Medium

A prevalent notion in modernism up to the mid 20th century in Europe and the USA was that art forms had a medium specificity, and that the responsibility of the artist was to refine their practice within the known material and technical means of this medium. For example, painting concerned paint and canvas, and choreography concerned human bodies engaging in movement. This notion of medium specificity was an articulation point of postmodernism and has been critically rethought in the last 70 years or so. For us, the choreographic is not only confined to explicating the possibilities of the medium of dance, but it can do this alongside other things.

Already towards the end of the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan famously claimed the medium is the message, but also the medium is the massage, foreseeing how information would not only travel faster with electronic mediation but also how this speed and seduction would impact us on a somatic level. The pluralities of social media, and their insistent massaging of data, have provoked some critical artistic returns to specificities, whilst simultaneously acknowledging any medium to be enmeshed in larger ecologies.