The Shore Revisited

This video article is based on a recorded return, in 2018, to the site of a performance for camera repeated weekly on Harakka Island in Helsinki during the year of the goat (2003–2004) as well as for a day and night during Easter that year. The video installations made fourteen years earlier are inserted in miniature format within the recent recording, complemented by journal entries from the day and night. The voice-over text discusses concerns relevant at the time of recording the performances and displaying the installations for the first time, such as the question what is repeated, what stays the same. It uses these works to exemplify one possible understanding of Karen Barad’s notion agential cut.


VIDEO ARTICLE TRANSCRIPT
was easy to find. The spot for the camera tripod was more difficult because the terrain had changed. The boulder was still there, but vegetation behind it had grown so there was no easy way of passing behind the camera. The rock I had used as a mark for framing the image, was not there or anywhere near, but there were other rocks. My camera was not the same, nor my tripod. At that time, I used a simple digital video camera and a television format, rather than the film format mostly used today, and un-manipulated stereo sound, without wind protection.
I decided there and then to record a repetition of the same action I had repeated so many times during that year: walking past the camera following the shoreline and the horizon from left to right in the image, then returning behind the camera and walking past it again a little further away, then standing on the cliff looking out to sea for a while, and finally letting the camera record the view without the human figure. This time I did not repeat the walk twice, though, nor did I have my dark blue scarf with me. This was a simple exercise of reminiscence, not a recreation. When I looked at the recording later, I realized I had made the same mistake that   -19.9.2004. In this context "method" means creating rough time-lapse videos by returning to the same site repeatedly, placing the camera tripod in the same spot, framing the image as similar as possible each time, and performing the same action or pose wearing the same scarf. By repeating the same action and the same image, the changes in the landscape can come to the fore, for instance the seasonal changes during a year, as in Year of the Goat, or the changing light conditions during a day and night, as in Day and Night of the Monkey, to be shown later. "The research practice explored by 'The Shore' combines performance and documentation into a method of production with the purpose to support the creative process. It could also be used to explore one's relationship to the landscape, to take up issues within a community by focusing on special areas, to understand changes in the environment within a time-period, etc. -that is, to produce knowledge related to The Three Ecologies by Félix Guattari. Roughly: the subjectivity, the socius and the global environment.
It raises questions about the relevance of a devotional practice for the performer, the political use of the self as a focusing tool when addressing environmental issues and the ethical challenge in creating action models to be repeated in everyday life" -end of quote.  Did the shoreline invite me to walk along it? Perhaps it did so by affording me a direction, although by moving I wanted rather to demonstrate time passing.
The landscape moved me through changes in the weather. I quickly learned to know the uneven surface of the cliff, its holes and bumps. Sometimes, however, they turned into pools that froze or disappeared under the snow.
A small hollow in the cliff was a sign for where to stand and look out to sea. with the video: The landscape is not uniform, singular or static, but always different. It is constantly changing and full of events, even when the site is only a bare cliff without any vegetation. I was interested in the corporeality of site-specific performance and noticed how -although the environment is often experienced most strongly by moving through it, rather than looking at it, as already Arnold Berleant pointed out -in order to experience a corporeal connection to a site it is useful to remain repeatedly still in it for a while. In that text, I looked at "The Shore" through the idea of "still-act", adopted from anthropologist Nadia Seremitakis by dance scholar André Lepecki in 2006, and through the "primaries of action" developed by the British live artist Anthony Howell in 1999. His idea of stillness, repetition and inconsistency being the three basic elements of performance, prompted me to look at the variations in "The Shore" by asking: What is changing, what stays the same? And to explore how the elements of action -stillness, repetition and inconsistency -understood more broadly as principles of action, could be used to analyse choices made in video recording, editing and display. The basic method used in these works involved stillness and cycles of repetition in various ways. The editing principles and the techniques of combining the videos in the installations were regarded through those notions as well.
