Watch a Beautiful Dance of Particles in This Motion-Captured Performance
In as·phyx·i·a, a new collaborative effort and experimental film by Maria Takeuchi with Frederico Phillips, dancer Shiho Tanaka transforms into an evolving, pulsating cloud of 3D data. “The performance is centered in an eloquent choreography that stresses the desire to be expressive without bounds,” its creators explain.
Like onformative and chopchop’s unnamed soundsculpture, Takeuchi and Phillips use motion data and dynamic simulations to re-envision Tanaka’s body as a wobbling mass of particles. Inside an environment specially-created for the film, a single, white spotlight follows her movements, casting a shadow on the ground beneath her abstracted figure. Set to an original soundtrack also created by Takeuchi, the result is an abstraction that is at once as fluid as it is writhing and roaring with information. Could it perhaps be the way a sentient computer might watch a performance? We’ll have to wait for one advanced enough to tell us. Until then, immerse yourself in the liberating dream of datafied motion that is as·phyx·i·a:
as·phyx·i·a from Maria Takeuchi on Vimeo.
Click here to watch the making of as·phyx·i·a.