Sketching Movement
June 2014
Jonathan Rubin and I programmed a way to translate the movement of a dancer into a sketch.
We did it for artist Raffael Lomas, for his iChair project. Raffael collaborated with dancers who danced with his sculptures – deformed impossible chairs. As the dancers took his sculptures and used them to create their own artistic practice, Raffael looked for a way to answer them by again transforming their art back into his own visual practice.
Translating and transforming complex phenomena, such as dance, to other modalities usually entails massive dimensionality reduction. Especially when using computers. We reduced the whole human body into one point – the center of mass. It was interesting to observe the strength and the failures of this reduction, symbolising the penetration of computers into human body and all humane practices.
These videos show both the sketch and the computer model reduction, in action –
A dancer sketching with the Kinect from Tamar Regev on Vimeo.
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And these are the final videos, edited with both the real dancers and the sketch –
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Official website of the iChair project, by Raffael and Tai Lomas –