The project I propose is a Motion Capture dance performance to be shown as an event in VR. This project is further development of a work I developed at Goldsmiths Mocap streamer residency in 2022 called Lois.Monstrous encounters.
During the residency in 2022, I worked remotely with 3 dancers on a live performance using motion capture suits and the final draft of the work was in the form of a live stream of the data to Unreal Engine and from there online. The residency was about technology testing + developing the skills.
Now I have streamlined the remote dance set up so I can use it in my practice, which involves working with Unreal engine 5 (incl visual coding), Blender, CC4, Axis studio software for Noiton Motion Capture suits.
With this in mind myself and one of the three dancers ( I will confirm who later on depends on the month we are selected for), will develop the work further by using dance and machine learning in Unreal 5 to influence the environment of the world with movement and then we will take the final version of the work to an online and a VR experience.
Thematically the work focuses on the posthuman body and how it encounters the other bodies. The story is not only about the nonhuman life forms but mainly about the encounter with them, hence the title. It looks for a kind of techno and bio collective attunement between the dancers and the viewers inside and outside of the digital-physical continuum.
The work reflects on the experiences in underground spaces, predominantly based on a factual-fictional story by Lois Jessup about her meeting of humanoid life forms in the depths of a neolithic temple in Malta in the 1930s. In part one of the work the performance occurred at the moment when isolated life forms leave the place of isolation and encounter the Primary World and one another. The monstrous self and the monstrous others experience inner and outer transformation of their body-mind states, questioning how to share experiences and relate to one another after a period of transformation and enormous change. Can some experiences be explained / related to at all? And whose voices are believed and considered valid?
Weblinks
All the multilayered narrative here sounds very interesting. It’s so intertwined, it’s not clear what’s real. It’s speculative-mystical machine and a dance. It seems to be quite an unusual approach to the phygital world and dance.
love how this proposal uses motion capture and machine learning(!wooooww!) in UE5 to create the final work. It goes beyond the usual “visual art-turned immersive experience” angle and uses actually challenging technologies. This is the stuff i’d like to see more of in digital residencies.