[We Already Know and We Don't Yet Know, Video, 6:16]

“We Already Know and We Don't Yet Know” took place in  São Paulo, Brazil at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics VIII Encuentro. The performance was the outcome of a three day workshop using dance, performance and theater of the oppressed exercises. As of November 20, at least 265 transgender people were killed in 2012, with the most murders—126—occurring in Brazil (sarahgiovanniello 2013). The U.S.-based National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reported in 2011 that the murder rate of LGBTQH people was at its highest point ever, with transgender women and people of color experiencing the most violence. The gestures in the São Paulo performance physically expressed participants' ideas about, and memories of, safety. After three days of conversation about prison abolition and community based responses to violence, the prompt to create the gestures in the performance was simply the word “safety”.

In “We Already Know”, the bodies of the eight performers create a cut in a field of mediation created by a transnational art context by moving in a public space with a shared speed. The fields of mediation being engaged with in this context include digital video, photography, and networked media. As can be seen in the photo above, audience members, potentially international art festival attendees and potentially bystanders, are engaged in photographing the event with digital cameras. The video included here was taken by an audience member in the form of a digital video shot with an iPhone and was later uploaded to social media. The existence of this photo demonstrates that the performers, by moving in this context, cut into multiple fields of mediation.

While the speed of the gestures can be seen more clearly in the video, the cut is created in this photo by the position of the bodies. By having a shared position, and being separated in space from the audience, it is apparent that these movements are a performative gesture. Additionally, by moving with a shared appearance, wearing similar kinds and colors of clothing, the performers in this photo differentiate themselves from the audience and call attention to their movement.  

  Gestures can cut fields of digital mediation by entering into an engagement with their temporalities, but they can also cut other fields of mediation. I propose that gender, race, sexuality and ability act as fields of mediation, intervening directly in the perception of bodies through social conditioning, and that these fields of mediation can also be cut in the way that digital fields of can. While cuts in digital fields of mediation may create relations between digital objects, I hold that cuts into fields such as gender and race create relations which are trans-digital, both pre-digital and post-digital. 

The danger here is that the definition of a field of mediation may become too broad to have any meaning. Yet my interest in this chapter is to work towards a decolonization of the digital, a post-media and post-digital configuration, which can still abstract and learn from digital technologies to consider concepts such as a field of mediation which starts with digital technologies but moves beyond them. Given that Kember and Zylinska's definition of mediation includes "a thesis that mediation can be seen as another term for 'life', for being-in and emerging-with the world", it seems within their scope to consider gender and race as fields of mediation, especially given claims that gender is a technology by Halberstam and that race operates as a kind of code by Nakamura and Chow-White (2012, 23, 1991, 2012). Both of these fields of mediation, as well as sexuality and ability, can be seen as material fields, constituted by such matter as clothing, skin and hair, as well as gesture. Also considering Barad's notion of "the agential cut" which considers "how to engage with the agency of matter and how to raise questions in a world which is relational, durational, constantly becoming", the use of gesture in dance and performance to express particular racialized, gendered forms of embodiment emerges as a usage of duration which may create an agential cut (Kember and Zylinska 2012, 81). Kember and Zylinska state "the practice of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-different-from-the-world” (2012, 75). This last pair of becoming-with and becoming-different-from seem particularly relevant to a trans of color analysis which considers the place of people whose modes of being take as necessity a gesture of becoming different from one's assigned gender at birth, even in a racialized context where such a choice adds to an already precarious existence.