Since the beginning of history, artists have always created works in “collaboration.” They abduct other works and turn it into their own; they kidnap other works and put them into their womb; they give birth without organs. In the digital age, this could be done without pain. Thus, we find ourselves asking the question, “What is original?” How far in time do we have to go back to find it? According to Plato, if God is the only original and we are all just mere representations of God’s perspective, then why do we debate over originality and ownership? Artists study and respond to creations in history and build techniques and concepts upon them, appropriating the forms or permeating them into their immanence of desire. Artists hack. No matter how recognizable the result would be, no one artist could make a work without other authors’ creations. So then, would the purpose of the debate be to set an agreeable degree of obviousness? Where shall we draw a line between theft and legitimate creation? Who shall draw this line and who would police this? Artists? Corporations? The government? “What is original?” I believe there is no original. Or maybe every creation is original. One can claim the effort and accomplishment for rearranging an artwork, breaking the code and mode. But this doesn't happen if someone else gave you the tools, the materials, and the information to do it. We hack old work to create New and we allow others to do the same. This is a global collaboration. Our work is coming from somewhere. Someone organized thought, formatted information and shapes into an exchangeable medium. We transgress. We create works using existing knowledge, result of studies and experiments, tools and gadgets, and our experiences of seeing, listening, and feeling other people’s works. Cultural evolution happens by deforming the old body, completely misusing it to give it a completely new ambience. Applying so-called wrong to so-called right; applying so-called unimportant to so-called important; we transgress culture and class by moving function and value from its old owner and then redistributing this wealth. We break in and we steal it. In this conditioned open market, we don’t own work. Work becomes a base tool, field, information, or material to develop New. We allow others to hack our work, which would only lead to a global and open collaboration without a time limit. Ken Wark uses word “mortgage” in his fabulous and powerful book A Hacker Manifesto describing the deal. No one would have an exclusive right to anyone’s work, including oneself as to no one can stop the open collaboration from happening. “Modernity is defined by the power of the simulacrum.” Deleuze said. I hack other people’s work to seek for an answer to the question, ‘What are the foundations of production of New?” Dance Without Bodies is my latest dance and mixed-media work. I have built the piece around two simultaneous, yet spatially disconnected solos that question the fundamental role of presence in performance and allude to an understanding of the self as a subject always in process. Created in collaboration with dancer Melissa Guerrero and Geoff Matters who worked on the music, video installation, and software design; Dance Without Bodies utilizes the Live Processing performance method I developed after studying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Body Without Organs and drawing from my experience working with The Wooster Group who uses video source on stage for the actors. In Live Processing, the dancers closely follow a set of three video source materials displayed on multiple monitors throughout the performance space. The dancers synthesize, in real-time, with the actions depicted in the videos and then generate new movement from these randomly combined sources. This movement is neither pure improvisation nor set choreography; it yields unique results each evening. The piece separates out and dissects the component processes of embodied performance, allowing for a new creative assemblage ripe for digital interface and experimentation. By externalizing the choreographic plan using video footage as an external agency for my choreography, I create new forms of movement. This material offers a variety of information that is much less filtered by my aesthetics, background, and training, and forces me to reexamine my habitual patterns. The dancers take in the movement information from the three video sources and process them all at once using tactile sensibility, processing the information faster than thought can be formed. Their bodies synthesize with the various video sources as they dance. This is a technique the dancers and I developed over the course of almost two years of vigorous and repetitive practice. I paid attention to how to restore myself by divorcing myself from my muscle memory. To achieve this, I decided to separate the dance information from the bodies that process and dance that information. The dancers dance with an extended, externalized dance mind. For Dance Without Bodies(DWB), Melissa Guerrero and I grow nervous systems outside of our skin and extend them to the video monitors and to the other machines like a microphone and bass guitar. It is like “a becoming new body.” In DWB, I am exploring Live Processing in its pure form, at the same time that I am also