Transhuman Dance Party
Transhuman Dance recital is a code-based computer-vision-aided video performance. In it, “famous new media artist” Jeremy Bailey appears as a disembodied head swaying bouncily through a black background, while four pairs of 2-dimensional iridescent purple noodles dangle from his transcended bust. He nonchalantly narrates his novel predicament, shrugging off his transcendence of form and highlighting the potential that his tentacled form for furthering the medium of dance. In his words:
“From now on, I dedicate myself to finding better ways for humans to
dance.”
Joining him in the view window is a friendly anthropomorphic triangle, equally iridescent, but his fill is an electric blue rather than a neon mauve. Bailey doesn’t offer much of an explanation for this figure’s presence, casually adding:
“That guy... that guy I’m not really sure, he was here when I got here.
But we will both dance for you, and hopefully, we’ll see how magical
this really is.”
As the music starts, Bailey’s bobs around the screen and as his transdimensional arms swing, they appear to shift faze, leaving colored trails like some kind of psychedelic vision. As his head grooves to the music, his arms take on a life of their own as they react to both the beat of the song, his physical position, and his relationship to his smiling triangular dance partner, who also rolls and careens off the edges of the frame. They dance together to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangles”, which no doubt plays some significance to the piece at large. The most obvious association is that Bailey dances with a literal triangle. One could also interpret the piece as depicting three elements in a void: Jeremy Bailey’s disembodied head, his glowing appendages, and his kindred luminescent figure. Or, counting the music as an element, one could interpret Bailey and his transhuman body as one form.
Image courtesy of the artist - http://jeremybailey.net/transhuman.html
One notable feature of Transhuman Dance Recital is bailey’s fatigued demeanor as he presents his ethereal condition. Despite his non-physical form and lack of contention with the laws of physics, Bailey appears to be exerting great effort in order to keep himself and his arms suspended in this void. As he bobs from side to side, out of breath, one can almost imagine ethereal muscles straining to push off the unformed medium around him. This sends a message that even within transcendence, even if the goal is just to express one’s existence in a dance, limitations and suffering will still arise.
This concept can be seen as a critique on the transhumanist philosophies of the past several decades that have become more prominent since the turn of the century and the rapid rise of technology. The cumbersome relationship Bailey has with his limbs calls to mind the abrasive and inhuman exoskeleton that transhumanist artist Stelarc created decades before, called Muscle Machine. The public performance artist created a personal mechanical walking machine that challenged the conception of how locomotion and autonomy make us human. In an effort to create a hyper-capable human body, Stelarc produced an entity is ironically quite foreign in contrast to the human form. In other words, in order for humans to become a better version of themselves, they must paradoxically abandon their own traits in favor of more novel ones, and this transition of control will not always be graceful.
Image courtesy of Stelarc - http://stelarc.org/?catID=20231
This isn’t a new theme in Jeremy Bailey’s work. Many of his videos feature him talking to the camera, overlaid with some sort of post-real, computer-vision-aided filter. He almost always speaks from these freshly minted perspectives with a mundane ambivalence, or at the very least, his characters have accepted the bizarre reality of their circumstances as nothing more than routine hassles. Take, for instance, his piece The Future of Theatre. This piece continues to play with how our expectation for technology to advance human endeavors differs from how that technology will actually look when implemented and integrated by culture. The Future of Theatre speculates how the medium of storytelling from one living being to another would be different in a virtual rather than a physical space. At the beginning, Bailey notes the limitless possibilities of a virtual theatre with virtual actors, but the more he describes of this world, the more doubts form in over whether such options are actually desirable. While true that people don’t often “see a local production of Macbeth in front of a dog that can’t quite turn over”, they must ask themselves if that’s an artistic choice that they’re really missing out on. It’s in this style that Jeremy Bailey parodies the very ideas he promotes, as he promotes them. A Dutch writer for Vice.com’s “Creators” section writes of Bailey in Transhumanist Dance Recital:
“He knows better than anyone that the changes in our lives are at the same time extremely drastic and profoundly ridiculous.”
Transhuman Dance Recital appeared as public performance art at Arts Fair Week in NYC
