plane while cutting them off from their surroundings (Kracauer [1951] 2012, 205). This shift from dimension to plane, or from dimension logic to plane logic, was central to the choreographic reorganization. Moreover, as Rudolf Arnheim describes, the spatial organization of the cinematic image is neither ‘absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely three-dimensional but something in between’, while being ‘at once plane and solid’ (Arnheim 1957, 12). Consequently, the choreographic site is not a three-dimensional space captured by the two-dimensional digital frame; rather, it is something in-between, consisting of both. In this way, the choreographic procedure reorganized the choreographic site while operating in this liminal space.

This reorganization does not necessarily hinge on what web camera captures, in a sense, what it ‘sees’ but rather what it does: to the system of relations within which the choreographic process is embedded. In other words, the webcam, like all other elements that are involved in relating of the choreographic system, is now inevitably relational too: doing the relating and being engaged in the labor of it. Deleuze argues that ‘relations do not belong to objects, but to the whole, on condition that this is not confused with a closed set of objects’ (Deleuze 1986, 10). In other words, the objects (within a set) can change the place without changing the set while relations transform the whole and do so both thoroughly and qualitatively. Sets are closed and consist of parts, Deleuze insists, but the whole is open and has no parts, moreover, it can only be understood as ‘an indivisible continuity’ (Deleuze 1986, 10). Such continuity emerges for Deleuze with even more consequences, i.e. concerning space in relation to time: sets are in space while the wholes (plural) ‘are in duration, are duration itself’ (Deleuze 1986, 11). Furthermore, duration here opens in both directions of the past and the future, as well as as dispersed across temporalities.

For example, the nature of pandemic as transnational and transcontinental collapsed the need to explain what pandemic is: we were on its interior, in it and part of it, and across the globe, and over time, so what remained was, in some ways, a shared interiority: a radically shared history that emerged from the interior and internal totality of the external experience. However, the experience necessitated changes in the definition of presence and present. According to Naomi Bennett it required ‘a redefinition of our cultural conceptions of liveness and what it means to be present with one another’ (Bennett 2020, 266). In this sense, redefinitions were required on multiple scales that are now inextricably linked. In other words, the reorganization of the choreographic process and its incorporation of the digital could be seen as part of the larger processes of redefining.

A webcam, and the procedure that it introduces to the system, is usually understood as an element that mediates or is a mediator itself. Examined closely, however, the mediation itself needs to be understood as an element. According to Richard Parmentier, one of the fundamental principles of mediation can be found in Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of Thirdness. The main idea of thirdness is that any third element that links, synthesizes, or binds the first two elements (each of which is in a different order) ‘must exist at a higher logical and ontological level than the initial two things’ (Parmentier 1994, 34). Moreover, the third element in which Peirce was invested is not a third-something but a relation between the first and second, a triadic quality itself, termed Mediation.

Paula Albuquerque, a media researcher who studied the temporal form of webcam footage, makes similar suggestions. For the operation of the webcam, she proposes a synthesis of the cinematic time (the single shot) and network time (global time and transmission) as a third term, Realtime. According to Albuquerque, this third form of time ‘consists of a temporality that includes delays in transmission, disguised by an apparent immediacy, and stands at the basis of the webcam’s potential to generate chronotopes, i.e. time–space narrative units’ (Albuquerque 2018, 32). Edward Soja, on the other hand, proposes a spatial version of trialectics. If the first space can be defined as the result of the physical material environment and the second space as the process of conceptualizing the first, then the third space, according to Soja, is a specific convergence of both. Soja defines thirdspace as an ‘open alternative that is both similar and strikingly different’, and that ‘does not derive simply from an additive combination of its binary antecedents but rather from a disordering, deconstruction, and tentative reconstruction of their presumed totalization’ (Soja 1996, 61).

As a result, it is possible to conclude that the choreographic process is not simply reorganized through, with, or by a webcam, but rather that the camera itself is a choreographic procedure, through an additional element of mediation. As an important distinction, a camera is not choreographing (or arranging or directing), because this would fail to recognize the realm of Thirdness. But, more importantly, no one is choreographing – as there is the choreographic as a procedure, as a mediation in and of itself, as Deleuzian indivisible continuity. André Lepecki argues that there is ‘an inscription of the dance onto the mnemonic mechanism of the technology, either through photography, film, the writing of the critic, or movement notation’, but ‘the notion of mnemonic trace emerges as a concept in crisis – a concept brought to crisis by the means of dance’ (Lepecki 2004, 4). The crisis here refers to the idea of the body as a visible presence choreographed into sequences of meaning. What is suggested instead are the bodies shifting between mnemonic modes, expressed not just in technology but also across it.