stepping outside of the system, contradicting it, and mixing it with other modes of performance to unfold ranges of presence and to awaken liberty in the creative environment. I chose to sing during this piece. The nature of that act, which demands memorization, is utilized to test, and even contradict, Live Processing. The act of singing intensifies the body and creates a singing body, which I consider as “a becoming new body.” We take movement information from the three video sources and combine them in real time. Memorizing the movements would be impossible, since the combination of the three sources is randomly chosen at each performance. We scan the surface of the video monitors. Reading would be too slow. We constantly bounce off the images before they tattoo on our skin. We move on to new clips like nomads keep on moving. Our bodies become slippery and hollow to optimize this function for processing the information somatically. We do not retain this information, however, only the experience of the connectivity between our bodies and this particular environment. The dancer and the choreographer share responsibility for completing the movement. As a choreographer, I have provided the information from which we create the dance. As dancers, Melissa and I bring plural results: similar yet unique results. I celebrate the differences. And this difference I want my audience to see. I prepared three types of video source materials for the Live Processing used in Dance Without Bodies. The three videos include a series of movie clips that contains movement information; documentation of Melissa and I improvising dance movements to unfold our history; and 3D animation of human character I hacked from Macinema. The movie clips in the first source range from A Raisin In the Sun and Onibaba to Scarface and Akira, which were chosen to create a wide range of movement. We ignored the emotional and political attributions while copying the movement. However, the first source is constantly combined with the other two sources as our eyes continually scan the images while we dance. We extend our nervous systems to the video images and the images extend towards us. Unlike TVs that network as a window on mass society, the video images are cut loose—like a painting broken up into sequences. Single source video has less impact than the combination of three sources, as does the act of processing all three sources into movement. Each clip restores the dancing body: new information moves the body in a new way, while the old movement leaves the body, and the new source of information waits. Past, present, and future constantly try to render, causing the movement flow to leave nothing behind. The dancing body is constantly restored. Live Processing also plays a crucial role in my next two projects, mech[a]OUTPUT and Blocks of Continuality/Movement-LiveCinema. I will continue to explore the possibility contained in this technique, the idea of “extension of man,” and the concept of “becoming always—able to evade the equal,” Deleuze said. Hacking holds potentiality for creation of simulacrum, a copy without original. A picture of Jesus is a simulacrum to me but for other people it is a representation. There is no original or everything is original. Each original contains differences. This difference is a new creation but doesn’t exist without context of other original. We are in a constant battle over originality. Copyright law chooses the winner by the degree of similarity or difference between the claimed original work and the hacked work. We hack others’ work and then return the work to the public. We don’t own it. This is an act of Symbolic Exchange. One can register copyright to a work and own the exclusive rights to it. But hackers are out and free on streets. While hacking is a key to the production of the “New” and the open global collaboration, moral consciousness must be raised. There two areas which I care about – to credit the work that you are hacking and to share the profit with the creator of the hacked work. This is very important. The law may protect us from been exploited by others, but copyright law (its excusive right) prevents us from customizing a condition for negotiating with the “original author” for the use of their work to create new work. We want an Open Source market and flow of wealth by bypassing the class system, which was modified to monopolized wealth. It is the failure of capitalism-the monster we created. I don’t ask for permission to use the movies in my work, because I am scared of lawsuits. This is why we put our faces behind masks and keep on hacking. And I allow others to hack my work in return. It would actually be flattering to see my work gets used. If I made a profit, I want to share it with the works which I hacked, but I don’t know what to count besides the obvious. How shall I count works that hacked by the work I hacked? “Artifice and simulacrum are opposed at the heart of modernity, at the point where modernity settles all of its accounts, as two modes of destruction: the two nihilisms. For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm—the most innocent of all destructions, the destructions of Platonism.” Gill Deleuze, The Simulunram and Ancient Philosophy, 1. Plato and the simulancrum.

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