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April 08, 2005

man in [ e]space.mov

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Cine[mato]graphy and Choreography

The performance man in [ e]space.mov--by Wolf Ka--questions the representation of the body by declining the relationship between electronic space and man by merging two forms of writing the movement: the cine[mato]graphy and choreography.

The performance bases on techniques that marked the beginning of the cinema and which has introduced a new reading of the moving body: the reduction and abstraction of the human body and the decomposition of its movement in 24 images/second is in this creation assembled and recomposed in 3D space. This process, undertaken in particular by Marey and Muybridge is renewed here with the introduction of electronic and digital technologies.

As the title already suggests the performance directly refers to the experimental German cinema and dance of the 20th examining the notion of bodyspace according to the machine and its aesthetics. From Etienne Jules Marey cinematic work to the experimental work of artist such as Oskar Schlemmer and Oskar Fischinger they followed a systematic and radical way proposing a perspective of the body on stage as an abstract and symbolic representation as opposed to the psychological and expressive approaches. According to their choreographic and cinematic work, Man in e.space.mov pursuit these researches while confronting it to digital media, in between choreography, cinematography and scenography _ in between dance, music and architecture.

Having the same starting point the performance Man in e.space.mov is based on the complete reduction of space and body, a complete black space where the dancer is reduced to lines constituted through a light costume outlining the body articulation. A camera films the invisible moving dancer on stage, the lines in time, while capturing only 2 frames per seconds. These captured images are placed inside a 3d space which is projected in the back of the stage. Each sequence new images are added, thus building up slowly a strip-man like animation out of the captured image. Once reached 24 frames/s the formed strip-man juxtapose to the performer on stage and thus construct a second ‘virtual’ dancer. Through this juxtaposition a dance, a movement, is constructed in between the dancer and its own images. On one hand the cinematic construct is directly derived from the dancer’s movements but the temporal programming also constitutes an unpredictable parameter giving autonomy to the self residual image. The result is not only a superposition of the image to the body but also from the subject to the object.

Posted by jo at April 8, 2005 04:12 PM

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