Ignorant Avatars

I began a collaboration with movement researcher and choreographer Paola Escobar to investigate the translation of movement into virtual space via VR hardware. We began with a series of dance experiments using High Fidelity’s avatar recording tool.

We tried to find and examine the liminal edge of translation, where the software’s extrapolation of a complete body from three data points (head, left hand, and right hand) was faulty. Torsion, weight, and all manner of nuance were lost during a dance, but we gained a form of machine choreography. The flickers, jitters, and inhuman angles conveyed a logic (or illogic) other than human dance sensibility, yet I see a performativity in them. The gap between a physical body and this virtual recording can serve as a new, generative notation system, or even a collaborative and interpretive intelligence. Perhaps it is intelligence through ignorance.