Hello, A thought: Matt Rogalsky is a UK based media artist who has recently announced his plans to "capture the gaps between the words" during 24 hours of monitoring BBC Radio 4 on 12 December 2001... and produce a 24 CD box set of silences. [12 December is the 100th anniversary of the first wireless transatlantic communication.] Matt has programmed Supercollider (a realtime audio synthesis programming language -- http://www.audiosynth.com/) to adjust itself to the loudness of the radio signal and pick up the ambient and other sounds that occur between the words. Each programme generates different silences -- "the silence of The Archers* is totally different from the silence of Today*" -- (*two BBC radio 4 shows for those of you outside the UK). The website for the project is: http://www.silenceisntgolden.net/ Motion Capture technologies (those systems that produce a simulation of movement recorded in three dimensions in the computer) places the emphasis on being able to reproduce this simulation of movement to appear to be as accurate as possible. In the animation field this accuracy is measured by different criteria than in the field of biomechanics. In animation, the accuracy aims to be universally acknowledged -- its evidence is the fiction that become less fictional through this integration of motion. This integration relies these days on a combination of sampling (capture) and synthesis (computation) and can apply not only to individual figures (animals or human) but also to larger crowds or flocks of figures moving in concert. The field of biomechanics is different by magnitudes -- motion capture in this context is designed to produce the most consistent, detailed and accurate traces of motion for analysis to be conducted by specialists in the field and in the service of developing solutions to motion problems encountered by people or animals. To return to the concept of silence -- why not develop a project that would focus on the capture of stillnesses? I am not thinking of the sort of work that David Rokeby has done with WATCH (1995) for example using video analysis of video image http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/watch.html -- and other similar projects. I'm thinking of a project that would propose to situate itself in the center of what is essentially a commercial and scientific industry with 100s of researchers, programmers and developers contributing towards the capture of motion in service of the two trajectories mentioned above. A project to capture stillnesses could describe a set of conceptual, philosophical, technical, cultural and aesthetic questions as a starting point. Who knows what the outcome would be... probably not a 24 CD box set of stillnesses. ************************************************************************************ Soon I will put a report on line from a motion capture project several artists participated in this last May in Athens. We didn't focus on capturing stillnesses exactly, but we did get the systems to do rather strange things... ************************************************************************************ best Scott
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