Handcrafted Digital Morphing

This research is based on personal circumstances that became globally relevant.  In 2017 (i.e. long before COVID-19 outbreak) I and several of my close friends-colleagues started to travel a lot and became separated from each other. To cure homesickness we run the project ‘Kvartirnik of the 3d order‘, that was a series of monthly online dance meetings of four dance artists, and we practiced it regardless of our locations and time-zones. “In four different places, we will simultaneously make our dance happen. Dance, which we couldn’t even imagine. Dance enclosed in pour private rooms but unfolding and interweaving with others over live video streaming. This dance is our way to comprehend the potentiality of the Real in inevitable hyperreality. Beyond borders. Beyond money. Beyond images. Dance. In da flat. On your screen.”  Through the Pandemic in 2019, this format became routine of the whole world.

For more than 8 years I work in dance cooperative Isadorino Gore, that we cofounded with Dasha Plokhova. Last 3 years we live in different cities that provoke us to explore the potentiality of distancing and the challenge that the gap of closeness provides. This time we explore how we could choreograph movement and attention through the most popular conference platform – Zoom. We’ve named that way of communication ‘handcrafted digital morphing’. 
Being involved in the discourse of communication with non-human selves, we are questioning, if we are able to consider digital media as a non-human self as well? As humanity, we are looking for a possibility to build responsible communication with the environment and other species on the planet. Following this logic we would address the question, how could we build horizontal communication with the media we are communicating through – through the platform that everyone uses. Could we consider the labor of digital selves as invisible labor that is developed by the feminist paradigm? How could we show hospitality and invite digital media to collaborate with us? And who is hosting whom? And how would we co-build this process accordingly? 

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