JUNKSPACE: A Performance Exploration of Decay Through Reproduction

Quinn Charles is a New York City based artist pursuing a bachelor's degree in Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College. Quinn’s work is often informed by her training as a ballet dancer, and reflects on her navigation of the dance world and troubling experience with the inherently binary nature of classical ballet. She is fascinated with the entanglement of performance, architecture, and video. Quinn’s senior capstone project interrogates discourse around reproduction and decay in relation to performance. The artist has a background in classical and contemporary ballet. Interest in contemporary ballet stems from her experience training with the Alonzo King LINES Ballet school. She draws inspiration and reference for her choreography from the teachings of this school. Quinn’s site specific capstone project was heavily reliant on a live audience and the ability to organize at Far Rockaway, Queens, which proved itself impossible to execute within the parameters of current limitations. Due to the unforeseen pandemic, her project has been heavily compromised, and now exists partially in the form of a proposal, with intentions to execute to its fullest capacity when possible. The piece functions as a synthesis of photography, performance, and architecture. Inspired by Hito Steyerl’s ​In Defense of the Poor Image a​ nd Rem Koolhaas’ essay ​Junkspace, s​ ite specificity is integral to the proposed piece, performing under the A train’s ‘Beach 44’ exit is Quinn’s ode to Koolhaas’ notion of Junkspace. The piece will be taped on a vintage camcorder from her childhood, Quinn’s ode to Steyerl’s notion of the Poor Image. Quinn has choreographed a piece of contemporary ballet, intended to be performed by four dancers in this space. A live audience will be present, allowing the piece multiple iterations; one initial life at Rockaway and infinite lives through the lens of the camcorder, the catalyst for technological reproduction. As a supplemental representation of the artist’s initial vision, Quinn’s piece has taken new form, and tentatively exists, in the words of the artist, as ‘Digital Junk’, the perfect marriage between ‘Junkspace’ and ‘The Poor Image’, a collection of still screenshots taken from videos of the artist dancing cluttered on a desktop computer. The work can be read as a recreation of video documentation of a performance through excessively edited and manipulated still images. The work’s adaptation from a live performance with a video component to a purely digital form is simultaneously a product of constraints induced by the pandemic, but also a representation of the pandemic; as we have watched our world almost instantaneously take digital form.