GRLS DUET

When a film crew assembles raw footage shot during the production of a motion picture for directorial review, it’s called, among other things, a daily rush. At the end of each day on set this unprocessed, unedited footage is developed, synced to sound, and packaged for the consideration of a lucid director the following day.

On conventional sets, the untreated rushes are rarely shared with staff, performers, or audiences. They’re intended for the eyes—and screen—of the project lead. In this way, the rush is a coveted indication of how a film is progressing even as it remains in production.

Footage making up a daily rush—also known colloquially as dailies or rushes—is typically quick, unmediated, and exceptional in its capacity to indicate how individual performances are shaped by the camera in front of which they’re carried out. And this appears as a justly photographic problem, confronting the strange dynamic between body, lens, and apparatus of capture.

For its first season, MOCAD's new media platform Daily Rush presented moving image works that challenged conventions surrounding performance, documentation, and embodiment, vis-à-vis their application in digital media. And as the platform's inaugural installment, these works doubled as a collective, exploratory gesture—itself a screen test or pilot episode; a beta release or reel of dailies.

Initially titled Inherent Affinities, this season was conceived as an addendum to the essays of Siegfried Kracauer, in particular those written as the critic witnessed an ever-expanding, postwar disciplinary landscape for lens-based media. It reflected on how Kracauer may or may not have situated the daily rush as a unique media-form that amplifies both individual and device, drawing attention to the legible tension, or careful ease, between performer, camera, and playback.

As published not long before Kracauer's passing in 1966: "If photography survives in film, film must share the same affinities.” He goes on, “but [one] affinity—the flow of life—is peculiar to film alone." A half-century later, this first season of Daily Rush likewise considers moving image’s flow of life, tracing it across recent works of performance, documentation, and digital media. (Siegfried Kracauer, from the essay, “Inherent Affinities”, in Theory of Film, 1960).