VAULT

How has your dance-making been affected (or not) by the virtual/digital availability of your work, in terms of both process and product?

As an artist, I work across live, analog, and digital forms—much of my work has not been digitized due to the tremendous costs associated with preservation and digitization. I keep an ongoing series of notes that live adjacent to my improvisational studio practice in physical notebooks, Google documents, iPhone notes, and various loose-leaf pages. All of it is fairly disorganized, which is ironic considering the care and attention I give to artists’ practices by way of organizing their archival materials. For video and born-digital media, I have provisional back-ups of materials saved on external hard drives; these materials haven’t been transferred or migrated. Some completed works live on Vimeo. With my own work, I’m not so interested in preserving, digitizing, and accessing previous work—mostly due to the cost for storage and archival labor to go back through 15 years of material. In my process, I use haptic forms of note taking that allow a fluid movement between creating and reflecting.

What strategies and experiences can you share related to digital or analog archiving and your current practice?

In 2017 I formed The Portal (Portal), a research studio and curatorial platform dedicated to the archiving and contextualizing of performance practices and embodied histories in motion. Through this work, I’m currently partnering with artists and institutions creating artist-driven models around performance archiving, living legacy planning, documentation, and visual storytelling. As part of our time together at Vault, I will present further on The Portal and our strategies of archiving.

What do you assume about audience in this regard?

In each project, the form of the archive varies wildly from artist to artist—demanding a fluidity and variability. I often take up each project as a hybrid archival-curatorial intervention, built with a particular context and audience in mind, in connection to the needs and interests of the artist and the communities the work inhabits.

Considering the spectrum from independent artist to supporting institutions, what are the directional shifts you’d like to see? Examples: funding for archiving; educational/training support; advocacy; networking between artists; a collective clearinghouse/library; public access; etc.

The Portal is actively looking for partnerships and supporters to continue carving out sustainable ways for offering this work to the field. Given the ephemeral nature of the medium, there’s little financial resource dedicated to the archiving of performance. I’d like to see a directional shift towards the valuing of artists’ creative practices and embodied methods of knowledge exchange. Part of this involves advocating for artistic forms that aren’t rooted in commodity-oriented transactions, whilst generating ways of devoting resources and capital to expanded research, archiving, education, and experimental and artist-driven methods for sharing and disseminating practice.