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In December 2019 I carried out a four week research residency in Dansmakers Amsterdam with the below manifesto in hand. Throughout the research I worked together with sound designer and computer programmer Tharim Cornelisse. I share this text here because the result of the SUB Research Project became the starting point for THE WOMAN DESTROYED. I’ve diverged quite a bit from this manifesto; ideas have developed and morphed a lot over the past year. However, I find it useful to look back and see where certain concepts originated and how they continue to resonate now.
SUB RESEARCH PROJECT: A COMPACT MANIFESTO IN THREE PARTS by Courtney May Robertson - November 2019
1. No new material - REUSE, RECYCLE, SAMPLE, EXTRACT, APPROPRIATE, RECONFIGURE, COLLAGE, COLLATE, from the internet, from literature, from TV, from dance history, from big data, from popular culture, from historic events,..
2. TECHNOLOGICAL INTERVENTION; remove human intuition - use autonomous digital systems, stage INDETERMINACY, live modification, computer generated processes, algorithms, computer as creator, REMOVE THE GUT,..
3. Symbolism - CENTRALIZED POWER, ownership, subjugation, BREACHES OF PRIVACY, question ethics of technological interference, VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMAN BODIES, autonomy, ELUSIVE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION, power disparity, authoritarianism,..
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Some meandering thoughts on the transitory experience of live art and my attempt to reinforce that experience... and a Zadie Smith quote.
In essence this work has no fixed end; the outcome is different each time it is presented. A never ending construction and destruction. Undoubtedly ephemeral. Of course one could say that this is always the case with live performances. Nothing exists in a vacuum and so all live art is inevitably informed by what happens around it - the location, the mood, the audience, the temperature, the political climate, the news of that day, and so on. Exact replication is simply impossible. Surely, this too is the case with THE WOMAN DESTROYED. However more concretely, the content and overall structure of the performance is being determined in real time. When I, the maker and performer, step on stage the specific outcome is unknown to me. A computer code and concrete data determine the result. I want to create a climate on stage that enhances the transitory experience of live art, but can a machine adequately replicate and induce something that is usually intangible and viscerally experienced? The climate also aims to reflect precarious power imbalances; what does it mean to consent to such precarity? To submit myself to the commands of a non-emotional system comes with risks, but as Zadie Smith puts it in her latest essay collection - Intimations - there is a ‘complex and ambivalent nature of submission’ - nothing is one thing, entirely. It’s neither good nor bad, entirely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
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Future Blips by Douglas Coupland
It is incontestable that we are collectively rebuilding the way we process information. For example, notice how, when we tell people about an idea that we want them to research later, we don’t focus on the idea so much as how to search for it. Search words establish future locatability. “When you get home, just google MOTHER TERESA, TOPLESS and LAWSUIT. You’ll find what I’m talking about right away.
