Ghostcatching
From MetaforasWiki
| Foundations | Structure | Metafora | Inflection | Return to Metaforas.org |
Contemporary choreographers have begun to use a new generation of computer tools to create dances in virtual realms. In 1998, Shelly Eshkar and Paul Kaiser (American computer artists) collaborated with Merce Cunningham (American dancer and choreographer, born 1919) to create the work "Hand-drawn Spaces." The programmers provided Cunningham with virtual characters and a stage to create with. "The dancers appear as life-size drawings emerging from the darkness and moving in an apparently limitless three-dimensional space. Though the dancers are visible on three screens, they move through a much larger virtual area, and so travel in and out of the projected image, often traversing the spectators' space." The following year, Eshkar and Kaiser helped Bill T. Jones create the work "Ghostcatching." Jones's motions were captured with motion sensors and used to animate wire frame figures in the computer, which were then drawn over in order to create abstract dancing figures. In both cases, the final product was not the result of the work of either the choreographer or the programmer alone, but instead of collaboration between all of the participants as creative interlocutors. The computer potentially liberates dance and motion from the constraints of gravity. In video games, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers, players are able to control the actions of avatars that can leap and soar to physically impossible heights, because their gravity is no more than an algorithm. Because motion in the computer is controlled not by the unchanging rules of the physical world but by infinitely malleable algorithms, a programmer can change a dance by literally changing the gravity in the computer simulation.
So, we may ask: What is human movement in the absence of the body? Can the drawn line carry the rhythm, weight, and intent of physical movement? What kind of dance do we conceive in this ghostly place, where enclosures, entanglements, and reflections vie with the will to break free?
- artist's statement for Ghostcatching
See Also
- Portraying Movement
- Ghostcatching
