Lithium dancing (hidden in plain sight)

In this article I explore screendance’s afair with social media, and the logics of production and consumption endemic to dancing for and with smartphones. I use an incidental encounter with two people making a dance video to try and make sense of the ways in which screendance practices and practitioners are being changed by social media technologies. The writing is built on the work of Harmony Bench, Shoshana Zubof, Alan Jacobs, Zygmunt Bauman, Neil Postman, Yuk Hui and Annie Pfngst and Helen Poynor. I use their scholarship and art to construct an experimental and non-linear seven-part narrative about how screendance can become a set of practices that visibly contradict the extractive datafcation of humans in motion. Part 1— Two young people and their camera —describes the encounter with two people flming their dancing, and serves as the platform on which this writing is based. In part 2— An assumption about what happened next —I introduce the theme of hiding that runs throughout the article, and make a case for my assumption that these two people were making their screendance for social media. Part 3— Algorithmic choreography —introduces the relationship between choreography in screendance and social media algorithms. Part 4— Being in (the) economic common —explores the digital commons as outlined by Bench, and its relationship to visibility, technology and proft-making. Part 5— Myth and the right to a future tense —discusses Jacobs and Zubof and how they both deploy hiding to consider a future that transcends technocratic rationalism. In part 6— Hidden in the future I zip forward far into the future and remember a 2016 screendance work by Annie Pfngst and Helen Poynor. I do this to as a strategy to imagine a non-technocratic world. Finally, part 7— To distill production from consumption — describes how, through social media, we in screendance have acquired a logic of consumption disguised or hidden as a mode of production.


Two young people and their camera
In which I describe an actual event that prompted this thinking and writing.
I am out for a walk during my one hour of permitted outdoor exercise. It is March 2021 and we are nearing the end of the strictest part of the UK's second national lockdown.
They are two young people, perhaps 15 years old, playing together in a park, or what is called a common. The area is not nature as such but it is also defnitely not the city.
I am walking past them, wary of watching or intruding, but also captivated by their play. They are dancing for each other. Or rather, one of them is dancing for the other who is recording the dancing on a smartphone held in portrait mode. The camera and the dancer are close to each other; it is a close-up. They take turns: they dance, record, watch, point at the screen, and laugh.
The dancing is mostly movement in the head and neck; rolling the head side to side around the frontal axis. They more or less do the same short sequence every time, as if they are trying to perfect the performance of the moves, or the recording of the performances. This trio of two young people and a smartphone are deep in their own world. Their game seems to be on repeat. The movement has a quality of being able to be reversed, repeated, or played back. Each dance is exquisitely brief, and not linear or forward seeking. It is as if there is a visual glitch in their matrix.
By this stage I am some way past where it is they are dancing. It has been no more than three minutes since I frst saw them.

An assumption about what happened next
In which I introduce the central conceit (or assumption) of this article, and use these two young people to stand-in for screendancing on social media.
In Volume 11 of IJSD-Expanded Screendance-Katrina McPherson noted Douglas Rosenberg's description of screendance as "the most invasive of all arts species" that "has been 'hiding in plain site' since well before there was a critical mass of interest in the form, even before it was named as such." 3 Then, Volume 12 of IJSD -This is where we dance now: COVID-19 and the new and next in dance onscreen -acknowledged and celebrated screendance's undeniable visibility as people danced and watched dancing through screens during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic lockdowns. In that same issue, Elena Benthaus described feeling "wary" 4 that screendance was somehow hidden before the virus acted as a great revealer, and outlined how dance fads have long been "circulated by Hollywood musicals and dance flms" and TV shows. 5 These descriptions of the practices of screendance being variously hidden, revealed, circulated, and invasive are telling in how those of us interested in screendance narrate or construct its history and practices. Something will always be hiding (in plain sight) if there isn't yet a name for it, or indeed the desire to do that naming. When we name or attach a label to anything we render it visible.
This writing is not about the kind of hiding that speaks of screendance's uncertainty about itself and desire for recognition. Instead, it is an attempt to understand what I could not see when I happened across those two young people making dances for their smartphone, and how mechanisms and narratives of hiding might matter to those of us who create screendances.
These two young people were dancing in plain sight while recording their movement, but it's not possible to know with any certainty why they were recording their dancing. The assumption on which this writing rests is that what I saw that day was not the full story; that what they did next or soon after was to post the best version of their screendance performances on social. I think this assumption is plausible and warranted because, as Harmony Bench suggests, it is "difcult if not impossible to separate dance in public from social media in an era when the latter are determining forces of contemporary social life and engagement." 6 My assumption efectively renders these two young people as representations or proxies; they stand in for all humans recording their dancing and uploading it to social media, not solely teenagers doing the same thing. People dance, record their dancing, and upload those recordings to social media; and we do all of these things routinely. Volume 12 of IJSD is testimony to the fact that social media technologies are cultural levers and patterns deeply embedded in screendance practices. 7 I am agnostic towards social media platforms, but given how much dancing is happening on TikTok 8 I will assume that this was their social media weapon of choice.

