Daniel R Marks
Research Abstract
Protagonist: Choreographing Dis-integration of Agency
From a baseline of enquiry into performance work composed beyond the live body, DRM’s practice-led doctoral project attempts not only to decipher the convoluted relations of agency across live and documentary forms, but to also identify with the very process of convolution in radical practice. Rather than speaking simply to the self-disintegrated across networks of relation, I instead propose an active practice of dis-integration: a non-binary self-problematisation of integrity, realised in interdisciplinary choreographies of action, artefact, and interface. Dis-integration is a potential to congeal the liquid self, the ideal of post-binary life, to actively non-linear problematisations and solutions — anonymous and intimate, abjectly open, blooming outward and inward at once. Tragic dis/embodiments, germinating in the dark spaces and blind spots of problematised agencies, are here exhumed as diagrammatic and poetic modalities which critically engage intersections of archival, architectural, and archaeological modes of performance-making. In propagating non-binary autonomies which break apart integrity of form and interface, the project facilitates self-quantifying formation across the bounds of academia, art practice and embodied action. With each complication and rupture of these limits, an iconography of transgressive action is figured-out in processual re-composition. This is how DRM’s research generates a symbological “protagonist” for the choreographing of dis-integrated practice. The protagonist (a generative diagram/score for practice-research) de-encrypts its own ongoing encryption, acting subversively through hidden logic and self-forensic gesture — splitting and folding linear narratives of action and representation into vessels, devices and tools of queer potentiality.
Bio
Daniel R Marks (DRM) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. Applying a framework of queer self-esotericism to processes of entropy and feedback-looping, DRM works through collusions of performance art, poetic-didactic writing/diagram work, sculptural installation, and accumulative media archives to exhume intertextual potentialities of the body-in-action. Their practice, tending toward motifs of tragedy, horror, non-binary embodiment, and the cybernetic, unearths radical gestures in multi-modal performance: the various artefacts of making and performing choreographed across a multiplicity of formats, as transgressive re-configurations of bodily agency. DRM has displayed and performed projects at multiple galleries and artist-run initiatives in Naarm and regional Victoria, including RMIT Gallery, La Trobe Art Institute, Wyndham Art Gallery, Testing Grounds, BLINDSIDE, KINGS Artist-run, and Trocadero Art Space. They are affiliated with the Performing Dress Lab, which operates between RMIT, University of the Arts London, and Aalto University (Finland), and have been a mentor for the Trocadero Art Space (Footscray) Peer-to-Peer artist support program in 2021.