Together with biological, cultural and technological viruses of all sorts, globalization has facilitated the

exchange of a particularly infectious bacillus: dance as the tendency to follow a pattern of imitable
steps. The myriad flash mobs, game platforms and You Tube videos reproducing the choreographies of
Michael Jackson's Thriller or Psy's Gangnam Style across analog and digital worlds, are only two
symptoms of this choreutic virality. This paper will analyze phenomena of contagious choreographic
design as events of multiple reanimation: the same choreography can be given infinite new lives, as a
bodily movement spreading across people and cultures, but also as a dance of digitally designed
figures. (not just survival of the zombie)

(video, 3.22)

Pattern of imitable steps, design of steps. As Sanford Kwinter (2008) points out, and contrary to the
common sense use of this term, to design something does not coincide with a simple predetermination
of its end results: more subtly, the operation consists in the engineering of initial parameters or
constraints that are left open to various possibilities of actualization. The generative aspect of design
alludes to the generation of novelty, diversity and complexity from the unpredictable combination of a
few basic units and rules: it is also the way in which viruses work. Imitating physical phenomena such
as swarm systems, evolution and emergence, digital generative design, for example, transfers the
creativity of matter to processes of algorithmic self-organization, shifting its main focus from pre-
programmed objects to the openness of the process, and allowing a redefinition of the designed artifact
in more dynamic terms. (machine learning) This concept acquires a particular interest when applied to
choreography: we can thus arrive at a topological concept of choreographic design as an open process,
a process whose initial algorithms envelop the potential of every moving body to fall over, or to deviate
and transform its route into something else, something unknown. It is exactly here, at the point of
convergence between rules and unpredictability, between composition and complexity, between
impeccable execution and creative improvisation, that Michael Jackson's virtuoso performances
originate.

‘Letting the dance create itself’ through his trained body, Michael used to collaborate with other
choreographers (such as Michael Peters, Vincent Paterson and Jeffrey Daniel) in order to organize all
the corporeal and cultural fragments into a well-defined whole. A distributed choreographic agency
self-organizing at the body's inside-outsid e limit, assembling motions suggested by both corporeal
habit and historical memory, and engineering Michael's body as a dancing molecular society with
always new shapes and consistencies. The final choreographic definition of the Thriller dance then
functioned as a generative inflection point to be each time metamorphosed into a different performative
wonder.

Philosophically thinking movement as an intensive continuum means feeling and dancing it, as Erin
Manning suggests, as a continuous folding of imperceptible microperceptions and micromovements
with each other (stillness is also movement): dance becomes a field of resonance, nebulized into an
emergent relational system that is tuned via a certain technique. The intensive continuum of thought,
Deleuze and Guattari write (2002), is a plane where de-individuated subjects and objects connect
through a continuity of sensations (a plane where philosophical thought profoundly distinguishes itself
from science). Each time a movement is reproduced, a technique needs to be reinvented, in order to
respond to the shifting conditions of movement's emergence. (Manning and Massumi, 2014) Through
this kind of intensive vision, we can perceive the virtuality folded in every performative act: difference
and repetition enveloping each other, as if on a Moebius strip.
(gesture as folding, difference and repetition)

On the other hand,

As Bruno Latour suggests, when faced with all kinds of measurability, we could:
Just once, before praising freedom, improvisation, tolerance, leeway, straying or disorganization, measure the greatness of
metrology, the fragility of the (...) networks that make a minute fraction of commensurability possible. [Because] Yes, the
form and the content have been permanently inverted: inconsistency is the rule, the rule is the exception. (Latour and
Hermant, 2006, 83)

Here, we have an apparent contradiction, between commensurability and freedom, the measurable
points and the improvisational process. The contradiction is therefore also between process and point. It
will be useful, at this point, to recur to the lens of Whitehead's 'mereotopology,' a topology of 'regions'
(rather than points) in which the ontological relation between A and B as two perceivable and thinkable
regions allows us to bypass the dualism of process and point, of sameness and mutation.

