Panel Statement

Panel: Motion Capture and Dance: what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it should never attempt

How have things changed? Mo­tion cap­ture per­for­mances used to be equip­ment heavy and fraught with cal­i­bra­tion prob­lems. Mocap was a do­main for priv­i­leged dancer-re­searchers with skilled col­lab­o­ra­tors. The Kinect has changed the ac­cess, cost, and cul­ture of mo­tion cap­ture. My con­tri­bu­tion to this panel will con­sider what hap­pens when mocap be­comes (more) ubiq­ui­tous. Can it con­verge with DIY or ‘Make’ cul­ture? I’ll re­flect upon some of the philo­soph­i­cal ideas I used in con­sid­er­ing mo­tion cap­ture per­for­mances using more elab­o­rate or high end sys­tems (in Closer MITP 2007) and see whether these are still rel­e­vant in the new mocap cli­mate. I’ll also briefly dis­cuss ‘Mi­cro-Mo­cap’: an ex­per­i­ment in ac­cu­mu­lat­ing a per­sonal vo­cab­u­lary of ‘noth­ing move­ments,’ or lit­tle ki­naes­thetic snip­pets, ask­ing if it is like a DIY ‘Mo­tion Bank’ with­out per­for­ma­tive as­pi­ra­tions.  But can mo­tion, once it is cap­tured, re­ally be non-per­for­ma­tive?

• Susan Kozel is a dancer, chore­o­g­ra­pher and philoso­pher work­ing at the con­ver­gence of per­for­mance and dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. She is Pro­fes­sor of New Media with the MEDEA Col­lab­o­ra­tive Media In­sti­tute at the Uni­ver­sity of Malmö, Swe­den, and is the di­rec­tor of Mesh Per­for­mance Prac­tices. She has pub­lished and per­formed widely. Her writ­ing in­cludes Closer: per­for­mance, tech­nolo­gies, phe­nom­e­nol­ogy (MIT Press 2007), a book in progress called So­cial Chore­o­gra­phies: Cor­po­real Aes­thet­ics with Mo­bile Media (ex­pected in 2012), and re­cent pieces on artis­tic re­search, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing, and bod­ily ex­pres­sion in elec­tronic music.  Her col­lab­o­ra­tive per­for­mances and in­stal­la­tions in­clude the Tech­nolo­gies of Inner Spaces se­ries (im­ma­nence 2005, Other Sto­ries 2007 and The Yel­low Mem­ory 2009), whis­per[s] wear­able com­put­ing 2002-2005, and tra­jets 2000-2007. In her role as col­lab­o­rat­ing re­searcher with the In­tu­ition in Cre­ative Processes ini­tia­tive based at the The­atre Acad­emy in Helsinki she is ex­per­i­ment­ing with so­cial net­work­ing ap­pli­ca­tions for im­pro­vised per­for­mance (In­tu­iTweet 2009-2010) and (Alone or Not 2011) and ex­pand­ing an em­bod­ied method­olog­i­cal basis for artis­tic re­search.

Full text (PDF) p. 1411-1413