On technology as choreography.
Tags: Sociology, Gender Identity, Choreography, Mixed Reality, Technology

BETWEEN MOVENT AND CHOREOGRAPHY

I read the brief of our first week of class. It asks for a reflection on how technology has been able, and does, choreograph life. I am instantly lightened by the word choreograph. From a personal background of working with many contemporary dancers, and as a contact dancer myself, I have long thought about what is the difference between moving and dancing. What is the borderline between walking in a catwalk and a theater, in font of two audiences which, although in different contexts, are ready for the spectacle.

So when thinking about choreography and technology the first thing that comes to mind is, literally, a human being dancing in response to technology. But instantly after, the borderline of moving/dancing comes to mind, and the next visual image I get in my head is of fingers moving around a screen. Are our fingers dancing? Please watch Jeff Mills in the following video and tell me his fingers aren’t dancing:

It is fun to imagine every kind of movement as part of a choreography that is meant for the spectacle. Then, who is watching? Is there a history of movement? Did people move differently before technological advances? Like, literally, did they walk in a different way? Certainly, there must be an evolution promoted by media and globalization. The way we have seen rappers move, or models walk must have affected our perception of movement in really subtle ways, wether we want to imitate that or all the opposite. From expressions and gestures of actors in films revealing psychological constraints to iconic movements such as the ‘mic drop’ which firstly happened with Judy Garland and was later copied by Eddie Murphy, becoming a global meme with Barack Obama in 2012, and finally being the name of a song by the Seoul K-pop music band. Of course, in this later movement, a political signification comes in. Movements have become statements. This is not new, but it has certainly been influenced by the growth of technology. In this specific case, the mic which drops acts a as a symbol for retirement (as this took place in Obama’s retirement speech). Some say it alluded to Bryant’s retirement speech from two weeks earlier, others say that he also meant to symbolize the fact that, if Trump was a candidate in the next elections, then he would rather throw the mic. So many understandings, politics being so interwoven with symbolism of meaning and marketing, we’ll never know. But now I am stepping out of my subject matter.

INHERENTLY CULTURAL: TECHNOLOGY AS A NEW TOOL.

What I really wanted to state with these examples is not new, but rather a reminder, culture is everything and behavior is as well. These two pillars in which society is built are a consequence of the other, meaning that their mutual influence makes them impossible to analyze separately. The way that we relate to each other and with the rest of the world has a contextual background of interwoven non-linear past histories and contemporary fashions. With the word fashion I aim to refer to the current trends in thought and interaction of our daily lives. This includes political trends and movements (veganism), philosophical perspectives (post-humanism), language (slang), and tools (technology) and the list goes on. The examples in () are fashionable at the moment because they are constantly growing and define, with many other examples, the period that we currently live in. So when we talk about technology choreographing life, we are talking about the tools that we use to do things. But let’s not forget that technology, from this perspective, has always existed. Fire is a tool in the same way that a knife is a tool. And this have existed for a really long time already. A tool is a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function (definition taken out from the first Google result). In this sense, technology is yet another tool that our species have created for a function. There is a tendency to create tools that make out lives easier and I believe this was the reason why tools started to be created and this easiness has affected the way we live from sociological points of view -enabling us to have free time- but also in biological ways -development of the human brain in response to eating cooked meet with fire-.

What I find mostly interesting in technological tools is their invisibility, point in which I will refer to the reading that impulsed this text. In Femke Snelting’s text ‘A fish can’t judge the water’ we are presented with a very interesting visual image to describe technology:

“My physiotherapist used the following analogy to explain how humans use tools to negotiate the space around their bodies: “If you prepare a sauce…” she said, “and stir it with a wooden spoon… you will be able to feel at which moment exactly the starch starts to burn to the bottom of the pan”.”

What Snetling is essentially talking about in here is the way in which we still use tools to do things, but the process in which this happens becomes invisible. Going back to more primitive tools such as a knife, we can understand the physics of a sharp blade cutting through a surface because this basic understanding of physical objects is what allows us to move around the physical world. But, who really understands why we click a button in a remote controller and the TV turns on? Or the way in which our thumb and index finger touch each other to separate drawing an invisible line so that a screen will understand that we want to zoom into something we are watching or taking us to the menu of the device? Back in the time these movements would not exist in the same way that buttons were made for clothing. So there is certainly a new set of movements that we are using now to relate to the world but, at the same time, as humans, we make everything to our scale; the knife has a grip so that we can hold it in one hand, the screen is made to fit our pockets and be as ergonomic as possible. My point is, yes, technology -and tools in general- choreograph our movements, but this only happens after we have created them to our own size and user experience. Snetling explains:

“It [software] has become our natural habitat. We practice software until we in-corporate its choreography. We make it disappear in the background. A seamless experience. We become one with our extensions. (…) Software produces culture at the same time as it is produced by culture.”

THE VIRTUAL INFLUENCE

Until now, I have only limited my analysis to the physical realm of gestures but, as already mentioned, culture is everything and everywhere and the various ways in which we respond to it collaborate to the constant process of cultural production as well as defines the political position in which we respond to culture. I will only place one example of this political response as the conversation is so broad that it can become an endless conversation. The following example also came to my mind instantly as well as the dancing perspective which I presented at the beginning of the text. This is the questioning of binary gender and the increase of preferred used pronouns in the biographies of Instagram profiles. I believe there has been a popularization of the questioning of gender performance and identity in the past years. With writers such as Judith Butler setting a common ground to these debates, more and more people have started questioning binary gender and have started identifying with other non-confomative responses to it. Interestingly, certain social media platforms such as Instagram, which is already a technological tool that has influenced our movements (scrolling and double tapping), language (hashtags), and relationships (best friends stories, blocking, restricting other users), has now became a vehicle of expressing self identity. Even thought my personal use of instagram is for professional purposes, as a photographer I only post work and follow photography related accounts to network and keep updated, there is a large amount of users that use this platform as a showcase of their identity, from the music they listen to, to the clothes they wear, the exhibitions they go to, the parties they attend, the friends they have and the list goes on and on. A new addition to this identification has been the use of preferred pronouns on biographies and use of a personal account as an activist account that intents to make visible and normalize ways of non-conformative gender (which can then be amplified to other activist represetation of the LGBTGI+ community). The popularization of this movement has transgressed the virtual realm to the physical one affecting peoples perception and they way the present themselves in real life through the way they communicate their identity and ideology. I recently experienced this transgression in two ways. Firstly, as a new MA student of Computational Arts at Goldsmiths University, I have been having introductory lectures in all of my modules. In one of them, called Physical Computing, taught by my only female professor, she asked everyone to introduce themselves with their name and preferred pronoun (interestingly none of my white male professors asked for the pronoun presentation). Mostly everyone in my class was familiar with the possibilities of pronoun presentations whatever their gender identity was and I believe this is due to an increasing visibility of the need to clarify how we want to be addressed. My second experience of an intewoven virtual and physical experience of self identity was that I introduced myself with the pronouns she/they for the first time. This addition of ‘they’ in my preferred pronoun use has been a result of consuming a different non-normative images and following instagram accounts that would challenge cis and white heteronormative preconceptions of self expression in social media as well as physical conversation with my friends who were being influenced in the same way as me, therefore contributing to each other’s deconstruction.

Overall, and this has suddenly become a massive text that might be even longer than the compulsory week reading, I believe that technology, as any other tool has affected the way we relate to the world in both the physical realm in terms of the way in which we actually move, as well as the sociological environment that we are inherently constantly constructing when belonging to any kind of community and society.