(drawing)

Acccording to Whitehead, in every occasion of experience (for example, in every step), an object is
‘prehended’ by, or becomes part of, another object: prehensions are acts of opening, or of unmediated
connection. What can be phenomenally observed are not isolated steps from point to point but
prehensive events between body occasions (show gesture, such as a raising of the leg, a bending of the
knee, a flexing of the ankle) whose duration is a thick spatiotemporal slice. Discrete abstractions such
as points, lines and surface forms simply constitute the logic and ideal limits, the centres, perimeters or
contours of the durationally consistent movement slices. (draw) Every gesture, every act of leg raising
contains in its spatiotemporal volume a series of smaller motions (and is in its turn contained by other
motions), in a relation of 'gestures within gestures within gestures', all connected to each other and
degenerating to a precise (rather than infin itesimal) point. This is the topological point of variation, the
mutating invariant, when and where the leg raises - a point that is of the mind, simultaneously and as
much as it is of the body. (show)

The superposition of all the divisions and connections a body could activate gives us the
virtual structure of its movements, while a precise typology of extensive corporeal divisions and
connections forms the ideal mereotopology of the Thriller choreographic design (for example when the
regions of neck turning and shoulder raising are connected, through the mediation of the nerves, into a
'shneck', show), a series of movement bubbles spreading as a physical and cultural virus. A virality
therefore not simply belonging to the metric succession of the points as virtual centres of bodily regions
(the point where and when the knee bends, the leg raises, the head turns, the shoulder raises, the pelvis
oscillates...), but especially to the generative potential that is contained, as Fred Moten (2003) would
say, 'in the break'. A virality spreading from the intervals, from those spaces left open for the ongoing
(re)production of that performance in all its guises, and for a critical awareness of how each of those
guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity.' (Moten, In the Break, 4)
All the guises of the Thriller performance, from a Big Brother's house task, to the choreographed
performance of 1500 detainees of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center
(Philippines, 2007), are thus potentially contained in-between the steps.

(videos)
Not by chance, prison, and video. This reconnects us to the link between technology and capture (but
also creation, which is important for an example such as that of Jackson). The movement of black
bodies has often been captured by motion-tracking/sensing technologies in different contexts and
situations, from animation cinema to facial recognition, from art to police preemptive profiling. As
often argued by critical and media theorists, digital technologies of this kind operate an interesting
ambiguous datafication of the black body, by filtering data along a subtle and shifting border between
the invisibility of the captured body and the visibility of its movement. This paper will now move on to
a discussion of the motion capture of Savion Glover’s tap dance performance for the animation movie
Happy Feet. (show trailer + Billy Jean) Applying an interdisciplinary perspective given by the
encounter between dance and movement studies, philosophy and cultural studies, I will try to move the
discussion beyond the simple critique of digital technologies as neutralizing forms of representation,
and beyond the theoretical and practical attempts to preserve a ‘lived-in’ and ‘body-specific’
experience of the racially identifiable body. Instead, a different theoretical perspective is given, through
which the motion capture apparatus can be defined as a differential marker, a machine that allows for
an ‘immediated calculation’ of movement and race. Amplifying the humanly and digitally limited
understanding of experience as data elaboration (datum as object of perception and knowledge), and
putting data in relation to feelings (in a Whiteheadian sense), it is possible to understand the digital
capture as a way to preserve movement, its singularity or its ‘datum of difference’, from a universal
sameness of movements without bodies.

A happy penguin can be a good tap dancer, there is no doubt. Especially if the penguin is a 3D
character moved by the steps of motion-cap tured African American tap dancer Savion Glover, in the
Oscar-winning animation Happy Feet by director George Miller (2006). (video of Savion Glover) In
fact, Mumble the penguin is not only an extremely talented dancer, but also (and unlike his fellows) an
extremely off-key singer with a shrill voice. His vocal incapacity is perceived by the other penguins as
a sort of psycho-physical disability which, combined with his exceptional ability to tap dance (a skill
that is quite despicable in the penguins’ community), puts him in a position of social discrimination.
Nevertheless, throughout the story Mumble proves to be so good at dancing that his steps even manage
to communicate empathy to human beings, convincing them to give up fishing, and thus saving
penguins from starvation. In the last scenes, as if touched by the magic of Mumble’s movements, all
penguins (even the oldest and most traditionalist ones) end up dancing a beautiful choreography of
rhythmic joy in Antarctica. (show video) In parallel with this happy ending, I try to develop a positive
analytical curve, starting from the cultural cri ticism of the animated penguin and of the motion capture
technology as respectively figure and tool of racial discrimination, and ending with a redrawing of their
role as protagonists of a postracial challenge.

