Astrid Piber The Technology of Capturing Motion and Digital Dance Choreography (Hard copy of final paper submitted) "Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object. Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements." A Thousand Plateaus(1) "Movement is a displacement or change of position, even if it cannot be defined as such." Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2) Referring to these quotations the body movement of dance is used to give one of many examples of the possibilities of tracing these relations on one hand and creating a map, which is based on the relational arguments rather than three dimensional data as such. The influence of advanced technologies on new ways of perceiving the virtual versus the actual body establish a link to animation based design strategies. These have the potential to negotiate between the virtual as a mode of abstraction and the real in architecture. That manifests somehow the shift from a modernist notion of abstraction based on form and vision to an abstraction based on process and movement. The notation of dance movements for example records the movement of the dancerıs body in relation to space and time. Classical notation systems employ writing symbols to indicate combinations, tempo, rhythm and specific directions from a performance. (3) In general two different fields of dance notation can be distinguished, where one is a pictorial representation and the other more an abstract representation. (4) Around 1950 Laban developed a notation system based on movement represented by an alphabetical system in which movement is spelled out according to the selection and arrangement of basic movement possibilities. In Oskar Schlemmerıs 'Egocentric Space Delineation' from 1924 the body in movement is characterized by two different spatial networks, the concentric circumferences arising from the chest and curves that radiate from the points of articulation of the body. Historical experiments concerning motion captures have involved the superimposition of simultaneous instances. In architecture this refers to the idea in which time is built into form as memory, like the superimposition of a sequence of frames produces memory in the form of spatio - temporal simultaneity, which is the primary concern in both Mechanization takes Command (1948) and Space, Time and Architecture (1941) by Siegfried Giedion. (5) During the last twenty years the term Œtraceı emerged, which describes a graphical notation system of time and motion in architecture. The trace has been defined primarily by Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. The two latter are both referring to the concept of the trace as the representation of time-based processes through simultaneity and seriality. (6) "The swift changes in technology are changing our lives. It is not so much revolutionizing, rather enlarging our relation to the present time. With the world - wide information net now becoming available, each person whether processing the information or participating in access to it, has a greater freedom of choice than ever before. The technology extends our possibilities to inform in multiple directions and via different media; at the same moment allows a freedom via the accessibility to the individual Marshall McLuhan would appreciate." Merce Cunningham (7) Similar to the rich diversity of different notation systems the various dance techniques themselves construct a specific and specialized body consciousness. The uniqueness of every dance technique depends largely on the choreographerıs or traditionıs aesthetics, the training and the relation of body and self. (8) The technological advances of capturing motion were always strongly connected to the techniques of notation. Étienne­Jules Marey (1830-1904) pioneered the study of curvature as the notation of both force and time. He made essential contributions to the development and establishment of graphic methods throughout medical diagnostics and he developed various graphic recording instruments. (9) One amongst many is the myograph, an instrument that recorded the muscle contraction with a light recording stylus. All of Mareyıs diagrams are real-time recordings and gave this field the name Œchronographyı. (10) One of his achievements was to move the study of form to a study of rhythms, movements, pulses and flows and their effects on form. In 1867 Marey turned to the types of locomotion in man and animals. The captured step sequence of feet or hooves in diagrams allowed the reading of length, speed and tread pressure. Marey invented bar charts that indicated when and how long each hoof touched the ground, which he himself called 'synoptic notations', notations of a 'sort of music', whose notes were Œwritten by the horse itselfı. (11) For this case of the diagram the chart or graph acts as a translator or symbol transformer with explicit denotation. Unlike other colleagues at that time (12) who also employed chronophotographic techniques Marey triggered the exposures with pneumatic and electronic sensors located on the animals, what allowed him to sequence his rhythmic exposures with the rhythms of the movements of the animal. Mareyıs traces of vector movement are based on the inflection and curvature of motion paths and flows in opposition to the ideas of sequential traces. Together with the pneumatic and electrical sensors Marey also used reflective optical disks attached to key points of the body to capture points of motion, a technique that is still employed in contemporary motion capturing devices. One of the original uses of this technology is purely representational, it works as a memory device: the teacher could put the computer exercises into the memory of that are given in class, and these could be looked at by students for clarification. Another possibility for dance is to use the memory potential to create movements and sequences