Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how dance and digital media "take form," performing something akin to what Brian Rotman calls "virtual ghosts," that is, a potential sense of self, a self that will be projected into a future archive.

Paper long abstract:

A great amount of faith has been put in digital media's ability to record, document, and archive live events, but more importantly to be able to retrieve them, and thus, bring them back to life, by reanimating them. These reanimated images do not easily lend themselves to evaluation. They also have the potential to spin out of control, doubling and redoubling figures, spaces, and our very perception of time. It is in this act of doubling, reanimating that spectral forms emerge to question our understanding of presence, our very relation to those archives that preserve our image in time. This paper explores how dance and digital media "take form," performing something akin to what Brian Rotman calls "virtual ghosts," that is, a potential sense of self, a self that will be projected into a future archive. Yet, this taking of form does not always imply emergence as the becoming of formation, becoming in-formation; the act of taking form is also an act of repetition which puts more emphasis on the concept of "taking" (Deleuze), and sometimes this repeated formation even amounts to the undoing of form (the exhaustion of form). Looking at Matthias Sperling's Loop Atlas and Siobhan Davies and Anri Sala's The Drum as Visual Speaker, I will examine the mediation between forms of individuation — a mediation between vital, collective, and technical modes of individuation. In their very attempt to return to unity, they take form by disfiguring our notion of form, and thereby create a ghostly aesthetics.