Algorithmic choreography
In which I question who is doing the choreography and just how little social media needs to know in order to know us. embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. -Neil Postman 9 In TikTok and Short-Form Screendance Before and After Covid the internet anthropologist Crystal Abidin describes how TikTok shapes you "to create content in specifc ways," and is "squishing you into a template and teaching you how to perform creativity within a box." 10 If these two people on the common during lockdown-or anyone for that matter-set out to make algorithmically inspired screendance it would likely look like the dancing they were doing, and be shot with the smartphone they were using. I saw their movement-performances-onrepeat without the need to scroll or refresh, and I can easily imagine their video likenesses on a small screen: the framing, dancing, music, and virtual stickers, and the desire to share and be seen.
I suspect though that they did not set out to make a screendance the way IJSD readers might understand an intention to make a screendance. Rather, the screendance was more made on them, and without them being aware of-nor probably caring about-the coercion. Who is doing the choreography here? These are ways of moving shaped by a machine that doesn't see how these young people are dancing, it doesn't need to. It is not an all-seeing machine of an invisible state. Rather, it is a commercial machine that has "blown by the panopticon" 11 There is no outside because it is not an institutional building, and there is "no zone of life that is not being infltrated." 12 These two dancing people were being directed by an invasive all-seeing sightless machine that carries the "colonizing forces of algorithmic logic." 13 But it is not so dystopic is it? After all, this machine was programmed by humans. The algorithms-opinions "formalized in code" 14 -were created by someone, probably more than one person: a cloud of developers-as-choreographers; unseen, hidden. American author/blogger Seth Godin writes, "The folks with the power are the anonymous engineers, tweaking algorithms without clear awareness of what the impact might be." 15 It is improbable that those software developers could ever imagine how their code in Kotlin, Java, Swift or Objective C would prescribe the way these two people were dancing.
At the same time, I do not want to overestimate the sophistication of their mathematics; very few data points are required for us to reveal ourselves through social media. The Wall Street Journal has found that although shares, likes, follows and the things you watch play a role in determining one's FYP (For You Page) on TikTok, the platform needs only one piece of data to "fgure you out": "how long you linger over a piece of content." 16 We will always linger over the things that attract our attention, whether we are in public or whatever remains of the private.