that afterwards can be examined from any angle, including overhead. Furthermore, it presents similar possibilities as the above mentioned chronophotographic methods, which catch a figure in a position our eye could never see. Obviously it can produce shapes and transitions that are not available to humans, but were always there. This exemplifies the diagram as a generative device. Modern dance choreography and related technologies are an exemplary tool to 'trace' movement. A choreographer that investigates on the field of creating virtual dance by the means of motion capturing technologies is Merce Cunningham. He developed his own school of dancing and choreography, a continuity which no longer relies on linear elements, neither narrative nor psychological, nor does it rely on a movement towards and away from climax. As in abstract painting, it is assumed that an element (a movement, a sound, and a change of light) is in and of itself expressive; what it communicates is in large part determined by the observer himself. For Cunningham dance has never had to refer to anything except itself. More than 40 years ago, he chose his path away from sentimental themes, toward kinesthetic exploration and freedom from drama or narrative, which he feared were restrictive (if not actually dangerous) to the process of making meaningful art. (13) Cunningham's first computer-assisted piece was Trackers (14), nine or 10 performers dressed in simple T-shirts and bodysuits begin one-by-one to tread casually across the stage organizing and reorganizing in randomly intersecting patterns. Within a few minutes, the dancers have introduced a new variety of shapes that were awkward and delicate. Most of them were completely unfamiliar in the field of dance movement. The limbs were considered as independent parts of the torso, where every limb had the potential to belong to any other body, which allowed the co-presence of unified and virtual bodies. Jose Gil analyzed Merce Cunningham's 'shift' from ballet and modern American dance to what seemed to be an 'abstract' or 'inexpressive' dance, described as a new choreographic language based on Deleuze's theories. (15) In the virtual dance installation Ghostcatching figures basically capture motion that is traced and transformed into animated diagrams of motion. Dancers are wearing motion capture sensors, which get optically recorded and converted into 3D files that are basis for the choreography of the virtual dance. The intention is not to represent or reproduce, but: "It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map." (16) Ghostcatching can be situated in the unexpected intersection of dance, drawing, and computer composition. Advances in motion capture a technology that tracks sensors attached to a moving body enabled this performance. The resulting data files reflect the position and rotation of the body in motion, without preserving the performer's mass or musculature. Thus, movement is extracted from the performer's body. This raises the question: What is human movement in the absence of the body? Can the drawn line carry the rhythm, weight, and intent of physical movement? "One could say that movement, becoming challenges conventional notions of perception. - Š - Movement is by nature imperceptible; it is only if perception somehow functions in the middle - on the plane of immanence, that it can perceive the imperceptible." (18) The Life Form Software has become a tool for Cunningham in order to search for the possibilities of this kind of 'visual idea generator' for accessing movement that he hasn't experienced or hasn't thought of before. The Hand-drawn Spaces (19) performance is driven by the urge to create a dance that cannot be performed on the stage. In this case the motions of the dancers should obey the rules of the physical world, but that the visual and spatial representation be purely mental. Beyond that, the computer allowed to push certain ideas to an extreme. The digital choreography of Hand-drawn Spaces is created both, in the studio and on the computer. Cunningham directed movements that were performed and recorded, the data was than the fed into sophisticated animation software. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, two digital artists from New York's Riverbed Media Collective, created a new kind of choreography, a dance for projected figures through infinite space. These techniques built up a virtual event that placed the viewers inside an original Cunningham dance. For Kaiser one of the fascinations is to capture uncontrolled movements of an ordinary person rather than of a highly trained dancer, because they are far more complex and harder to replicate. This might be the reason why choreographers using the language of ballet avoided working with these movements and preferred simplified and repeatable ones. Kaiser also emphasizes the divergence from classical ballet where the final position is paramount, as opposed to the internally performed movement that discovers new ways of moving. (20) The possibility to memorize and duplicate classical ballet can be described as an alphabetical approach, the choreography therefore seems to be spatial and fixed. Using with todayıs technologies a rather 'digital' approach the choreography becomes temporal and unfixed. Before performers could start working with motion on the computer, they needed fine control over every element of the motion. The natural starting-point therefore was to use the idea of the footsteps and footprints, something that dancers think of automatically, as the key control mechanism. The basic starting-point was a set of patterns in space and time. (21) Character Studio (22), a software that is based on its patented footstep-driven keyframe approach, seemed to be the ideal solution. (23) Light-sensitive sensors were attached to key points on the performer's body. Optical cameras record the points as coordinates in a three-dimensional data set. These are numbers, not pictures. The recordings itself are abstract representations of the performance. The motion capture data provided the raw material from which the project was constructed. The motion capture technique as a representational and generative device at once carries the potential to enable performance. