IJSD Volume 13: Choreographing the Archive
Rippling Outwardly: Expanding The Notion Of Screendance
Archives With Augmented And Mixed Reality
Jeannette Ginslov
Abstract
In this article I propose that augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) have
the potential to expand the notion of a Screendance archive. This takes the form
of a hybrid installation, where visitors are invited to download an AR app onto
their mobile phones, or tablets, to access a Screendance archive tagged to
images in an installation space. This type of archive, is conceived as a piece of
artistic work for hybrid installations, and is intrinsically related to collaborative
artistic, philosophical and technological research. It has the ability to highlight
temporal shifts between past and present and demonstrates how archived
somatic states may ripple outwardly across technologies, bodies, and space, to
audiences who embody these states within the wider somatic feld. For these MR
interactions to work, methods in relation to flming, editing, and archiving are re-
examined. Documentation and archiving methods are reviewed through a
phenomenological lens and once distributed within the AR/MR archive installation,
a postphenomenological perspective reveals how new relations with technology,
materials and media are discovered. Furthermore, the use of AI is perceived as
enhancing the rippling out of afective somatic states that becomes an embodied
materiality
1
(orig. emphasis), a relational feminist posthumanist perspective, that,
permanently changes ways of seeing and experiencing dance on screens and the
notion of a Screendance archive.
Keywords: Screendance, archive, installation, embodied materiality, Augmented
Reality, AI
Introduction
In this article I propose that augmented reality (AR)
2
and mixed reality (MR)
3
have
the potential to expand the notion of a Screendance archive. Since 2011, I have
worked with Susan Kozel, in collaboration with other artists and researchers,
creating several Screendance AR archives as hybrid or MR installations and
exhibitions, with the aim of sharing bodily states with viewers through
technological and philosophical experimentation. Each collaboration attempted to
tackle the problem of archiving and disseminating subtle bodily states that are
often lost or depleted in conventional archival forms. This type of archive is
conceived as both a piece of artistic work for hybrid installations, and is
intrinsically related to artistic, philosophical and technological research. Visitors
to the installations are invited to download an AR app onto their mobile phone, or
The International Journal of Screendance 13 (2022) https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v13i1.9197
© 2022 Ginslov. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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