As a result, several realms are folded onto and into each other: a webcam is folded into the choreographic, the choreographic is folded both along the choreographic process and across the camera that is mediation, the mediation is folded onto itself and opened in all possible directions, the plane cuts through dimensions while being folded within them, and the camera is folded, in a sense, out of duration while being, at the same time, constitutive of it. To put it another way, we can speak of the choreographic interiority of the camera that spills over the totality that is only seemingly external to the camera. Seemingly because the plane's very existence eliminates the internal-external divide, which has now been reorganized through the Thirdness, or as a perception that knows no rest, or as Deleuzian continuity or duration. To summarize, there is a specific type of dislodging occurring, which is not of the technological but of the conceptual order.

The geo-kinetic rattle

Our work on these questions continued into summer 2020, when the second unexpected event cut through our choreographic process, the first being the pandemic itself. As mentioned in the introduction, the earthquake on June 17, 2020 occurred while we were on Zoom; some of us were in the dance studio in Zagreb, some in Berlin, and some in Columbus Ohio. Suddenly, a sharp jolt blurred the screen. As the quake subsided, the Zoom space erupted with worried questions. The earthquake amidst the pandemic was too surreal to imagine and prepare for. After ensuring that everyone was safe, we noticed that all six of our web cameras and internet connections remained operational, with no interruptions. But what is the protocol for dealing with the earthquake during a cross-continental Zoom call while in the dance studio? We wondered if it the quake would repeat. A strange dilemma. Is it okay to continue or should people go home? Is the studio actually safer than peoples’ homes? It’s on the ground and not the high floor, we brainstormed over Zoom, scrolling the news and messaging family and friends. As nobody wanted to leave the studio, we stayed online, kept working, and leaned into the collective online presence as a mode of togetherness.

Susan Leigh Foster proposes a link between the bodies affected by the earthquake and the understanding of such calamity over distances (Foster 2007, 151). In her larger project, a research on empathy and kinesthesia, she investigates those confluences in relation to choreography. She argues that the connection between bodies that allows empathic meanings to be transmitted is highly mediated and constructed along social, historical, and political lines (Foster 2011). With this in mind, does the webcamera's Realtime, as proposed by Albuquerque, or its thirdspace, as proposed by Soja, reorganize kinesthetic mediation and construction, especially if the earthquake becomes an integral part of the digital site? In other words, are these trialectic modes capable of ushering in, or are they already ushering in, novel ways in which choreography facilitates and is organized around kinesthetic sequences? Is there a larger flow of meaning, history, and time that goes beyond the single instance of choreographic work?

Foster's research proposes embodied experience in relation to perspective, in which kinesthetic empathy is organized around connection and relation to the movement witnessed. This resonates with Albuquerque's proposal of the web camera's Realtime, in which the synchronous nature of video communication tools, including the underlying ruptures of time, allow experiences presence and connection despite physical distance. The earthquake that occurred in the dance studio while everyone was working on Zoom adds a new dimension to this discussion. It disrupts the assumed sequence between digital and physical space, bridging the physical and virtual realms differently. The magnitude and intensity of the event invites reflection on the vulnerabilities and unpredictability of both embodied and mediated experiences. It reorganizes the concept of the choreographic process while emphasizing the embodied response and shared resilience, as well as the integration of the event beyond the concepts of presentation and performance.

As these components begin to relate throughout and across, the thirdspace proposed by Soja is beginning to emerge. The earthquake is underpinned by the thirdspace, as the experience blurs the boundaries between physical and virtual spaces, highlighting the coexistence of multiple dimensions within the choreographic process. The disruption restructures choreography that transcends its performative form and is hybridized throughout the thirdspace, while the earthquake catalyzes the entanglement of physical, virtual, and collective choreographic experiences. It challenges the notion of choreography in relation to the complexities of the thirdspace, resulting in reimagination of the choreographic landscape. Ultimately, this seismic event and the subsequent reflections deepen the term of choreography, inviting a more complex approach to its theorizing that recognizes the interconnectedness of embodied presence, mediated communication, layered temporality, and shared experiences.

