Dune Dream – Self-imaging, Trans-corporeality and the Environment

In this text a small video, Dune Dream (2 min 39 sec), performed in 2014 in Maspalomas, and its material, Dune Dream (raw), are related to discussions of some previous works created in the same place (Sitting in Sand 2008), where the strategies of stillness versus movement and merging with or standing out from the landscape were compared. Here the video is looked at through the notions self-imaging (Jones 2006) and trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010). Where self-imaging invites an interpretation of Dune Dream as an imagined dissolution of the self, there Alaimo’s notion trans-corporeality assists in seeing it as a reminder of our indissoluble entanglement with the materiality of the world. Reflecting on the relationship of human body and environment with the help of a performance for camera by the author, this text can be linked to performance-as-research or artistic research and to discussions concerning representation, performance, new materialism and the environment.


Introduction
Anyone who has been engaged with performance art during the last twenty years or more has probably encountered Peggy Phelan's famous dictum concerning the ontology of performance: Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance's being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance' (Phelan, 1993: 146).  For an artist who performs mainly by posing for a camera on tripod, the question inevitably arises: What is this 'other than performance'? Is it merely representation of representation, then? Regarding disappearance Phelan further asserts: 'The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered' (Phelan, 1993: 147).
This text looks at an example of posing for camera where disappearance is the main action, relating it to 'self imaging', a term coined by Amelia Jones (2006). This idea is linked to self-imagining as well. When performing landscape for camera, a blurring of the boundary between performer and environment, even the dissolution of the performer into the surroundings can be created by the help of technology. A small, slightly embarrassing video work, based on a documentation of a performance for camera, called Dune Dream, where I pose for a camera on tripod, created in Maspalomas on Gran Canaria in March 2014, will serve as an example (see image below).

Self-imaging
According to Amelia Jones, in her book Self/Image -technology, representation and the contemporary subject (2006) there is a tendency: In Euro-American culture to deploy technologies of visual representation to render and/or confirm the self (paradoxically: objectifying the self so as to prove its existence as a subject), and … these technologies expose the inexorable failure of representation to offer up the self as a coherent knowable identity (Jones, 2006: xvii).
Moreover, it seems to her that we keep making and viewing images 'as if to complete our pictures of ourselves' as if we could not 'exist anymore without imagining ourselves as a picture' (Jones, 2006: xvii). And yet, we do recognize the disastrous effects of relying on 'oppositional models of self and other' for navigating the world, models that seem to be 'motivating our weird, counterproductive imagining of ourselves from the outside' (Jones, 2006: xvii). In the era of the ubiquitous selfie her observation is more relevant than ever. And for an artist who uses posing for a video camera as her basic tool, this comment invites some serious reflection.
Jones discusses images and projects which are not 'self-portraits' in the traditional sense, but which: Enact the self (and most often of the artist her or himself) in the context of the visual and performing arts (including film, video, and digital media)' and which participate in what she calls "self-imaging" -the rendering of the self in and through technologies of representation (Jones, 2006: xvii).
Jones devotes the main part of her book to discussing filmic and televisual selfimaging but since my example functions in a rather photographic manner (the camera is static, the framing is constant, movement is minimised, post production is not used, except for a slow cross fade etc.) I mention here some of her comments on photography and use them as a starting point.
Arlander: Dune Dream -Self-imaging, Trans-corporeality and the Environment 6 While discussing self-imaging and analogue photography she describes photographic self-performances, which emerge sporadically in early twentieth century modernist photography and then in postmodern photographic practices.
These establish an exaggerated mode of performative self-imaging that opens up a new way of thinking about photography and the racially, sexually and genderidentified subject (Jones, 2006: 40). Performative images are 'self portraits' because: They convey to the viewer the very subject who was responsible for staging the image', but by exaggerating 'the performative dimension of the self (its openness to otherness and … its contingency on the one who views … it)', they alter ' our conception of what a self portrait -and the subject -is' (Jones, 2006: 41).
Exaggerating their own self performances, some artists ' explore the capacity of the self portrait photograph to foreground the "I" as other to itself, the artistic subject "taking place" in the future through interpretive acts that bring her or him back to life via memory and desire.' Thus, Jones argues, the self-portrait photograph 'becomes a kind of technology of embodiment' (Jones, 2006: 43).
An image of a woman lying in a hollow in the sand dunes, slowly disappearing from the image through an extended crossfade, is not an exaggerated selfperformance in the sense of Jones's examples (Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Renée Cox or Laura Aguilar). The video is not a performative self-portrait exaggerating some assumed characteristics of the self, although imagining a dissolution of the body into the sand in a romantic and aestheticised, even pathetic manner, is of course an exaggeration of sorts. The self-imagining of disembodiment with the body merging with the environment becomes a literal disappearance of the subject of the image.
Jones focuses on images of exaggerated self-performances rather than on more traditional self-portraits because 'they complicate the belief in the self-portrait image as incontrovertibly delivering the "true" artistic subject to the viewer -a Arlander: Dune Dream -Self-imaging, Trans-corporeality and the Environment 7 belief central to modernist discourses of art and photography' (Jones, 2006: 44).
The self-portrait photograph is a relatively low-tech example of the 'way in which technology not only mediates but produces subjectivities, deeply inflecting how we experience ourselves in the contemporary world' (Jones, 2006: 44). Not only exaggerated examples of theatrical, photographic self-production operate this way, she claims, but all images 'work reciprocally to construct bodies and selves across the interpretive bridges that connect them' (Jones, 2006: 44). But what happens in viewing such a disappearance, as in Dune Dream; does it produce a sense of loss, or perhaps a sense of relief, in returning to the landscape without the disturbing figure?
Discussing photography as death Jones notes that the: Photograph is a sign of the passing of time, of the fact that what we see in the … photographic print no longer exists as we see it: it is a sign of our inexorable mortality (as well as, paradoxically, an always failed means of re-securing our hope of having the photographed subject "live" forever) (Jones, 2006: 46).
The photographic portrait is ' a death mask, a coffin, a lifeless screen stifling all breath and sensation and movement' (Jones, 2006: 46). Moreover, 'it is through the pose (and thus through representation, which necessarily predicates a freezing of bodily motion) that the death of the subject dealt by the photographic shot -its fetishizing power -is enacted' (Jones, 2006: 47-48).
In her epilogue Jones suggests that 'representation, perhaps especially in its photographic (and digital) variants, dissimulates life. It preys on our desire for the body to remain suspended in time forever ' (Jones, 2006: 244). Moreover, it: Fills the gap between the moment to moment of our lived experience (which can never be secured) and our desire both to make sense of that experience and by freeze-drying it as it is/was in one instant to delay forever the inevitable result of the passage of time: death (Jones, 2006: 244).
Arlander: Dune Dream -Self-imaging, Trans-corporeality and the Environment 8 She further explains: The photograph simply exaggerates the urge built into all representational practices involving images of the body -the urge to delay or foreclose on death. Self images -renditions (in some form) that the maker has forged involving his or her own body -make this profound paradox of representation explicit (Jones, 2006: 245).
In Dune Dream self-imaging, involving self-imagining (of melting into the dunes and disappearing in the sand) and sharing the existence of the materiality of the surrounding landscape, can produce the impression of the performer merging with the environment, which reminds of camouflage or chameleon like posing in the landscape. Curling up in the hollow of the dune and hiding in the shadow was an impulse within an action attempted as a formal experiment -how could I and the dark blue scarf form a contrast to the dunes and also merge with the shadow in the hollow in the sand. It turned by mistake, by chance or by providence and later aided by technology (the slow crossfade between the image with a human figure and the same image without a human figure) into an exercise in disappearing, with meanings related to death and dying. Since the 'action' or 'process' depicted is a form of dissolving or disappearing, a form of dying is staged, and thus also maintained or 'freeze-dried' as an ongoing event. What is taking place, however, could equally well be understood as the body merging with the earth, the restoration of the surface of the sand after the disappearance of human presence.

