Sara-Lot`s interest in the topic of media archeology - and media ecology in a broader sense - has met Sabrina's current engagement in “doing archiving”, in exploring archival practices as performative acts. Rather than focusing on the archive as a physical space for remaining and preserving knowledge and collective memories, we are both curious in the process of archiving itself; in the transforming and transgressing of movement into enduring material. Based on these common areas of interest, we have started investigating the space in between the digital and the material; we are Lost and Mov.ing in Archives.
Our current digital era seems to be all about archives, as metaphor, as place, as system and as logic of knowledge production, transmission and preservation. Technologies seem to offer new futures for our pasts; we see glimpses of a world where information is transparent, freely accessible and based on open access. At the same time we find ourselves temporarily dislocated, being in relation to digital technologies generate feelings of not being coterminous with our time.
The title of the project is inspired by the collection of essays Lost and Living (In) Archives: Collectively Shaping New Memories. The contributors of this book explore the question, how the change from traditional archives to digital ones, which are in fact “living”, flexible and virtual repositories, has affected our relationship to the past, the present and the future. They ask for the potential of these new archives: do they “offer the democracy implied by the idea of the public domain, or will they offer new ways for public instruments of power to operate?”
As Diana Taylor defined the ‘repertoire’ as the epistemic system of embodied knowledge - the doing, repeating, and mimetic practices that are performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing (acts of non reproducible knowledge, transferred from body to body). In contrast, the ‘archive’ is supposedly lasting, stable objects such as books, documents, bones, photographs, determined by Taylor as objects that theoretically resist change over time. As the ‘live’ nature of the repertoire suffered from erasure by the ever changing present, the archive constructed a past to remember.
Both the archive and the repertoire provoke different ways of knowing and being in the world, the repertoire supports embodied cognition and collective thinking. The archive favors objective and universal thought and individualism. Memory and history stem from the differences between the repertoire and the archive, they are not static entities, but active processes which continuously engage with the creation, storage and transmission of knowledge.
Lost and MOV.ing in Archives is a performance based project and collaboration in which the embodied, the archival, and the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other. A performance based on a ‘mixed reality’ in which both technology as the two bodies mutually influence and collaborate with one another.
At the same time, a second performer is doing film recordings of the performed movement score. At two to three minutes intervals, she uploads the film footage on an online video platform (such as youtube or vimeo) and transforms it into a new QR code. As soon as the new QR code is generated, it will be projected on the white cube and replace the previous one. The original movement score, built upon basic blocks of steps, is transformed by the pattern of the new QR code that opens and closes new movement trajectories. In the meantime, the recording of the varied movement score will be uploaded and transformed into a new QR code which - once again - will be projected on the cube and affect the performance of the movement score.
Digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission - a system that is rapidly complicating western systems of knowledge. if the repertoire consists of embodied acts of transfer and the archive preserves and safeguard print and material culture- what to make of the digital that displaces both bodies and objects?
This performance based project questions the translatability of movement into material archives: how to archive movement in times where the traditional archive has been partly reconfigured by digital technologies?
The multimedia performance begins with a person moving in percussive rhythms within a cube. Dissonant sounds of overlapping metronomes accompany repetitive patterns of gangly steps and jerky movements. The movement score[1] seems to be directed by a QR code projected on the floor and on the walls. The web of black and white cubes both structures and limits the movement capacity of the performer.
As a result, the performance Lost and Mov.ing in Archives unfolds seemingly endless loops of the digitally mediated and transformed movement score. The initial pattern of movement is re-enacted and at the same time transformed into something new. Whereby, neither the moving performer, nor the performer operating the technology is fully in control of the variability. There is a third element involved: the digital.
As materialized traces of the recurring movement score, the generated digital QR codes will be printed out and attached to a wall during the performance. Thus, the printed QR codes literally produce a material archive of the performed movement that can only be accessed by means of technological devices. By scanning the code, the audience will be forwarded to a youtube (or vimeo) link that displays a specific video recording of the performance. However, the performance itself cannot be re-viewed as a whole; it is digitally preserved only in pieces and fragments.