Choreo-digital archive

O n June 25, 2020, the Croatian State Archive released a rare 1968 dance film on its YouTube channel (Golik and Maletić 1968a, 1968b). A Choreography for Camera and Dancers, created by renowned Yugoslavian artists, director Krešo Golik and choreographer Vera Maletić, is considered one of the first experimental dance films in Croatia (Plesna scena.hr 2011). The film's title is a nod to Maya Deren's 1945 short film A Study in Choreography for Camera. According to Vera Maletić, Golik used a static camera to film the sequences as no movable cameras were available at the time of filming at the Radio-Television Zagreb. Maletić structured improvisational segments for dancers while Golik created a detailed storyboard. The filmed sequences were then choreographed as movements (Mihelcˇić 2008, 12). As a result, the image, location, and bodies are intricately woven together, with choreography involving the camera, frame, editing, and movement.

The collaboration of Maletić and Golik surfaced online at a relevant point in our own thinking about the statics of the web camera. Their unintentional use of the static camera echoed ours, and their cine-choreographic solution resonated with our conceptual efforts. In her 1987 essay ‘Videodance: Technology: Attitude Shift’, Maletić explains the theoretical shift required in understanding camera technology for dance. She argues that the interaction of technology and movement ‘creates new videographic space–time-dynamics which are different from the spatial and temporal dimensions of a theater dance performance’ (Maletić 1987, 3). In other words, she draws attention to the camera's thirdspaceness, which raises its own set of questions outside of the physical performance space.

Lutz Koepnick argues that Kracauer’s Theory of Film reorganized the understanding of photography as a medium in relation to the photographic as a mode of the medium. Kracauer maintened, Koepnick explains, that ‘photography and the photographic are locked into a historical dialectic, a reciprocal dynamic in which one simultaneously needs and helps constitute the other’, while our understanding of photography is deeply historical because ‘we cannot speak about photography, the medium’s nature, without mapping the unfolding of this nature in what contemporary discourse calls the photographic’ (Koepnick 2012, 116). The relationship between photography and the photographic is thus mutually constitutive, with each shaping the other within a historical dialectic. The medium necessitates an examination of its unfolding in contemporary discourse, which emerges as the photographic. This emphasizes the inextricable link between the historical context and the conceptual framework through which photography is understood and discussed.

The choreographic suggested by Jen Joy, the photographic proposed by Sigfried Kracauer, and Vera Maletić's notion of the videographic dynamic of space–time all intersect around the transformative mode as a specific kind of fold. Jen Joy emphasizes context reorganization and meaning fluidity in choreographic procedures. This applies to the camera as well, which captures and frames movement while choreographing visual, spatial, and temporal compositions. Sigfried Kracauer's photographic discourse adds another layer to this synthesis by examining the historical and discursive dimensions of photography. This is consistent with Joy's emphasis on choreography as a field of context, as is the camera's ability to reorganize the aspects embedded within its images that are now emerging as archives.

In Vera Maletić's concept of videographic space–time, the camera is a thirdspace that includes both physical and virtual realms, echoing Kracauer's notion of the medium. In this way, the camera becomes a portal that invites a deeper exploration of the spatial and temporal dimensions in both choreography and moving image. These perspectives, taken together, highlight the interconnectedness of choreography, image, and archive, revealing the transformative potential of camera as a medium that works with movement, context, and history while also complicating relations between space and time. This encourages an investigation of the dynamic interplay between physical presence, mediated communication, and the fluidity of the camera as a specific space and mode of discourse.

The doing of the camera and its conceptual uptake through choreography reorganizes not only how choreography looks like, is perceived, or understood, but also what it theoretically does, broadening its scope from choreography to the choreographic. Beyond the immediate contents of choreography, the issue of reorganization raises the issue of knowledge's specific production, which derives its power from the unearthing of the seen, temporalized, and archived. The web camera’s data archive connects with the film footage from the archives. Both are now linked as digital archives, and their content takes on a dynamic nature, existing in multiple temporal sequences and multiple locations at the same time. From 1968 to 2020, the echo of the archive is captured by a peculiar kinetic flicker, the long take distributed across media surfaces. What emerges from the bridging of temporal sequences is the archival sphere, merging into a web of interconnected histories. As a result, archived content not only retains its original meaning but also acquires new associations, resulting in a dynamic dialogue between various temporalities and meanings.

Choreo-digital prefiguration and geo-kinetic exchange

As various elements unexpectedly intertwined with our choreographic process and became part of it, what we were able to designate, recognize, and define as choreography changed as well. Not only for this specific process but also in relation to the concept of choreography more broadly. Specific pandemic circumstances triggered a geo-kinetic exchange along the choreography's digital parameters. And the exchange drew its force from the pandemic circumstances itself and their non-negotiable nature. In other words, the pressures of the circumstances created a structure and ushered it into existence. Is this the revolution that Dziga Vertov was writing about? A revolution that reorganizes with spaces, contexts, bodies, and across time?

