Digital Theatre - an experimentarium

"news from the motion capturing front"

Motion Capture refers to the computer hardware and software which makes possible digital 3-D representation of recording moving bodies. Recording sessions involve the placement of markers or sensors in strategic positions on the body which provide the basic information for the computer software. The expense of these systems, which includes the cost of the equipment as well as the expertise to run it, is enormous with developments being driven primarily by those industries such as medical, military, entertainment and advertising which have the necessary capital.

These costs, combined with a basic distrust in 'technology', has resulted in little interesting artistic work being done within the dance field until recently through the efforts of a small but determined artistic vanguard of dance and digital artist collaborators. This includes Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar working with Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones (USA); Kirk Woolford with Susan Kozel (UK); Bruno Martelli with Ruth Gibson (UK), Yvonne Fontijn with Karin Post and Michael Schumacher (NL); Richard Lord with Christian Hogue (UK); Sally Jane Norman (FR); etc.

Two of the most interesting recent works were created by Riverbed, the digital arts partnership of Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar. Their project with Merce Cunningham, titled "Hand Drawn Spaces", premiered as a 4 minute film installation at the international graphics trade show SIGGRAPH in July 1998. "Ghostcatching" with movement captured from Bill T. Jones, was installed recently as an 8.5 minute film at the Cooper Union in New York City.

For "Hand Drawn Spaces", Cunningham choreographed and motion captured 71 short phrases. The animation mapped onto this data had a hand drawn appearance, hence the name. The selection of the sequence of the recorded phrases was done with the help of new piece of animation software developed specifically for the project titled the 'motion flow editor'. For Riverbed's work with Bill T. Jones, the challenge was partly to 'test' the potential for the motion capture technology to record the personal movement subtleties of a particular and unique dancer. Austin Bunn in the Village Voice writes that while Jones has vanished from the footage "his movements remain behind".

MESH Performance Partnerships, Susan Kozel and Kirk Woolford, are pursuing the possibilities of combining virtual dancers with live performers for an installation opening later this year in Chichester, UK. Using a wireless magnetic motion capture suit, they will record the movements of the live dancer and play these back at a slightly later time on individual display screens suspended in the space to create a duet.

These projects represent just the beginning. Organisations for the preservation of dance are considering the possibility of using motion capture. Links have been established between the choreography software tool Lifeforms and motion capture. Projects such as "Coppelia" at Surrey University in the UK are writing software which can generate dances from databases of motion captured material. With the ease of transportation via the internet, raw motion capture data can be easily 'emailed' anywhere in the world. This could be a boon for the disemmination and teaching of dance and choreography if the issues of intellectual copyright are solved.

The term Motion Capture implies an entrapment of the human body by technology. However, the next generation of dancers raised with Internet and increased access to technologies will not be so concerned.

Scott deLahunta 3/2/99

• Bodybuilding -- a 3-D poem in two parts
  
• MediaSpace [look in on a rehearsal]
• Analytical Seminar