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