Panel Statement

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

Move­ment analy­sis in the sci­en­tific realm is often char­ac­terised by the de­sire for cer­tainty and pre­dictabil­ity yet this level of pre­dictabil­ity may not al­ways be de­sir­able in an artis­tic con­text. In the area of dance cre­ation and per­for­mance, the fact that hu­mans can be sur­pris­ing, in­spired, frag­ile and un­pre­dictable could be seen as part of their po­ten­tial cre­ativ­ity and prefer­able to ob­vi­ous, ro­botic re­sponses. How far would we allow ma­chines to carry sim­i­lar traits in their analy­sis and re­sponses to human move­ment? This pre­sen­ta­tion in­ves­ti­gates the area of ma­chine learn­ing and un­der­stand­ing as it may be ap­plied to mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis in per­for­mance, in­clud­ing the as­pi­ra­tion of many ma­chine learn­ing tech­niques to model and ap­proach human learn­ing.

• John Mc­Cormick (AU) has been ac­tive in the area of dance and new media for many years. He was a found­ing mem­ber of Com­pany In Space (with Hellen Sky), Dance­house and Square­tan­gle (with Adam Nash). He has worked on a num­ber of per­for­mances in­cor­po­rat­ing mo­tion cap­ture tech­nolo­gies in­clud­ing  the Com­pany In Space works CO3 (2001), The Light­room (2004) and Sen­tient Space (2005), the lat­ter in col­lab­o­ra­tion with igloo and Adam Nash, Aura (2009) with Kim Vincs and Choreoto­pog­ra­phy (2010) with Kim Vincs, Daniel Skovli, Peter Divers and Rob Vincs. John teaches mo­tion cap­ture and dance at Deakin Uni­ver­sity in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia and is cur­rently un­der­tak­ing re­search at the Deakin Motion.lab and the Cen­tre for In­tel­li­gent Sys­tems Re­search.

Full text (PDF) p. 1667-1669  [Different title!]