How to NOT Quantify Movement
1 year of Flee Immediately! on Medium and why we need new moves and new ways of thinking about movement
It was exactly one year ago today that I started this “blog”, aka stream of thought experiments and movements to define exactly what Flee Immediately! is and where it is going while having a critical eye on technology, culture and art. Since then things have been moving, including myself.
I wrote the inauguration text shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires and having a small laugh about how the airport is run by a company called Aeropuerto 2000. 2000?! A reflection on what I have called the future of the past. Since then I have strived to write one blog a week. Lately I have been slacking — sometimes the words just don’t flow.
One year later, I am preparing to move to Buenos Aires myself to start a doctorate programme. My topic will be around, guess what, dancing and coding. These writings on Medium, although not as in-depth and theoretical at times as they should be, but still critical enough, have surely helped me to dance my thoughts into a choreography that is essentially something concrete enough to be the length of a book after many years of research.
Briefly I will outline the dance that this blog has created and the moves it hoped to reveal, or discretely hide, in the words. The future of the past goes full circle, what does Flee Immediately!’s year 2000 mean for the future? And why do we need to think about movement differently in a time of over-saturated worlds of hate speech, Trumpisms, anxieties and bodies that are hardly aware of their moving swipe gestures?
482 Question Marks ?
Flee Immediately! is full of more questions than answers. Even this style of writing, fast and accessible to an audience, is full of questions for me. I much prefer the researched-every-line-structured-yet-still-based-on-experience kind of writing. Except more of that in the future. But I am still happy I went for it, found a new voice and asked a lot of questions — 482 to be exact, including those question-marks inadvertently left in the code.
But can a question really be quantified when it moves to a new thought as soon as it is written down? It is not the quantity that matters, but the quality. We need to learn to think critically again, to ask questions, and to have conversations that go beyond trolling, reactionary social media trends and shock values. Let’s ask before it is too late.
Here are some of the questions that help to summarise this year of Flee Immediately! and to get you moving.
Perhaps plague is more epidemic then endemic with technology today?
But what about those that have blisters from dancing without end, that are half way between this side and that, the fear of deformity, what about our body, our trance, our individual, our dancing styles?
Where would we be surfing the web if it wasn’t for those invisible hands working behind the scenes, those hands that fold the wires of your machines in factories that allow you to fold in the first place?
How can we design movement into online worlds? …how can we use the lessons learned by Pina Bausch in our own daily social media lives?
Would you rather be the dissector or the dissected?
So then how can we actually be in-between for longer than a fleeting second when this is just, well, life?
Can a dance between our own experience and the imagination of other’s help us to think about the technology hidden behind?
But what if white space could be used as a tool to give control to the user, to let them learn, understand and actually process what they are doing?
Why is it aesthetically pleasing to manipulate 0’s and 1’s?
But in a world of fake news and clickbaits, do we forget how to suspend?
Can we keep up with our partners before they overwrite all of our improvising moves?
I’m still hanging here on appendix — does that make me the worm?
What happens when how also becomes why, aka a process?
Would our rhythm create a new form of resistance outside of Capitalism?
Will our collective swiping diagonally down be a new beat in the notion of centred control?
What is fleeing research?
We don’t have all the answers — yet. However, the next step in this publication will be to attempt to explore new ways of fleeing research as well as keeping the questions moving along to the tune of more questions.
1,227 Views over the past 90-days
Medium itself has a lot of problems and writing about it seems to be one of the community’s favourite pastimes. Medium claims to be different, but in the end they want to be like everyone else, boring how to lists and articles on the verge of click-bait. Luckily, some of the writers and readers on Medium have proven otherwise. My one text that went viral, happened to be the most researched and longest, a whopping 28 min read on the aesthetics of code. So perhaps people really are looking for more.
Forget hearting, liking, clapping — and all the numbers they represent. The more important question is how people moved to find your writing and what it moved in them afterwards. This may never be something quantified or even known to you. But let’s continue moving between conversations, or rather, creating the need for them again in the first place that goes beyond trends like #metoo and gets to the roots of the real problems.
This isn’t about covering up with hashtags, although #metoo does play its own positive roll too. Flee Immediately! will continue to go deeper in our writings in the future, creating a space for more conversation, and yes, dancing and moving to a new tune.
On that note: Hi, number 1,228, I am glad you viewed something while I was writing this. How do you move today?
move = 277, dance = 491, body = 676, system = 97
The Move Dance Body System is a new way of thinking about our body in relationship to technology. It has been coined through a one year series of writing published on blog.fleeimmediately.com. It has been explored through contextual reviews that look at dance performances and exhibitions within the context of code, technology, social media and culture. It has re-published critical essays. It has tried out some humorous experiences in the form of writing. It has probably failed. It has hopefully helped you think about the system itself, move to a new one, change direction of your hand scroll, or leave the publication altogether to try out some dance moves offline. Forget about motion tracking, technology for technology sake or the wow factor, the Move Dance Body System is more than that.
The ones who left and danced, we are happy. We too want to be offline, dancing. But we won’t go away yet, we will still use this space to discuss our experiences. 1 million words or more later, innumerable dance moves and we are still defining who we are. With the launch of the new Flee Research Bureau, we hope to show how important it is to use our bodies again. They may be the only power tools we have left.
We may not publish as often in the future, but expect new ways of moving with us in actual participatory events, new ways of moving online to create new conversations and more in-depth thoughts, essays, experiments and experiences.
We hope to use this space to contribute to the conversations around artistic research, gestures, and the relationships between dancing and coding as forms of resisting, amongst others. Except more researched, more thought-provoking and more performative and participatory ideas to come.
Thanks for moving with us until now! Here’s to a year of unquantifiable research by doing, creating, laughing, and most importantly, dancing to the Flee Immediately! tune. We may never know what Flee Immediately! is, but we can at least keep fleeing to find out.