Being in (the) economic common
In which I think through dancing in common (spaces), the recursive power of Postman's technopoly, and how any discussion of technology is a discussion about economics.
In 2000, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described a liquid-modern society in which the balance has tilted from the societal improvement for the common good and heavily "towards the self-assertion of the individual." 17 In liquid modernity, the public sphere has become one of the "many spoils of deregulation, privatization, individualization, of the conquest and annexation of the public by the private." 18 These two young people were in a public sphere that in the UK is called a common. Such spaces are owned privately, or by local councils or the National Trust. They have simple and reasonably relaxed rules, and are protected, cared for, and open. They are one of few areas in the UK not overwhelmed by CCTV. Yet within this particular public space on that day in March 2021, the public dances performed by these two people were annexed by privately owned algorithms. This public-private paradox of the commons is a direct part of what social psychologist Shoshana Zubof calls surveillance capitalism, that deploys "extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others' ends." 19 The purpose of these hidden extractive operations is to predict our future behaviors and to sell those predictions to advertisers. This mostly hidden economy functions because data and advertising now rule the world's economy. 20 In Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (2020) Harmony Bench describes and analyzes the role of digital technologies in the global proliferation and circulation of dances. She writes that "regardless of whether gestures should circulate freely across moving bodies, they most certainly do." 21 Bench uses Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's idea of the common as being more than simply a shared resource (like in the shared common outdoor spaces here in the UK). Instead, Hardt and Negri's common is produced socially and is essential for social interaction and ongoing production. Bench writes how "ideas, customs, and practices that are collectively generated and make it possible to live together" 22 are examples of Hardt and Negri's artifcial common (as distinct from the natural commons of limited resources).
In the book, Bench expresses a delicate ambivalence in describing the digital commons in dance. She articulates the ideologies and conficts at play in how dance snowballs and circulates, while acknowledging that individuals generate belonging and community through digital circulations of movement. These circulations of gestures are, according to Bench, "assertions of dance as common," 23 and it is digital contexts-or more precisely "technologically enabled decontextualization" 24 -that generate the conditions for dancers to create a movement culture in common and to feel as if they belong. Bench is also clear that she does not suggest this movement culture in common is an "an antidote to cultural appropriation or capitalist expropriation." 25 There are two words Bench uses-and that I have quoted above-that interest me. The frst is assertions, and the second is decontextualization. They interest me because to decontextualise gestures and movements from everything privileges and "repackages ideologies of freedom and universal access," 26 and creates the conditions to assert being in common. That is, technologies of decontextualization generate the necessary distance, invisibility, and absence to make possible the production, reproduction, and circulation of gestures that in turn serve the pursuit of belonging (and being seen to belong) in common.
I wonder though what those two young people in the common were really asserting. Even while (hypothetically) distributing and circulating their public dancing, these two young people were certainly not creating content for some innocent digital commons. I worry that to call this space in the cloud a commonparticularly given the word's idiomatic meaning-implicitly trivializes or glosses over the powerful technocratic mechanisms at play, including in some simple dancing between two young people and their smartphone.
For all that Bench so beautifully and diplomatically articulates, my sense is that she leans towards the circulation of dancing through the digital commons as being a good thing for dance. 27 The implication is that the circulation and proliferation of humans in motion in the digital common creates positive externalities; that is, by defnition, benefts to the public good not mediated through the market. But what of negative externalities? What kind of efuent is created by our digital dancing commons and who eventually pays for it, and when, and how? Even given the implicit or explicit value of the circulation and proliferation of gestures in the digital common, it is worth remembering that all technologies-including those of social media-are developments "largely oriented economically to proftmaking" 28 and that "technology was, is, and always will be an expression of the economic objectives that direct it into action." 29 In other words, when we dance with technologies, we dance with proft-making, and perhaps now we are only ever dancing with technologies.
In 1993, the technology skeptic Neil Postman coined a word, technopoly, which he describes as "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology." 30 Postman describes technopoly as totalitarian technocracy because it "eliminates alternatives to itself" 31 by rendering them invisible. Technopoly is a way of culture and thinking in which no matter the question, the answer is technology. Yet, when there is only one answer, the nature of the questions we ask inevitably changes and we create loops of recursion that are both frightening and fascinating. 32

Myth and the right to a f uture tense
In which I describe Alan Jacobs' understanding of the value of myth in the technopoly and the understandable temptation to go into hiding.
In 2019, the humanities scholar Alan Jacobs wrote an essay called After Technopoly that, like much of his thinking, calls attention to the power and value of myth making. Jacobs describes how Postman's technopoly "arises from the technological core of society but produces people who are driven and formed by the mythical core." 33 Jacobs' thinking about the mythical core is based on the work of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. The mythical core represents those of us "who practice moral life by habits of afection, not by rules." 34 For Kołakowski, the mythical core of culture is those experiences that are not able to be manipulated because they are "prior to our instrumental reasoning about our environment." 35 In other words, the mythical core-a way of experiencing "nonempirical unconditioned reality" 36 -is unable to be pressed into the logic of technology no matter our rational capacities. For Jacobs, the mythical core is a way out of the recursive loop of the technopoly.
This interplay between rationalism and myth is a key aspect of Jacobs' ongoing thinking. He argues that technocratic rationalism cannot be avoided but rather transcended: "that there is something better, not in opposition to it, but on the other side of it. Something that will in time emerge." 37 This all sounds so easy, perhaps even quaint, but Jacobs also warns that the place for transcending technopoly will be a hidden place because if "transnational technopoly can hunt you down and root you out, it will; and it probably can." 38 In Surveillance Capitalism Shoshana Zubof also talks about hiding, and her thinking is similarly bleak when it comes to the future. She writes of the terrible danger that we become accustomed to either life without privacy or the necessity to hide from being seen. She suggests that both alternatives-total transparency or hiding underground-"rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that fnally distinguishes us from the machines." 39 Her perspective is that surveillance capitalism has compromised our right to the future tense. This is the right to make moral decisions free from forces that modify and exploit our behavior, and that function beyond our awareness.