This part of the paper comes from a fictio-sophical reflection published on Computational Culture.
(show article) One day, Professor Franz Fanon sat quietly, and in a mild voice asked us to gather
around his desk. “Modernity is nothing else than the mise en fiches de l’homme. The fiches are the
records, files, time sheets, and identity documents that together form a biography, and sometimes an
unauthorized one, of the modern subject. Control by quantification. Sociogeny is the organizational
framework that, in the human condition of modernity, names what is and what is not admitted into the
category of the human, according to the data provided by this ‘mise en fiche’.” A brief pause ensued,
and then Fanon continued, “In particular, blackness is fixed and framed as an object of surveillance, the
black body kept under control and discriminated by continuously measuring, recording, annotating data
from its qualities and movements: black body as black data.” The professor slowly closed the book and
started to turn the pages of a journal. At last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Now
go to the third page of Dr. Michael Ralph’s article (show article) – And yet, in slave insurance policies,
human chattel was priced, not according to physical stature (as has often been the assumption); instead,
prices were based on the enslaved person’s skill set – In this article, Dr. Ralph tells us that, if we take a
step back, we see that the slavery epoch was in fact a fertile germination field for the racial control
which has since then proliferated throughout modernity. This control machine started to assemble itself
from the quantification and pricing of the ‘negroes’ skills and capacities to work, and from the early
mechanism of insurance securities, a mechanism through which different values were respectively
assigned to black property and to white lives, on the basis of measurements that defined the latter as
more moderate and thoughtful and, therefore, as endowed with a better intellect and constitution, or
chance to survive. After the abolition of slavery, the direct calculus of value extraction (or
capitalization) from the reified time and activity of blacks was replaced by the use of vital statistics as
another mechanism of insurance and indirect control, from which the lives of free blacks emerged as
indeed more difficult to assess than those of slaves. In any case, the unquestionable mathematical
connection starting to appear between skin colour and criminality rates confirmed, even more than the
previous measurements of brain size, intelligence quotient or disease probability, the necessity for a
strict surveillance of the black as ‘lesser humans’.” He said no more, but closing the journal, remained
sitting, till all the students had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

Motion capture as surveillance of a lesser human.

End of the story: reincarnation of Kodwo Eshun, from sound to dance. “I am not ignoring
discrimination, but trying to re-articulate its critique through a different set of concepts. Instead of
repeating the story of the black race as victim or object of technology (and of its capturing gaze), we
should recuperate the traces of a long tradition of anti-humanism in black culture, complicating the
stable frame of ‘the human’ as interpellative and performative function, exactly through technology.
This cyborg fantasy would revert the implications of the status of ‘non-human’ creatures attached by
racism to black people, in order to creatively address blackness in its recombinant character. Since race
is a shifty amalgamation of human bodies and their appearance, genetic material, artifacts, landscapes,
music, money, language, and states of mind, it is a complex dissipative system, a material interlocking
of heterogenous components in turn stabilized in a certain asset, but continuously differentiating
through new little connections and flows. Race could therefore be perceived the way complex systems
are: starting not from a visible body with an image and an identity, but from their micro-dynamics of
organization, their machinic assemblage with technology, for example through dance steps. This
‘molecularization’, or ‘molecular calculus’ of race, this ‘feeling’ of race enabled by motion captured
steps, was missed by some spectators who, instead, perceived only a ‘disappearance’ – a denial or
disavowal of race. But in fact, we can leave behind the intent to approach the question of race with the
aim to fulfill a desire to be visible, to express political resistance by way of a struggle for self-
expression and of a desire to speak ‘the truth’ to a hegemonic power whose main interest lies in
strangling the ‘subalterns’ between the oscillating poles of ‘truth bearer’ and ‘victim’. We can think of
subjectivities as being first of all constituted ‘energetically’: as Elizabeth Grosz says, subjectivities are
[…] structured not only by institutions and social networks, but also by impersonal or pre-personal,
subhuman, or inhuman forces, forces that may be constructed as competing microagencies rather than
as the conflict between singular, unified, self-knowing subjects. Well, I like this idea. I like the idea of
race as a molecular technology of vibration and virtuality that structures political micro-agencies. I like
the idea of blackness as an energy, a ‘rate of vibration’, as Beatrice Ferrara also says. Blackness as a
‘calculated feeling’. Being robbed of one’s own identity, being broken down in one’s own physicality
and reassembled as digital data, is an event that can be strategically reappropriated. There is a particular
quality of sound, a particular speed of movement, and, if you take out the identity, you feel that this
quality ‘could’ be black. The political point is exactly the impossibility to distinguish a visible body
image and its cultural identity. ” Race, as choreography itself, is also a design. A viral one.

I started this paper with a discussion of the digitalization of one of the most popular dances produced
by the contemporary music, film and entertainment industries, with an enormous influence of this
process on the movements of people at a global social scale. The conclusion (temporary, if there can be
one) of this discussion, after going through the analysis of another example of motion capture and
animation, again of a black dance in the field of pop culture (this time cinema rather than music, video
and the Internet), leads us to understand how digital applications generate and replicate what can be
defined as virtual choreographic objects (as I do in my book chapter), steps adopted and adapted by
people and cultures, movement ideas obsessively circulating and continuously mutating on the markets
of an increasingly neurotic and technological capitalism.