Comment

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on May 17, 2009 at 3:08pm

Lucia, can you say more about the trend of deconstruction, the patrimony of humanity, and the domination of the western vocabulary? I feel like that is at the heart of your project, and maybe what your doing is quite different from how I'd imagined it.

Comment by ibeshe on May 17, 2009 at 12:20am

i think the simplest way is to really dig deeply into the stories of the ancients themselves. Binary code is nothing new, and almost all traditional forms are based on it, albeit in esoteric ways. from there, analysis of the costuming, choreography songs will quickly reveal the continued usefulness of the ancient and its profound implications for the present.

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on March 13, 2009 at 11:23am

Hi Michel,

can you link me that video? i've seen some of the work coming out of osu, and there is actually a dance graduate student working on "solving the problems" of how gravity is not accurately represented here. More or less motion capture initiative can offer one thing that video can't: 3-d point location.

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on March 12, 2009 at 11:56am

Michael's questions and concerns are the same questions and concerns that i had, which is why I am trying to suggest that somehow you think about the usefulness of this. Not to b a skeptic, but I've seen mocap before and it does not accurately represent many aspects of movement, primarily gravity and effort. It only really captures speed and direction of certain points.

So, unless there is technology I'm not hip to, this seems like its oriented not toward the archiving of these forms, but in just a free bank for anyone to use.

Admittedly, if I knew of a free mocap bank, I would be all over it. I would have devised a hundred projects for it within 30 seconds of hearing about it. If I'd heard of it for archiving, I'd become suspicious.

MIDI is not a history of instruments and performances, and I don't think this would be either. It would be a source for choreographic composition, like MIDI is a source for musical composition and performance,

Comment by Doug Fox on March 8, 2009 at 6:31am

Michael, thanks for your breakdown and explanation of different approaches to motion synthesis in animation - very helpful.

Motion capture is definitely expensive. I wonder how good the mocap is of less expensive systems such as Optitrack?

Comment by Doug Fox on March 2, 2009 at 2:33pm

I just caught-up on this thread and read the recent posts. Very intriguing. Definitely many questions have to be considered including what the actual purpose of this project would be. And if such a project did move forward, there are clearly a number of important challenges that would have to be addressed.

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on March 2, 2009 at 9:58am

Thanks Jennet and Michael.

Is it ethical to record points of my skeletal performance, and then let it be remixed by someone else? Only if you call it that, and not sell it as something else.

Dance "movement" is linked to the performer because the instrument is one's body. Instruments can all be made pretty darn near uniform. Whereas bodies... its a wide net about a neuro-muscular, self-body, mapped relationship that then determines how the performer... performs. Its comparing apples and oranges to say this endeavor of capturing dance is like capturing music... as MIDI assumes a standard of instruments.. although that is customizable. The point is to be clear about what you are defining and identifying.

If you're only capturing a series of points of skeletal actions, how does that go beyond what a video camera can capture? How can it be used?

Music is a product that can be bought, sold, and manipulated. But in dance, the product is connected to the performers. By now we know that. Why isolate the skeletal information? Who will use it? How will they use this data? What "new creative process" do you see enabled by this endeavor? That's your money shot.

Comment by Jennet De Shook Leitao on March 2, 2009 at 6:44am

Hello all.. I apologize for not being much of a contributor.. I am not nearly as enthusiastic about dance and technology as a science for choreography or study of movement as you all are... though i find what i am learning to be incredible interesting especially when it comes to something like what Doug mentioned (If i understand correctly) as a Global dance movement database. not merely for the resource it has for all sorts of dancers, but also the amazing implications of correlations of movements across ethnic/cultural/geographic lines (too bad we cant go back in time!). Michael's "pandora's box" hesitations are valid. But this is not perhaps, a full-fledged chore-ethnographic endevour... as i perceive it, it seems like a slice study. A captured motion database may create a skeletonized piece of data, which is not nearly enough to learn something about what the dance actually is, but is gives a very raw and clean resource as to the movements people make across the world. It cannot be seen of course, as a representation of that cultural art-form, but merely a resource of movement.

also, is crediting the performer not possible in such a large database? I would assume it would be possible.

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on February 28, 2009 at 10:16am

P.S.: seems like we have a great team here...

anyone thought about trying to organize and assemble forces?

Comment by Julie N. Cruse on February 28, 2009 at 10:14am

Just a few thoughts:

May want to start developing a list of applications of a global dance capture initiative.

Also, clarify why you see a need to capture. Who needs it? Why? Why is it important? What parts of this need, if not all, does mocap fulfill? How?

In terms of being inclusive - what kinds of data does mocap include and what does it leave out? Will the capture initiative deal with information in dance other than x y z points of location? How?

To answer your question Michael, yes, I've thought in depth on those questions, and accounted for them.

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