‘I am kino-eye’, Vertov writes, ‘I am a builder. […] I am a mechanical eye. […] Now I, a camera, fling myself along [the bodies’] resultant, manoeuvring in the chaos of movement. […] My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you’ (Vertov and Michelson [1984] 1984, 18). Along these lines, what possibilities for political futures can such reorganization open? Oliver Marchart argues that art practices, on their own experimental terms, are capable of pre-enacting political ones, and that ‘the future society is brought into existence in the very moment in which it is pre-enacted’ (Marchart 2019, 86). The pre-enactment or prefiguration of the present moment grounds it not only by negotiating the transition between past and future, but also by expanding, looping, and de-territorializing the idea of the now. Art practices, Marchart suggests, are capable of constructing loops and loopholes in the fabric of historical time, and thus re-actualize alternative histories by pre-actualizing alternative futures (Marchart 2019, 88).

Taken together, Vertov and Marchart's ideas present a relevant set of possibilities. Those are found in the experimental application of known technologies and procedures but go beyond aesthetic inscription. The experiment here is oriented toward prefiguration, a kind of re-drafting, connecting the elements otherwise. In this sense, and as Golik and Maletić’s film emerged from the depths of analogue archives, what made sense to see in their work shifted dramatically as well. Is it possible to understand their work as part of a larger conglomerate of cine-kinetic elements that seek to prefigure something? In other words, can various elements of its belonging to technology, aesthetic, discipline, or field be released and inscribed differently, or even positioned as uninscribed?

In ‘Seeing Things Through Things’ Jacques Rancière chronicles Dziga Vertov’s struggles with critics of his work by situating Vertov’s method as a question of the camera itself. ‘The camera gains its autonomy’, Rancière argues, ‘when it plunges into the middle of facts to make them its own thing, and to make this thing an element of social construction’ (Rancière 2019, 229). Moreover, he explains, if the relational unity shown in A Sixth Part of the World was only geographic, ‘the spatio-temporal unity of Man with a Movie Camera is not defined by any geographic territory or historical sequence but by the cinematographic machine alone’ (Rancière 2019, 240). Hence, the conglomerate of different, incompossible elements can be seen as the ‘explosion of surfaces’ that presents a certain kind of ‘dynamism of collective forms that cuts across any particular activity’ (Rancière 2019, 230).

In other words, is it possible to understand A Choreography for Camera and Dancers (Radio-Television Zagreb, 1968) and Five Dances for Camera, Dance Studio, and a City (the dance studio in Zagreb, 2020) as part of the continuum of their shared prefiguration? Anna Pakes proposes a distinction between experiencing the performance event and experiencing the dance work. ‘If a dance work is an abstract object or type (or indeed a set, fusion, or action token)’, she argues, we ‘do not have direct epistemic access to it through performance anyway, even though [we] may ‘see’ it in a process akin to deferred ostension’ (Pakes 2020, 233). The question is thus, what new possibilities can be derived from comprehending choreographic outputs based on premises that forego dance's performative aspects in favor of dance's experimental, digital, and cine-geo-kinetic prefiguration? And can the static camera, both analogue and digital, be theorized as a point of pressure and horizon that has reorganized the choreo-cinematic gaze towards prefiguration?

In this sense, it might be argued, a static camera, one that simply captures and thus exchanges dimensions for planes, creates a pre-enacted aspect of the emerging plane. This plane cuts across time, compresses historical distances, and allows for new entry points into the temporal frame, all while shifting our understanding of what content, captured by the camera in this cross-ontological sense, is. Or as Deleuze suggests: ‘it is no longer time as succession of movements, and of their units, but time as simultaneism and simultaneity (for simultaneity, no less then succession, belongs to time; it is time as whole)’ (Deleuze 1986, 46). In other words, the workings of the camera are simultaneously constitutive of time in two ways: ‘time as interval and time as whole, time as variable present and time as immensity of past and future’ (Deleuze 1986, 48).

This implies that the camera, in the most immediate sense, is the earthquake, or is of the earthquake. Furthermore, a camera announces the pure kinetics of all: bodies, spaces, infrastructures, earthquakes, and more – but also – it is the ‘pure movement extracted from bodies or moving things’, and this is not, Deleuze will conclude, an abstraction but emancipation (Deleuze 1986, 23). In this sense, a surviving camera labors at the forefront of radical kinetics – not as a tool for choreographic work, but as the radical choreographic itself.

