The Opaque Image

The depiction of spacial arrangements through cameras and other optical systems is often read in terms of re-presentation. The projected video image of a given choreography is seen as mere window to the past, an opportunity to revisit a supposed original through the camera eye, in short: it is seen within the paradigm of a document. The video image itself tends to become transparant in our perception, a window leading the viewer‘s eye into the reconstructed past of the recording.

Yet the camera does much more to performance and its space: a new regime of relations singular to the presence and position of the camera is established within the image. The camera-eye produces a performance space different from the space it observes, it leaves things out, establishes a new space geometry, introduces frontality and creates figurative relations of the bodies; relations that are virtually present in the performace but actualised through the camera.
The opaque image calls attention to its own presence, to the image itself as a unique construction. This video image is not readable only on spatial terms. Over the layer of reconstructed spatiality within it a new layer of relations is superimposed: an image layer where the body as a figure now overlaps, touches, hides, grows smaller or bigger with distance, or leaves the frame altogether. When a performer navigates his/her position both in space and in the image a new hybrid space is created, now partially ruled by the camera. This image-space is not a representation or a document but a new and singular event with its own potentiality and meaning.
I would like to draw attention to and explore the diagrammatic relations of the figure in the image-space not in order to abolish the transparent documentary layer altogether, but to create a possibility for a double reading of the image. A reading where the reconstruction of the original spatiality of the performance is in constant negotiation with the new figurative relations of the body in the image-space as produced by the camera. This reading calls for an image-aware performance, one which can assign meaning to both the spatial order of body-performace and the diagrammatic order of the image.

I would like to explore this co-production of space a camera can introduce to performance. This proposal for a 2-day theoretical and practical research addresses choreographers, researchers and performers who are interested to work with the potential of the moving body in the image-space.


Vladimir Miller
Vladimir Miller is an artist whose research centres around questions of spectatorship and perception in visual arts and performance. He develops his works from an engagement with theory in installation, scenography, performance and visual arts. He lives in Berlin and Vienna.

In recent years Vladimir Miller collaborated on works by Philipp Gehmacher, Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll) and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods.

Among the works created with Philpp Gehmacher are the video installations "dead reckoning" (2009) and "at arm's length" (2010). Together with Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher he created the performance installation "the fault lines" which premiered at Sprindance 2010.
Vladimir Miller teaches and is mentor at the postgraduate studies a.pass in Antwerp. There he curated the temporary research space "City of Illusions" in February 2010.