The question "What is changing, what stays the same?" was applied on all levels. Here I will compare only two of the works included in "The Shore", and performed on the same site on the island, the year and the day and night.
In using a static camera on a tripod, I strived to repeat the same framing While editing I retained the original order and the chronology of the images.
The weekly performance consisted of several actions in a row -walking past the camera twice and then going to stand at the shore -which I divided into parts to present the variations simultaneously, as can be seen here. Each performance is divided into four parts: first walk, second walk, standing at the shore and the shore without a human figure. In the videos where I am standing still, I cut out my entering and exiting the image, to create an illusion of immobility, an artificial stillness, a fiction of sorts. Small cross fades between the images were added to soften the sound changes and to make the synchronisation easier. In Year of the Goat the duration of the images followed the slowest walk and varied from image to image, keeping the rhythm as tight as possible. In Day and Night of the Monkey, which involved only standing at the shore, the images were shortened to have the total duration of the video equal that of the Year of the Goat, approximately 13 minutes 40 seconds.
When displayed, the videos in Year of the Goat were placed next to each other in separate monitors with the image changes synchronised. This formed another type of a repetition; the same landscape was repeated horizontally, emphasizing and extending the horizon in the images. As the aim was to produce an experience of continuity all videos were running nonstop without a marked beginning, end or rhythmical development.
Here, as a miniature installation with all four channels cramped onto one screen, the work seems like an example of repetition as aesthetic strategy.
Repetition not as in rehearsal or practicing mastering a skill, nor to find the perfect solution, nor repetition as a technique of the numinous, as suggested by Silvia Battista, but rather repetition as a tool for amplification, for accumulating material, for producing variation, and for demonstrating, even materialising difference. Looking at the work today, the notion "agential cut", or agential separability, developed by physicist and queer theorist Karen Barad, might be a more interesting concept than stillness and repetition in discussing the decisions involved. which involves a specific material configuration of the "apparatus", enacts an agential cut, effecting a separation between "subject" and "object".
The agential cut resolves the ontological and semantic indeterminacy.
This means, to put it simply, that differences are made, not found, and dichotomies derive from specific cuts. [14:54] The boundaries and properties of the parts of a phenomenon become determinate only in the enactment of an agential cut that delineates the 'measured object' from the 'measuring agent'. A measurement is the intra-active marking of one part of a phenomenon by another; nothing in a measurement makes it irreducibly humancentred (after Barad 2007, 338).
The boundaries and properties of the parts of a phenomenon become determinate only in the enactment of an agential cut that delineates the "measured object" from the "measuring agent". A measurement is the intraactive marking of one part of a phenomenon by another; nothing in a measurement makes it irreducibly human-centred. For Barad "observer" and "observed" are merely two physical systems intra-acting in the marking of the "effect" by the "cause". Humans may emerge as part of such practices but they are not necessary. The agential cut delineates object and instrument, but the role played by any part of the experimental arrangement varies depending on the details of the intra-action, due to the mutual exclusivity of the conditions for definability. For example, a device that can be used to define and measure "momentum" cannot be used to define and measure "position". Take a scarf, go to the shore, stand at the shore. Look at the horizon, look at the water's surface, breathe. Until your eyes rest, until your mind rests, until you are cold, tired, having enough.
[Text scrolling in embedded video]: Take a scarf, go to the shore, stand at the shore.
Look at the horizon, look at the water's surface, breathe.
Until your eyes rest, until your mind rests, until you are cold, tired, having enough.
Take the same scarf, go to the same shore, stand at the shore.
Look at the horizon, look at the water's surface, breathe.
And so on.
Take the same scarf, go to the same shore, stand at the shore. Look at the horizon, look at the water's surface, breathe. And so on. [20:41] Perhaps we can understand the idea of an agential cut, albeit in a somewhat simplified manner, with the help of these performances for camera. [20:57]

Sunday 11 April 2004 3 am
There is a faint mist in the air, a hint, or perhaps I imagine.