Enflamed camera and the architectures of time

When Vertov writes ‘I am a builder. […] I, a camera, fling myself along [the bodies’] resultant’ he assumes the voice of the camera itself. Vertov ‘enflames’ the camera with intention, the intention of the camera itself, rather than its operator, by shifting away from the human who operates the camera and from the human who does something with the content that the camera has captured. It may even be possible to comprehend the operator as an extension of the camera's intention rather than the other way around. In other words, the camera endows the world with existence but on its own terms and as specifically defined by the camera.

In other words, as Vertov writes, the camera is capable of deciphering, and in a novel way, a world unknown to us, and as the amount of content produced by cameras far outnumbers our ability to do something with it, whether viewing, organizing, discussing, sorting, archiving, analyzing, categorizing, or destroying, the challenge is to lean into such vast unknowing. From this vantage point, it is possible to see, I believe, how the camera itself builds (to use Vertov’s term) through doing, through its own procedure. In this sense, on top of a specific constitution with which the web camera reorganized our choreographic process, is an additional, underlying capacity: area, latitude, and extent – with which the camera mobilizes its own procedure.

From this perspective, Architectures of Time, our choreographic topic amidst the 2020 pandemic, took shape as cine-kinetic surviving, cine-kinetic choreographing, and cine-kinetic procedure, held by various past and present cameras through their choreographic capacity. Walter Benjamin argues that something in front of the camera is much less about that something being represented for the viewer than it is about being represented for the camera’s apparatus (Benjamin 2008, 37). As part of the same process, I Zoom-recorded and archived nearly all of our choreographic sessions with the intention of ‘doing something with it’. Along the lines discussed here however, it appears to me that it will not be me doing something, but rather, it will be the camera doing the doing, proceeding me in a direction of that future something.

Siegfried Kracauer argues that we redeem the world ‘from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera’ (Kracauer 1960, 300). Similarly, Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese underscore that the pandemic crisis should remind us to renew our commitments to social engagement, political struggle, and artistic protest, showing us how to transition ‘from the individual to the collective and from grief to action’ (Capece and Scorese 2021, 11). What called our attention in the early summer of 2020 was thus perhaps one such transition, and even if incomplete and in-progress, we decided to show up for the moment, for each other, and for the process itself, curious about the possibilities, however unpredictable.

Conclusion

Under specific circumstances, the digital site can become our space of togetherness. I argued that one such crucial mechanism of mediation – the camera, or more precisely, a web camera – both illuminates and reorganizes what that space is. By approaching the question from within the choreographic process and from the vantage point of the choreographic, I showed how the concept of choreography is thereby reorganized too. Or alternatively, the very idea of choreography comes into a full relief through the conceptual and digital uptake by the camera.

Furthermore, the camera, as a process, sphere, or duration, participates in geo-materialities, for example geo-materialities of an earthquake, but from an internal perspective of space, experience, body, and time. As it moves across the medium's surfaces, modes, and archives, the camera that captures the earthquake becomes inextricably linked to it. The archives, on the other hand, extend as the camera's echo, constructing a distinct, third space that transforms the temporalities of both the archive and the event. The concept of choreography, caught in the middle, changes as well, altering its mode of operation, meaning, and outcome.

The camera thus illuminates its own agency, its own thinking procedure, while becoming a crucial element of the choreographic process and the choreographic procedure in and of itself. In this sense, many digital spheres that have emerged during the pandemic are endowed with multiple internal structural agencies, revealing possible choreographic, discursive, and agential capacities. Exploring those through a choreographic lens encourages understanding of specific, unpredictable knowledge brought on by structural pressures of the pandemic. This knowledge moves through familiar disciplines in novel ways, potentially reorganizing them in the process.

For forever camera, forever filming, showing up for dances as the hallways of data, echoing through times of the long change – reorganizing, surviving.

Geolocation information

Zagreb (Croatia), Berlin (Germany), Columbus Ohio (USA)

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Erica Levin and Dr. Harmony Bench at The Ohio State University for providing a supportive research framework for the development of this article. I extend my gratitude to Prof. Maja Đurinović at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek and Marko Rojnić at the Croatian Film Association for their assistance with the archival version of A Choreography for Camera and Dancers (1968).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marjana Krajac

Marjana Krajac is a choreographic researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the emancipatory potentials of dance and its practice, with an emphasis on media, site, and process. Her texts have been published in Movement Research Performance Journal, Performing Arts Journal Frakcija, Journal for Dance Movements/Kretanja, and Body, Space & Technology Journal. Choreographic Journal: seeing / vidjeti, a collection of her choreographic essays, was published as a book in 2018. She has received numerous awards for her choreographic work that explores various symptoms, processes, and temporalities of form.