workshop MOCAP-080701

Captured Motions

The workshop held at the media lab of the institute for architecture and media at the technical university Graz hosted faculty and students of the IKA for four days. Work was conducted on the motion capture system installed at the lab, centring on the articulation of spatial installations challenging and disturbing classical causalities in procedures of body-space interaction. The technology, allowing for the diffusion of the virtual, coded machine realm with the sphere of the immediate senses, ephemeral realities have been constructed, transactions enabled. Point of departure was the human body, observation and codification of its motions, amounting to strategies, in which new motions, choreographies would be orchestrated. Choreographing was here performed by installing an environment, in which the sensor-motor-apparatus of the human would need to adapt and cope with a set of rules and objectives, which designated artificially, would radically differ from the proverbial set of every-day life. Practice of the exercise, mimicking causalities and assemblies found in the world of myths, games and tales, once linked to the investigation of sub-domains of every-day interactions, is understood as capable of dismantling the compacted perception on how we interact in our environment, and would allow for an intense dissection of sociotopias based on behavioural rules and objectives. The workshop initially was set up to explore the productivity of motion-capture systems in the realm of architecture as an empirical device, following the tradition of Eadweard Muybridge, but also addressing problematic practice of observing and quantifying the human body as practiced in Taylorism. A comprehensive theory of motion capturing still has to be articulated.