"Ghostcatching is a digital art installation that fuses dance, drawing, and computer composition. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar created the visual and sound composition; Bill T. Jones created and performed the dance and vocal phrases. Seven minutes long, the piece is a meditation on the act of being captured and of breaking free.
Ghostcatching finds its place in the unexpected intersection of dance, drawing, and computer composition. The work is made possible by advances in motion capture, a technology that tracks sensors attached to a moving body. The resulting data files reflect the position and rotation of the body in motion, without preserving the performer's mass or musculature. Thus, movement is extracted from the performer’s body.
"Captured phrases become the building blocks for the virtual composition. As data, the phrases can be edited, re-choreographed, and staged for a digital performance in the 3D space of the computer.
"Here, the body of Bill T. Jones is multiplied into many dancers, who perform as three-dimensional drawings. Their anatomies are intertwinings of drawn strokes, which are in fact painstakingly modeled as geometry on the computer — never drawn on paper.
"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"
from the Artists’ Statement by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar
For a more detailed account of Ghostcatching, see the catalogue essay Steps"
"Don't be afraid to fall off balance." – Bill T Jones, vocal fragment from 'Breathing Show' [ video below]
fragment from 'Breathing Show'
"Don't be afraid to fall off balance." – Bill T Jones, vocal fragment from 'Breathing Show' [ video below]
"After Ghostcatching began as an updating of Ghostcatching, the 1999 installation piece created with Bill T. Jones, but the work took on a new existence as the possibilities of 3D projection led deeper into the original terrain.
A re-envisioning of Ghostcatching (1999), After Ghostcatching is built up from the same motions and vocalizations of Bill T. Jones used in the earlier work, but explores the themes of disembodiment and identity with the new possibilities opened up by 3D projection and a custom 3D renderer built up in Field.
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