The use of video and of video sharing platforms

Douglas Crimp in his essay On the Museum’s Ruins (1980) argues that it is photography that opened up a field of copies which allowed the existence of collections, gatherings, compilations of information that do not follow the rules of the institution. For Crimp it is through photography that everything can become the same size, flat and two dimensional, and it is the fact that every object can be represented by a copy on a flat image that gave the artist the possibility to build its own rules within the institution.

Additionally, I want to suggest that videos function for live events in a similar way that photography functions for objects. Live events can be rendered in a way equivalent and projected on a two dimensional screen. The video recording renders the live event flat and also opens up a field of copies. Moreover websites such as YouTube and Vimeo offer virtual storehouses of recordings of performances that allow the possibility to disregard the rules of the institution. But as Crimp says ‘photography not only secures the admittance of various objects, fragments of objects, details of objects to the museum, it is also the organizing device: it reduces the now even vaster heterogeneity to a single perfect similitude’ (p. 54). In relation to that, can we consider the use of video and of YouTube or Vimeo platforms as organising devices?

On YouTube channel under the Community Guidelines it is stated that ‘YouTube is for the Community’ and that every user of it makes the site what it is. It is made for ‘you to have fun’ and to ‘let folks know what you think’ and in case that you don’t like what is on or if you find it offending you can just ‘click on something else’ (retrieved online from YouTube). YouTube is made for entertainment. One could say that since it is for entertainment and not for education, exchange of information, distribution of knowledge, neither for the purpose of the creation of an archive, then it cannot be called a ‘museum’. At the same time, under the YouTube Community Guidelines there are also certain rules to be followed. For instance one is not allowed to upload videos with sexually explicit content, animal abuse, drug abuse, bomb making, dead bodies

and copyrighted material. Therefore, YouTube follows some rules, but is this enough to make it an organising device? The fact that it permits or rejects videos from its space does not mean that it organises them in any way. There is no kind of order that connects those videos to each other. No narrative or structure between them. YouTube lacks what we would refer to as curation. At the same time, YouTube ‘proposes’ what to watch next, meaning that YouTube collaborating with Google suggests videos to each user based on the user’s ‘search history’.

On the other hand, YouTube and similar websites can be a great tool to use, and it is up to the user to make the most out of it. During the interview that took place online at the Tate channel on YouTube (after the online version of the performance Shirtology took place) Jérôme Bel said that ‘YouTube is our first library for the performing arts it’s a new dispositif’ (2012). YouTube can become a ‘school’, a canon created by its users. It is when consumption is turned into production that the role of these platforms can change in the cultural industry. As Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) writes:

what matters is what we make of the elements placed at our disposal. We are tenants of culture: society is a text whose law is production, a law that so-called passive users divert from within, through the practices of postproduction. (p. 19)

YouTube provides a depository of virtual objects. Adding more objects to this depository does not change its function; organising them in different ways might do because that can change its basic principles, the links that connect these works together. What is needed in this, technological age full of objects is the organisation of objects under different systems. I propose that video documentation offers the possibility for choreographers to ‘graph’ new ways of writing history by organising choreographic objects under their own systems. Contemporary choreographers using and thinking through these materials and through remix take the writing of history in their own hands and thus become curators of dance and of dance history.

This summarises exactly what I try to do in my work The last lecture (a performance); I look at the connections between pieces of art in a horizontal way in order to place them within the works of their contemporaries as well as their predecessors. In this way I aim at revealing that culture is a network, as musician Brian Eno (1996) writes:

If you abandon the idea that culture has a single centre, and imagine that there is instead a network of active nodes which may or may not be included in a particular journey across the field, you also abandon the idea that those nodes have absolute value. Their value changes according to which story they’re included in, and how prominently. It’s a bit like modern currency: all values are

now floating, and there is no longer the ‘gold standard’ that art history sought to provide us with. (p. 238)

Thinking together and through the works of others and the media available to us we, as choreographers, become also curators who see art as ‘an urban sprawl of culture objects joined by the journeys we make between them’ (ibid). Thus remix as a choreographic methodology also offers the possibility for reorganisation of canonical pieces of work and the creation of links through which we can rethink the attribution of value. In my piece I used remix as a methodology in order to discuss the ‘gold standard’ of the choreographer as an author-genius and to re-evaluate authorship through my choreographic practice.

CHAPTER 4

without respect but with love: The Canon

4.1

The piece

The following are the two final videos created as part of the work without respect but with love (2015). These are also available in the DVD and online.

without respect but with love (2015) (A): https://vimeo.com/151397618

without respect but with love (2015) (B): https://vimeo.com/149513456

Credits

Duration A: 14’ 19’’ Duration B: 9’ 14’’

Creation: Stella Dimitrakopoulou

Performance: Megan Armishaw, Clare Daly, Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Andrew Hardwidge, Antje Hildebrandt, Samuel Kennedy, Elena Koukoli, Alice MacKenzie, Martha Passakopoulou, Helena Rosamund Webb, Lizzie Sells, Tania Soubry, Rosalie Wahlfrid, Emelie Wångstedt Af Dalmatinerhjärta. Production: 2014-2015

Trinity Laban, London, UK