Panel Statement

The normative use of motion capture technology is to map the body in movement so as to make animated characters more life-like. This filmic application of this process is conceptually instrumental because the data is co-opted for a largely illustrative uses where the focus is on simply re-presenting movement in animated characters so as to make them more believable substitutes for actual actors. With this approach the technology is conceptually limited to mimetic applications. . The technology and data is, in a sense, pre-figured so as to conform to the disciplinary conventions of filmic animation. In contrast this cross-disciplinary panel will explore a range of alternative conceptual trajectories for the use of the motion capture tool and the data it yields. In particular the panel will discuss a range of applications where the use of motion capture technology directly brings to the forefront issues associated with notion of gesture and its communication. Drawing specifically on design based research currently underway the discussion will encompass the way in which this data brings into focus questions around narrative as a gestural typology and an index of the inter-relation between the body and space. Exploring hierarchies of human gesture in its expressive cultural forms, The understanding of motion data in its broadest context will be discussed as responses to the spatailasation and visualisation of sound, light, text, images, space, surface and object. The panel will include discussions around how a feedback of these digitized gestural taxonomies can inform choreography to generate new forms of performance as well as explore how space, conceived as a strategically framed environment, can affect the body’s movement without the need to resort to the conventional filmic narratives that this technology is currently limited to.

• Chris Bowman, UK, is a designer, artist, writer, director and teacher who works with animation, film, and convergent media display systems. He graduated in Film and Animation from Liverpool School of Art + Design (Liverpool John Moore’s University, 1980) and completed his MA in Film and Television at the Royal College of Art (1984). Chris has directed and produced award winning animated and experimental art films and he regularly exhibits his screen media work in Australia. In addition Chris has an international profile as a production designer with over thirty film and television productions to his credit. Since 1992, Chris has taught in the Visual Communication Program at UTS in Sydney and is currently Director of the Master of Animation at UTS. He is a member of the Centre for Contemporary Design Practice and he actively participates in the Centre for Media Arts Innovation and the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS. In 2006 Chris co-founded the Centre for Digital Design. Chris has been the recipient of funding from ACID (Australasian CRC for Interaction Design), the Australian Film Commission (Screen Australia), and the Australia Council for the Arts.