Drowning in Dance Data: The Liquidity of Digital Choreography, from Sweat to Currency

Starting with the synovial fluid lubricating the dancer’s knees at the motion capture studio, continuing with the sweat stains on gamers’ couches, and culminating with the liquid income that the companies behind hit titles like Fortnite generate by selling choreographic material; there is an overarching liquidity that dance turned into data traces across bodies and devices. Different kinds of liquification can be seen throughout the digitization stages of the dancing body, demonstrating an interconnecting thread between performance and dance on the screen that is fundamentally material, chemical, and physiological. This thread fosters a juxtaposition of digital and physical corporealities that forces users’ bodily schemas to be reformulated into techno-human embodiments. The mutual correspondence of the incursion of dance into the numerical field and the numerical into dance evidences the kinetic motor behind the capital accumulation of the new emergent economy of digital dance, whose hallmark is a fluidity that liquifies bodies into currency and back, for the service of an information society.