May - October 1999
Building 4, Second floor

Ghostcatching by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar finds its place in the unexpected intersection of dance, drawing, and computer composition. The work is made possible by advances in motion capture, a technology that tracks sensors attached to a moving body. The resulting data files reflect the position and rotation of the body in motion, without recording the performer's likeness. Thus, movement is extracted from the performer's body.

Captured phrases become the building blocks for the virtual composition. As data, the phrases can be edited, re-choreographed, and staged for a digital performance in the three-dimensional space of the computer.

Here, the body of Bill T. Jones is multiplied into many dancers, who perform as three-dimensional drawings. Their anatomies are intertwinings of drawn strokes, which are in fact painstakingly modeled as geometry on the computer - never drawn on paper.

So, we may ask: What is human movement abstracted from its original body? Can the drawn line carry the rhythm, weight, and intent of physical movement? What kind of dance do we conceive in this ghostly place, where enclosures, entanglements, and reflections vie with the will to break free?

Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Ghostcatching (1999)