Guests in this talk session were dancer/choreographer Tsuyoshi Shirai, creator of the recently unveiled videodance piece mass, slide ,&  . in frames, and Keisuke Kitano, a researcher in the fields of film, culture and representation theory.
Mr. Shirai began with a brief introduction of his dance piece mass, slide ,&  . (first performed in 2004), which served as a foundation for his new videodance project. Following a short explanation of his basic approach to choreography, he talked about the differences between dance on a stage and dance on video. One core element in Shirai’s dance is a dialogue with all kinds of objects revolving around the key idea of ”mass”. As encapsulated by the phrase, “being one step behind the environmental situation,” which he also used in this talk session, scanning various objects on stage for their mass and texture, and detecting therein a sort of ”inevitability” that determines his next movements, is the method that basically defines Shirai’s individual style. Particularly impressive about this videodance project is the fact that this style was ultimately reflected even in the production, and especially also in the editing of the final video. According to the artist, just like in the case of a stage performance, the video was edited while focusing on those same elements that inevitably lead from one scene to the next. Easy to imagine, the fact that Shirai applied that style to the same degree as in his stage performances is one significant factor that helped make this work much more than a mere record of a stage performance: a sublimation of dance as a type of video, and video as a type of dance. On the other hand, however, differently from a dance performance on stage, the video shooting was done without audience, which rendered the temporal and spatial aspects that normally arise between the dancer and his audience difficult to read. Consequently, and perhaps also due to Shirai’s lack of experience with imagery creation, the inexpertness of his cinematurgy was one of the bigger challenges that cropped up during the production.
In the second half, the conversation shifted toward a discussion about the website – certainly one elemental feature of this project. Inspired by the fact that anybody with an Internet connection can access the videodance piece and experience Shirai’s body sensation at any time and place, the artist commented that this website was supposedly

“a tool for creating a certain kind of ‘live’ sensation,” and suggested that the discovery of such novel type of “live sensation” was of some help in terms of overcoming the aforementioned difficulty. Based on the understanding that a person’s own body is an invisible and unknowable something that is formulated as a set of various images, and that the “living self” basically doesn’t exist, Kitano rated this project as an effort that possibly triggers a constructive transformation in that self-perception. While referring to specific examples of today’s social media and the complexly layered creative work that is happening there, he further pointed out the potential of a transfer of the piece into a format with no beginning or end through a website where the viewer can watch the final edited video parallel with all other footage that was filmed during the creation process. This configuration of a piece without beginning or end is in fact the very configuration of primordial dance as performed in prehistoric cultic rites, and the introduction of new technology reflected Shirai’s actual interest in certain aspects going “back to the roots.” Kitano praised the project’s innovative approach reflecting very trenchantly recent trends in Internet culture, but at the same time, he warned that a further escalation of this trend may result in the collapse of the framework for constructing “works”, and of the independence of the ”creator”, which would push such public facilities like YCAM into a central position in the discourse on what makes a work of art a work of art.
In this age of prospering social media such as Twitter or Ustream, it has been pointed out many times that these media trigger a change of our self-consciousness and self-perception. However, there aren’t many examples of people who literally put this into practice ”with their own flesh and blood.” Exceeding the dimensions of an ordinary videodance production, this project has found its definition in the aspect of sharing with the viewer the process of the modification of a human being’s self-perception via social media. In addition to the fact that it illustrated the production process of a videodance piece, this talk session can be considered as a valuable opportunity for learning about the plain “eeriness” and the new creative possibilities sensed by an individual that practices creative work in today’s social media with his very own flesh and blood.