«Our gestures are changing. We are in crisis. (…) A crisis in our ‘gesture of searching.’» [*]

Choreographic Analytics is a local analytics engine for the ‡ DobbeltDagger website. The work enables users to search through the code abstractions of the site. Each user search generates a pdf that represents text and code extracts of site content, and is stored in a public archive — turning data into metadata.

«Remembering and forgetting are space-time concepts as well. (…) That is what best characterizes the new structure of the gesture of searching: it is a projection of itself into a future pressing in from all sides, a projection of scenarios into the future.» [*]

The countless, growing choreographies of large scale computation, automated or not, that inhabit our online environments are facilitating various surveillance mechanisms. Mechanisms that aggregate all possible movement, keeping traces, intersecting temporalities, defining presences and absences of data — now, then and hereafter.

Performing at an infinitesimal scale, Choreographic Analytics presents an alternative form of documenting, analyzing, notating and archiving ‡ DobbeltDagger. Every search performed is an act of making a new choreography — which brings new relations and new links between words and meanings — building up on an ecology of growing choreographies.

Choreographic Analytics is a scraping mechanism that brings the underlying voices, rhythms and patterns that compose the platform, to the front stage.

[*] Vilém Flusser (2014). Gestures. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

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Joana Chicau [PT/NL] is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. Her trans-disciplinary project interweaves media design and web environments with performance and choreographic practices. In her practice she researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at in widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism. Website: joanachicau.com