Hidden in the future
In which I zoom out far into the future to remember a screendance and consider what it might mean for those of us here in the present who make screendances. The American writer Stewart Brand proposes that there are "six signifcant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization." 42 From "fast and attention-getting to slow and powerful" 43 the six levels are: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and nature. Brand writes how the role of fashion and art is essentially to be "quick, irrelevant, engaging, self-preoccupied, and cruel" 44 whereas the "vast slow-motion dance" 45 of culture operates through centuries and millennia. Brand suggests that together these distinct and contradictory pace layers provide internal negative feedback that stabilizes and afords the health of civilization.
So now I'm going to attempt to zoom out in time to the pace of culture according to Brand's levels. It is a level or place where time as chronos operates akin to Danny Hillis' 10,000-year clock 46 or The Clock of the Long Now. 47 Those two young people have grown up, lived their lives and are gone. They are probably survived by family, but maybe not. I am long dead. Perhaps the park is still there? It is common land so hopefully it has not been developed; but I am doubtful. There are parts of the teenagers' phones from 2021 that are still on the planet in some form: lithium, copper, gold, lead, zinc, etc; elemental fragments of devices that once aforded some public dancing back in 2021 during the pandemic that is almost forgotten. For the most part these elements are in landfll. Those software companies that wielded algorithms to reach through the smartphone to choreograph or enframe that dancing are long gone too; I can no longer remember their names. They were once so certain and stable; omnipresent. Their algorithms disappeared with them, and have been replaced by old mathematics rethought and recompiled.
I feel none of the vertigo that American media theorist Douglas Rushkof suggested I might feel if I were to zoom so far out. 48 But he was writing in 2013, so what would he know? I notice the stillness and slowness, and the absence of sniping chatter. In that stillness I remember seeing a screendance by Annie Pfngst and Helen Poynor called in Memoriam that was frst screened in 2016. 49 I saw it at the Light Moves Festival of Screendance in 2018; such a long time ago. This is a flm thataccording to Brand's thinking-is the scale of art operating at the pace of nature. 50 The flm is kryptonite to the digital social platforms that people once used. In the flm a single fgure inhabits densely forested areas through diferent seasons. I don't remember there being much movement in the body; indeed my key memory is of the tapestry of the terrain, and of the passing of time. But that was no ordinary time that was passing, even under the machinations and co-ordinates of the long now. 51 in Memoriam is-or is it was?-a flm that treasures myth and seems to resist and transcend technopoly. It is a flm in a hidden place in plain sight. It is unable to be rooted out, even as the dancer Helen Poynor is enmeshed in the roots of trees and of nature. It exists through its edit and feel in an other time akin to kairos.
Here, as I write, long into the future, some uncountable years after the screening in Limerick, it seems that it is no mere coincidence that the flm was shot in an Iron Age fort; an ancient place of protection, a place by which we recognize the slowness of culture, and the creep of nature. A place where others like us sought shelter, protection and safety. It is, after all, worth remembering that the feeling of safety makes it possible for us to "dare to choose the unknown." 52 in Memoriam is the kind of screendance that recognizes and understands modes of production and presentation, and pursues alternate tastes, pace, and time. It is grounded in making and process yet somehow manages to avoid the feeling that it was designed for consumption. How can that be? What sleight of hand is at play?
Around the same time that in Memoriam was being made, the philosopher of technology Yuk Hui 53 wrote an article called Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics. 54 Cosmotechnics is a strange term that describes the "unifcation of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art making." 55 It is as if Hui is turning back from Postman's technopoly towards tool-using cultures. In the article, Hui tells the story of a very good butcher called Pao Ding who claims that having an excellent knife is not enough: it is more important to understand the Dao in the cow, so that one does not use the blade to cut through the bones and tendons, but rather to pass alongside them in order to enter into the gaps between them. 56 Hui writes that when the butcher encounters any difculty, "he slows down the knife and gropes for the right place to move further." 57 This is the Dao (or way or path), whereas the Qi is the technical/phenomenal object (or "technics"): the knife. I like to think that Annie Pfngst and Helen Poynor's sleight of hand was to recognise the utility of the knife as technic, while being busy with the Dao of making. That is, in in Memoriam they unifed the cosmos and the moral.
In this future or the next, screendance emerged out of the rubble of "life versus the machine" 58 and humankind's dance with the technological singularity. The singularity-which did not end up happening just in case you were wonderingonce described the point at which "ever-more-rapid technological change leads to unpredictable consequences." 59 The technological singularity is the thing that even back in 2017 Hui was calling a pipe dream. At some point in the 21st century screendance simply refused the "homogeneous technological future" 60 that had been presented to humankind as the only option.

