Interactive dance performance : movement data and the 'materiality' of the system

This paper describes a recent performance work I made using dance and live feed video<br />processing, 1 + x: mid-range projections, commissioned by the Seoul Contemporary Dance<br />Company and first performed in Melbourne in July 2005. This work forms a basis for discussing<br />my interest in creating performance images that reveal 'interiority'. I am interested in how you<br />embed the 'feel' of the human systematically in an interactive structure, and how that process<br />can produce a poetic that arises from the detailed and nuanced play between real and virtual<br />images on the same screen. How do you abstract and play with a performer's movement, play<br />with it in real and virtual time, so that it gives the work an emotional charge? Its like playing with<br />the process of 'becoming virtual' - and I'm being deliberately Deleuzian about that - how do you<br />'become virtual' in the sense of melding performer and image so that the meaning exists<br />between - in the connection between the two? <br /><br />This quest to get the energy, the 'lived', 'felt' quality of the movement into the imagery gives rise<br />to research questions about how 'presence' is perceived in movement. What elements of the<br />raw movement data do you need to keep and what can you throwaway, and still keep the<br />personality, the emotion, the 'life' of that movement? How do you make a virtual, interactive<br />performance system that has its own 'materiality'?<br />