CMD+FN

How are digital media content making strategies also choreographic strategies? What might be produced at their convergence, and, when they diverge, how might they continue to run in parallel or intersecting lines?

To answer these questions, I began a creative research process that considers how digital interfaces function as instructions for users and how this interaction imposes a choreographic logic and workflow for making dances. At play in the process were four key propositions: first, that particular economies of labor could be revealed in the making of a work; second, that choreography and the dancing body can serve as means to explicate the function of digital interfaces; third, that strategies for making digital media content are choreographic strategies; fourth, and perhaps most important, that the dancing body and the digital media with which it interacts register equally in the scope of the work.

The creative research built on these propositions resulted in Cmd+Fn, a site specific, live dance and digital media performance in the Media Theater of Art Building West. Featuring a cast of 10 dancers, an interactive media system that transforms the performance space into an immersive video environment, dynamic lighting and sound design, and an audience of over 400 people, Cmd+Fn challenges its participants to rethink the edges of where choreographer, audience and performer meet.