Nobody Knows What a Body Can Do: un/making the mediated body

• In Event: If a Body Meet a Body: Making People in Daily Practice

Abstract

Motion capture (mo-cap) technology is increasingly used to convey the sense of real bodies in cinematic and gaming representations. However, most audiences do not perceive any trace of the actual body that produced the movements in the studio. Legacies of STS provide a framework to critically analyse blackboxed technology revealing the normative assumptions mo-cap is premised on: understandings of what bodies are and how they move (consider the calibration tests needed to synchronise mo-cap systems). Tobin Siebers in his polemic 'Disability Aesthetics' understands the aesthetic as the impact of some bodies on other bodies (2006 & 2010). Thinking of bodies coming together through motion capture technology is a means of extending our understandings of what bodies are and can do. Deleuze drawing on Spinoza in his essay "What Can a Body Do?" sees these two questions of bodily structure and capacity as equivalent, reminding us that "we do not even know of what a body is capable" (1990: 226). This creative presentation will present preliminary findings from a research project which has used mo-cap as a means of artistic expression for people living with a disability.

Authors

• Scott East, UNSW Sydney

• Karen Kriss Karen Kriss, UNSW Sydney Art & Design