Jennifer Walshe: capture

A percussionist performs a piece. The performance is filmed, and the footage is imported into video editing software, where the file can be sped up, slowed down, frozen; where tiny fragments can be repeated, reversed or layered, where the editor can scrub through the footage at will. These experiences of digitally-mediated movement flip over, returning to the real world. capture is concerned with how »digital signatures« of movement can be performed onstage, how they affect our relationship with sound, with time, with the body. How they navigate the blurry territory between the digital and the real where we all live now.

Jennifer Walshe

 

Context:

The photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) is known for his studies of humans and animals in motion. The Horse in Motion, a ground-breaking series of cabinet cards published in 1878, laid the ground for the invention of film. The Horse in Motion came about as a result of Muybridge’s patron, Leland Stanford, the industrialist, race-horse owner and founder of Stanford University. Stanford wanted a method to analyse the gait of his horses–prior to 1878, there was no way of verifying whether one or more legs of a horse touched the ground at different points during a trot or gallop. Muybridge designed a system of 12 cameras, triggered by wires, and was able to successfully photograph horses trotting, cantering and galloping. Photography now offered a way to capture and break down sequential motions–motions too rapid for the human eye to grasp. And so began the era we live in today, an era when movement is technologically mediated, and often understood primarily through the lens of the technology it was captured in. An era when movement is broken down into fragments, sped up, slowed down, reversed, edited; disseminated as movies, stills and GIFs.

 

The concept of the »Uncanny Valley« was first described by the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in the journal Energy in 19701. Mori’s paper deals with the challenges facing designers of prosthetic limbs and robots. Mori describes a graph with two axes–affinity and human likeness. Mori’s model describes how we feel little affinity with industrial robots which in no way resemble people, versus feeling huge affinity with healthy humans. Between these two extremes, we find the Uncanny Valley. As robots, or any other representations of humans, such as dolls or puppets, come to more closely resemble humans, we feel increasing levels of affinity, until we come to the Uncanny Valley, at which point humans are unnerved. The Uncanny Valley is inhabited by corpses, zombies, prosthetic limbs and robots who are »almost human« or »barely human.« For Mori, as we enter the Uncanny Valley there is an abrupt shift from empathy to revulsion. The Uncanny Valley can be regarded as more than a concept in robotics–it can be regarded as an aesthetic. This aesthetic is found everywhere in culture–in Mime, with its rich history of humans pretending to be marionettes and dolls; in dance styles such as Animation, Robotics and Strobing; in influencers such as Poppy, a human who pretends to be a robot.

Jennifer Walshe (fragmets from the conceptual score of »capture«)