Workshop Outcomes

Dance and Virtual Space / Motion Capture Derived Work - Immersion and Dispersion

 

Facilitated by: Simon Biggs/ Sue Hawksley, and Kirk Woolford, Guy Hilton, Hellen Sky, and Arthur Elsenaar

 

Research essay (included in the special issue of International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media 2:2 , 2006, dedicated to the Digital Cultures Lab)

Sue Hawksley and Simon Biggs

"Memory maps in interactive dance environments"

 

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(João Costa moving in ReActor motion capture suit sending data to computer to "move" facial muscles in Arthur Elsenaar's face)

Workshop Comments by Arthur Elsenaar:

 

Concerning the Digital Cultures lab, I've read Sue Hawksley's and Simon Biggs' text
about the workshop ("Memory maps in interactive dance environments) and can agree with what they bring up there.
Personally I liked the experience with the mocap rig as the level of control another person (dancer Joao Costa, above) can have over another person’s face is unprecedented and goes beyond experiments I have done earlier. What I did in the lab was a quick and dirty hack with the help of Guy Hilton and not more than that, but it surely gives reason for future exploration.

I like to add that as part of my PhD at Sheffield Hallam, I'm developing a new generation of facial stimulus device that will allow
even more precise control over the facial muscles, will have more outputs, will be more comfortable in terms of the stimulating pulses
and will be portable and wireless. This seems quite a bit of improvement, but I'm in the fourth generation of development now and
you know how it works with technology, the never ending circle of versioning..

Besides the tech, in my work I'm heading for true algorithmic facial choreography pieces, and last autumn we premiered two new pieces:
Morphology and Face Shift that were exactly that; precise computer control over the facial muscles resulting in shifting facial patterns
resembling minimalist sixties tape experiments

(March 2006)