The Placeholders

~ 20 min Live Computational Dance Performance
Immersive Room at Goldsmiths University during the Alumni Residency, London 2025
Märkisches Museum, Witten, 2026

The Placeholders is a 15-minute performance piece about meaning-making in the age of monopolistic social media platforms, AI-generated content, and instant-consumption information. Three performers are on stage. One of them dances. Another films them. The third sits at a computer, extracting still images from the live camera feed, one at a time. Each image is immediately projected onto the back of the stage, repurposed as it is juxtaposed with an image from a curated dataset, providing a dual-image backdrop for the happening. Within this simple yet intricate setup, the three performers continuously negotiate with one another and with the technology they operate and are operated by. The audience is invited into the intimacy that grows among them, and called upon to make sense of the random sequences and shifting narrative permutations that emerge. Together, performers and viewers alike risk the collapse into utter nonsense or absolute truths, while enchanting this risk with unpredictable moments of beauty and glimpses of both personal and collective meaning.

Background: 

In the contemporary digital flood of images, much of what our senses encounter is random, unprocessed, not curated by a human. As a result, one either laments the loss of meaning and the apathy that follows, or turns to obsessing over making simple, reel-length, potentially lethal sense out of everything around us.

The Placeholders choreography offers a contemplative space and method to intellectually and emotionally survive this relentless flood. Even when seemingly incoherent, the audience and performers never fail to assume connections- to the point of doubting whether the images are random at all. They become aware of their tendencies and insist on remaining engaged, they improvise meaning on the spot, then naturally let it go as a new one surfaces and shifts their perspective.

Together, they try not to lose hope, and perhaps even find joy and relief in the unfolding patchwork process of the performance. And while the audience is reminded of its nature as a meaning-making entity, illiteracy becomes a prominent part of the performance: it is reading and learning how to read at the same time.