To distill production from consumption
In which I try to draw these threads together through lenses of awe and ambiguity.
As much as networked technology has dismantled and distributed power in more egalitarian ways, it has also extended and obscured power, making it less visible and, arguably, harder to resist. -Astra Taylor  I recognize that this writing is a rather curious rollercoaster ride through many sources and many ideas. I worry that what I hope is a strength (traversing broad terrain) will be judged as a weakness. Perhaps some of you are still with me. Perhaps I lost others in making the assumption I did about those two young people doing their lithium dancing in the common.
Certainly, this article is flled with the ambivalence generated by my assumption that what they did next that day in March 2021 was to knowingly and unwittingly participate in a complex techno-choreography of extraction. In many respects I felt and continue to feel something akin to awe: "the perception of vastness and the struggle to mentally process the experience." 63 Awe is unusual because it mixes emotions that do not normally reside together. In the case of these two people dancing, I experienced beauty and fear. There was beauty in happening across two human beings dancing together through play; the sense of them being close together and in common, and of their obliviousness and disinterest in being seen. I like to pretend that in that brief moment watching their dance-to-bescreened James Carse's idea of the infnite game came to my mind. This is a game predicated on surprise and in which there is no audience, only players. 64 They were making something together, not something to be watched or consumed. Yet I was afraid too. I was afraid of the hidden players and costs-the negative externalities-of that play for their future, and for our future. Perhaps then this writing is an attempt to place that feeling of awe in the context of the work we make and see in the feld of screendance.
Perhaps also the writing refects my desire to convince readers-particularly those of you who make screendances-that in social media (and the dancing that happens on it) we have acquired a logic of consumption disguised or hidden as a mode of production. 65 That there is danger in valorizing the making or creativity of these two young people who are proxies for all of us who make screendances to be consumed: And it is in our role as producers, not consumers, that we contribute to the common good and win recognition for doing so. -Michael Sandel 66 I am proposing that we must seek methods of making that distill production from consumption; that our work is to pry apart the discombobulating efects of screendancing to be seen, and to do this in plain sight. I understand screendance to be a small enough feld-and collection of practices-to interrogate and resist the logic of production predicated on consumption. We have talked about such resistance for years as a community but as dance has become more and more visible on social media, the temptation is to celebrate these days in the sun, and turn our backs on promises to the future in which we "expand our understanding of responsibility to include how our actions efect people we will never meet." 67 Western culture's crash zoom to social media since around the introduction of Facebook's Like button in 2009 68 has made the stakes high and ambiguous for screendance: the promise of being transmitted and seen (fnally!) at the cost of extractive consumption and the "immediacy of appropriation." 69 We need more lithium today, and merely hope to fnd greater reserves-or a suitable replacement-tomorrow. This revaluation has the efect of shifting the place of the natural order from something intrinsic to our practices to something extrinsic. The whole of nature becomes what economists tellingly call an externality.
-Alan Jacobs 70 It is simply a coincidence that the extraction of lithium plays a key role in the production of our smartphones that themselves are agents and transmitters of extraction and consumption. Perhaps also it is a coincidence that those two young people dancing with and for their smartphone ofered a glimpse (in plain sight) of the thin line between that difcult-to-name thing intrinsic to their playful practice, and the poison of social media's consumptive virality.

Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the people whose work I have cited. I have done this without their permission, and in some instances pulled their work out of the context in which it was frst presented. I am grateful for their scholarship and craft, and the infuence they've had on my thinking and understanding. Thank you to Harmony Bench for the endnoted clarifcation in Part 4 of this writing. Thank you also to the journal's peer reviewers for their generosity and care with the work, and to Kyra Norman for her careful copy-editing to prepare the document for publication in IJSD, and for her ongoing stewardship of IJSD.
The entire development of Lithium dancing (hidden in plain sight)-every edit, tangent, and syntactical tic-is publicly accessible as part of a GitHub repository at github.com/skellis46/slipbox/commits/master/two%20women%20dancing.md. The working title was two women dancing, and the frst git commit (i.e. upload to GitHub) was on 7 May 2021. The document was renamed Lithium dancing on 27 September 2021 and all remaining edits are visible at github.com/skellis46/slipbox/blame/master/Lithium%20dancing.md.

Biography
Simon Ellis works with practices of choreography, flmmaking and dance. He was born in the Wairarapa in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but now lives in the UK and works at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. He grew up in a family where politicised conversations about human dignity, consumerism and even technology were common. These conversations have shaped his values as an artist, and underpin much of what his practice is about, and how it is conducted. He also thinks about the ways humans might value things that are not easily commodifed, and likes to imagine a world flled with people who are sensitive to their own bodies, and the bodies of others.