Patterns of Life

At the exhibition from May 30, 2018 to June 1, 2018

»Patterns of Life« presents a history of the technological capture of human movement within the genre of a dance film. Prévieux enlisted five dancers from the Opéra de Paris to develop dance choreographies based on six different experiments, studies, or technologies – presented in chronological order and accompanied by a narration – that are concerned in different ways with the task of extracting patterns from bodies in motion, and the way this data is applied to reorganize, control, and encapsulate individual and group movement and behavior.

From Georges Demenÿ's chronophotography of faulty gait in the late nineteenth century to the capture of human gesture in order to reconstruct and remodel it in quest of greater efficiency within the factory regime to the »activity-based intelligence« generated by the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the film traces the genealogy of the quantification and visualization of bodily movement and the various ways of making sense of it. It concludes by addressing the contemporary preoccupation with data mining, and the consequent shift from looking for things to looking for »patterns of activity« – the very form of analysis that underpins »targeting« today, both in the military context of the »war on terror« as well as in consumer culture and advertising.