The stars are as bright as before.
In the south, there is a strange pale gleam, could it be Tallinn?
The traffic of the city is even  The spring is only nascent.
Each of these cuts clearly makes a difference in the resulting videos by defining what is included and what is excluded on each level. As Barad explains, I quote: "different agential cuts materialize different phenomena -different marks on bodies" and "contribute to the differential mattering of the world". End of quote.
[25:26] "different agential cuts materialize different phenomena -different marks on bodies" and "contribute to the differential mattering of the world" (Barad 2007, 178) She insists that we are responsible for the cuts that we help to enact, not because we choose or are being chosen but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. This also means, I quote, "' others' are never very far from 'us'; 'they' and 'we' are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts 'we' help to enact", she writes.
Although I chose the apparatus and the moments, in this case, the combined environmental circumstances that the camera reacted to produce the images. In the distance, some sails.
Crazy people defying the cutting wind, longing for the spring, like me.
[ 26:27] Barad further specifies the nature of agential cuts as follows, I quote: "Intraactions enact agential cuts, which are a cutting together-apart (that is, entangling-differentiating), as one move (not sequential acts)", end of quote.
[26:41] Moreover, I quote, "the world can never characterize itself in its entirety; it is only through different enactments of agential cuts, different differences, that it can come to know different aspects of 'itself'", end of quote.
"the world can never characterize itself in its entirety; it is only through different enactments of agential cuts, different differences, that it can come to know different aspects of 'itself'" (Barad 2007, 432, footnote 42).
We cannot study or look at everything at once, I quote: "Only part of the world can be made intelligible to itself at a time, because the other part of the world has to be the part that it makes a difference to" -end of quote.
[27:00] "Only part of the world can be made intelligible to itself at a time, because the other part of the world has to be the part that it makes a difference to" (Barad 2007, 432, footnote 42).
What is part of the apparatus and what is part of the body being marked or measured can change from case to case and within a specific case from time to time.
What matters for Barad is the accountability to marks on bodies -that is, an accounting of the apparatuses that enact determinate causal structures, boundaries, properties, and meanings. She stresses the importance of, I quote: "the proper accounting of agential cuts within the specific phenomenon in question", end of quote. How can wind from southwest be so cold?
"the proper accounting of agential cuts within the specific phenomenon in question" (Barad 2007, 345).
Although there are no determinate, pre-existing entities with determinate properties, there are determinate marks on bodies produced through specific intra-actions, and these marks need to be accounted for.
[28:05] As Barad suggests, I quote: "All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity, its performativity. Boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted through the intra-activity of mattering" -end of quote. "All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity, its performativity. Boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted through the intra-activity of mattering" (Barad 2012, 69).
She adds, however, that differentiating is not about radical exteriorities, not about "othering" or separating, I quote: "the very nature of materiality itself is an entanglement. Hence, what is on the other side of the agential cut is never separate from us", end of quote.
Arlander: The Shore Revisited 28 [28:34] "the very nature of materiality itself is an entanglement. Hence, what is on the other side of the agential cut is never separate from us" (Barad 2012, 69). on the horizon promise rain; hopefully rain rather than hail or snow. The seagulls are still shrieking, although they have no reason yet. There are no nests or offspring yet, but soon there will be. Then one would hardly dare walk on the rocks.
Did the wind banish away the evil spirits of last winter? I don't know. It did stiffen me, inured, too, I guess. I leave content to seek shelter from the wind on the mainland and wait patiently for the warming spring.
Exhausted more than renewed: at home the spring cleaning remains to be done.
[ 29:53] Thinking of Barad's demand to account for agential cuts, it is relatively easy to understand in terms of art, and it is also one aspect of how things are done with performance: attending to the details of what matters and what is excluded from mattering. How to remember, acknowledge and account for the cuts of inclusion and exclusion we make, the apparatuses we use and are used by, as well as the marks on bodies generated by them in daily life, however, could be more of a

Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.