Ecology of the imaginary
Though the human figure is clearly distinguishable in the image, some blurring of the boundary between the human and the environment takes place from the point of view of the spectator. The image produces an illusion of continuity and confluence between the human form and the surrounding sand. This could also be understood as an interpretation of Gregory Bateson's famous axiom of the unit of survival being organism plus environment (or action plus context), further Arlander: Dune Dream -Self-imaging, Trans-corporeality and the Environment 9 developed by Kershaw into an ' ecology of the imaginary' (Kershaw, 2007: 249).
According systemic thinking it does not make sense to separate ' organisms' from ' environments' as they are aspects of the same system. (Kershaw, 2007: 248). Along the same lines Félix Guattari claimed (in 1989) that nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, we must learn to think 'transversally' (Guattari, 2000: 54 quoted in Kershaw, 2007. For Kershaw transversal thinking is paradoxical. And as Guattari exclaimed, 'no one is exempt from playing the game of the ecology of the imaginary!' (Guattari, 2000: 57).
The relationship between performer and environment can be understood in terms of foreground and background, or as the option of merging with the landscape or standing out from it. Another way is to think of the difference between performing 'as' something and performing 'with' something in the landscape.
And, if we extend this 'with' aspect of performance, we can ask who and what are the actors involved. In any case performances provide imaginary models for the relationship between a human being and the environment. Perhaps Dune Dream could be understood not only as an attempt at self-imaging but as an exercise in an ecology of the imaginary. Imagining a world without a human presence takes another turn, however, when small human figures show up at the horizon on the dunes after the woman in the foreground has disappeared, and the everyday life of the tourist resort is resumed.

