Digital Movement ― Essays in Motion Technology and Performance

Digital Movement is about the evolving relationship between human movement and the technologically mediated process of motion study, particularly in terms of how, through digital media technology, human motion can be captured, rendered, animated, processed, analysed, computed, documented, archived, and through these and other iterations, it can ultimately be turned into an object of discourse and knowledge. Opening up relatively untheorized areas of study, the book argues that digital motion should refer not only to visual forms of capture (movement recomposed through still images), but also to high-level motion-sensor and depth-sensor based forms of capture, which constitute, as it were, a higher-dimensional language of motion analysis. The book then alludes to the ubiquitous technological sensation that is digital movement, as it proliferates through a plethora of sensing technologies. How can we construct meaningful interpretations of this tremendous volume of motion-data by using representative models that reveal the felt experience living deep within the data? How can we dig for movement meaning in the cultural and somatic landscape of technological design and use? This is an important study for all scholars and upper-level students of contemporary performance.

Nicolas Salazar Sutil is a Lecturer in Dance and Digital Arts at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. He is a Chilean performance and cultural theorist and arts practitioner, trained in Laban-Malgrem Movement Psychology, and co-founder and artistic director of C8 Project. Since 2011 he has acted as director of Performance Studies international (PSi), Chair of Independent Scholar Committee (PSi) and a member of PSi's International Committee. He is the co-founder of MoVe (Movement Visualisation in e-Cultures), a network for independent research in the field of human movement using Kinect. He received the 1994 Academic Excellence scholarship from the Universidad de Chile, and the 1995 ICN award for his adaptation of Kopit's play Wings in Santiago de Chile.

Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds, UK. She is co-founder and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. She is on the Advisory Board for Palgrave Macmillan's Performance and Technology book series. She is a member of the Standing Committee for Digital Resources in Humanities and Arts (DRHA) and a Trustee for DV8 Physical Theatre.