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari, a map always has to do with performance, as "the orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp, but it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome." (24) If we look at modern dance as a rhizome, the technique of capturing motion is on one hand a logic of tracing - "is it not the essence of a map to be traceable?" (25) - and on the other it experiments with the choreography of the real. On one hand current technologies are extending the physical and creative potential of dance artists, on the other, the moving body transforms our thinking about technology and its impact. Digital technologies accelerate new attitudes towards human condition, culture, architecture etc., which are affecting the way of conceiving and representing 'new mediated spaces' in terms of choreography as well as architecture. In that way the technology of motion capture is a tool that enables to experiment into new types of spatial relationships from various interdisciplinary sources. Virtual images canıt be separated from the actual object and vice versa. One affects the other. Dynamical shaped architecture may be shaped in association with virtual motion and force, which does not mandate to change the physicality itself, but to allow the form to occupy a multiplicity of possible positions continuously within the same form. The term 'virtual' refers more to the idea of an abstract scheme that has the possibility of becoming actualized taking into account a variety of possible configurations. ENDNOTES: 1. Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.282 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p.267 3. In the 16th and 17th century drawings done directly on the floor described the paths of the movements of the body in a dance, also 'horse-dances' were recorded like this, reference: Caroso, Freuilliet 4. Zorn, Sutton, Benesh give examples for the pictorial notation techniques, Laban and Eshkol-Wachmann for the abstract representation. 5. Greg Lynn, Animate Form, p.11 6. The working with the trace occurs in Tschumi's storyboard in the Manhattan Transcripts (1981) and in Eisenman's design process especially in the early houses and the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati. Greg Lynn, Animate Form, p.43 7. http://www.merce.org 8. Susan Leigh Foster, Dancing Bodies, in: Incorporations, p.485 - In this article the author distinguishes between five twentieth-century techniques, namely: Ballet technique, Duncan Technique, Graham Technique, Cunningham Technique, Contact Improvisation Technique; 9. Krausse Joachim, Information at a glance p. 27 - for example the cardiograph, the encephalograph, the oscilloscope, etc. 10. Krausse Joachim, Information at a glance p. 28 11. Braun, Marta - Picturing time p.28 12. for example Muybridge, Greg Lynn, Animate Form, p.26 13. http://www.merce.org/biography 14. Trackers reflects Cunningham's early experiments with LifeForms, software for choreography developed by a design team from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. 15. Paper presented at the Symposium at Columbia University, April 16th, 1999 16. Ghostcatching is a virtual dance collaboration created by Merce Cunningham in collaboration with Bill T. Jones. It premiered at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, January 3 to February 12, 1999; http://www.cooper.edu/art/ghostcatching 17. Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.13 18. Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.280-281 19. Hand-drawn Spaces is a multimedia art installation -- a mental landscape in which hand-drawn figures move in 3D to the choreography of Merce Cunningham, 20. http://www.modernuprising.com 21. Paul Kaiser in a conversation, recorded in March 1998, with Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut, who founded Unreal Pictures and created the Character Studio figure animation software. http://www.unrealpictures.com 22. Character Studio is a figure animation software toolset created by Unreal Pictures and published by Kinetix (www.ktx.com) for use in its 3D Studio Max software package. 23. http://www.merce/org 24. Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.12 25. Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.13 BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexander, Elena ­ Footnotes, Six choreographers inscribe the page, G+B International Publ., 1998 Crary, Jonathan and Kwinter, Sanford (ed.) - Incorporations, Zone Books, New York, 1992 Davidson, Cynthia D.(ed) ­ Anybody, Anyone Corporation, New York, 1997 Braun, Marta - Picturing time, The work of Etienne-Jules Marey, University of Chicago Press, 1992 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari , Félix- A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), University of Minnesota Press, 7th ed. 1998 Gil, Jose-ŒThe Dancerıs Bodyı ­ paper presented at Columbia University, NY, on the 16th of April, 1999 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice - Phenomenology of Perception, (trans. Colin Smith), Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1962 Krausse, Joachim - Information at a glance , in: OASE, Tijdschrft voor architectuur No. 48, Uitgeverij SUN, 1998 Greg Lynn - Animate Form, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998 ŒThe Computer From the Danceı - New York Times, February 23,1999 p. E3 http://www.cooper.edu/art/ghostcatching http://www.ktx.com http://www.merce.org http://www.modernuprising.com http://www.riverbed.com Back to Final Paper Index...