Notes in Sand
In a text called Notes in Sand (Arlander, 2012: 254-264)  The habit of seeing the performer as separate from the environment and the attempt to explicitly make him or her stand out from the environment is strong among the creators as well as the spectators of performances (Arlander, 1998: 218). With a recorded moving image, the performance is divided in two -first a performance for the camera and then a performance or re-presentation for The study shows that the making of a documentary film is a process, in which the filmmaker takes a stand in relation to two basic factors: to the surrounding socio-historical world on the one hand, and to the traditions and conventions of representation on the other. The former is called the reality aspect, and the latter is called the representational aspect (Aaltonen, 2006: 246-47).
According to Aaltonen, the strategies of documentary film-makers can be divided into basic strategies of perceiving and representing. Each author is forced to make choices concerning both of these questions, either consciously or unconsciously: How to perceive and encounter the world and how to tell about it to others'? (Aaltonen, 2006: 10). He maintains that all theoretical discussion concerning documentary film circles around these two basic concerns. Aaltonen is interested in how Finnish documentary film-makers understand documentary film and its production process. My interest concerns this simple division, which seems rather problematic at first (how could you separate them?), but which is quite

Trans-corporeality
In her book, Bodily Natures -Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo (2010) 'explores the interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures' (Alaimo, 2010: 2). She introduces the concept trans-corporeality to describe human corporeality, to underline how the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world and ultimately inseparable from 'the environment' and to emphasise movement across bodies, which is often unpredictable or unwanted. In 'early twenty-first century realities', she writes, '"human" and "environment" can by no means be considered as separate' (Alaimo, 2010: 2). She focuses on issues of environmental justice and environmental health, and gives an account and critique of previous feminist theorisations of the body. For her, 'trans-corporeality as a theoretical site is where corporeal theories, environmental theories and science studies meet and mingle', while 'the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual' (Alaimo, 2010: 3). Alaimo emphasises 'the need to cultivate a tangible sense of connection to the material world' to counter 'the pervasive sense of disconnection that casts 'environmental issues' as containable, eccentric, dismissible topics' (Alaimo, 2010: 16).
' [U]nderstanding the substance of one's self as interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity,' she argues (Alaimo, 2010: 20). A recognition 'that humans are the very stuff of the material, emergent world' means that 'the pursuit of self-knowledge, which has been a personal, philosophical, psychological or discursive matter, now extends to a rather 'scientific' investigation of our constitution of our coextensive environments' (Alaimo, 2010: 20). In any case, 'the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial', she notes (Alaimo, 2010: 20).

Alaimo refers to Karen Barad's concept intra-action and writes:
Understanding the material world as agential and considering that things, as such, do not precede their intra-actions are, I think, crucial for twentyfirst century environmentalisms in which the existence of anything -any creature, ecosystem, climatological pattern, ocean current -cannot be taken for granted as simply existing out there (Alaimo, 2010: 21).
Moreover, 'if the material environment is a realm of often incalculable, interconnected agencies, then we must somehow make political, regulatory, and even personal decisions within an ever-changing landscape of continuous interplay, intraaction, emergence and risk' (Alaimo, 2010: 21).
Regarding my example, Dune Dream, Alaimo's insistence on a material understanding of trans-corporeality is relevant. For her: Trans-corporeality, as it emerges in environmental health, environmental justice, web-based subcultures, green consumerism, literature, photography, activist websites, and films, is a recognition not just that everything is interconnected but that humans are the very stuff of the material, emergent world (Alaimo, 2010: 20).
The human figure lying in the shadow of the dune thus literally consists of, among other things, the wind and the moving sand. Their degree of toxicity or the amount of micro plastics they carry cannot be detected from the image; nor is the urbanisation extending around the protected dunes visible within the frame. The scarcity of water, traditionally associated with desert dunes, is here more likely the result of the evergrowing tourist industry than the burning sun. The material consequences of the tourist dream of 'sun, sand and sea' and the ubiquitous, everywhere intruding wind are material ingredients of the trans-corporeal body lying on the ground.

So?
Where self-imaging, including Jones' insistence of the reciprocity of all imaging, invites an interpretation of Dune Dream as a self-imagining, an imagined dissolution of the self and the moment of disappearance freeze-dried forever on video, there Alaimo's notion trans-corporeality assists in seeing this video less as a romantic fantasy of returning to dust or a reconciliation with the human fear of death, and more as a reminder of our indissoluble entanglement with the physical materiality of the world.
Looking at the landscape and its elements as agential in Barad's terms, is understanding the sand and the wind as generators of meaning, as co-performers on the video. Barad explains: Intelligibility is usually framed as a matter of intellection and therefore a specifically human capacity. But in my agential realist account, intelligibility is a matter of differential responsiveness, as performatively articulated and accountable, to what matters. Intelligibility is not an inherent characteristic of humans but a feature of the world in its differential becoming. The world articulates itself differently (Barad, 2007: 335).
In Barad's posthumanist account 'meaning is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility'. (Barad, 2007: 335). That formulation brings us from Phelan's ontology of performance as disappearance, mentioned in the beginning, to an extended understanding of performance as action, process and becoming, something that cannot be limited to humans only. And thus, we could see Dune Dream as simply recording an instance of the world articulating itself, a moment in the performance of the world.