Dancing Glitch

Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance. Her performance in Lumiere vue no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work. I selected the original footage for several reasons—among them my love for Art Nouveau design—the version that I chose was hand tinted, animating the color; the digital file was compressed, but not so much as to have lost all detail; the “Serpentine Dance” that Fuller famous has an indirect relationship to early abstract art and Cubist painting, giving an added dimension of interest to the types of visual fragmentation and abstraction common to digital glitches. Making this short film the starting point for my exploration of how digital movies create abstract-yet-representational art when subjected to various forms of glitching gave an additional layer of conceptual depth to the result.