New frameworks
Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar bring a trio of pioneering motion-capture works to the Bay Area.

By Dan Engber

AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY'S Cantor Center for Visual Arts, there's a collotype from 1885 called Fancy Dancing. A girl in a draped gown stands like a statue, her arms outstretched against a black background with white, ruled lines. In 12 stuttering, stop-motion frames she lifts a leg, turns away from the camera, and prances in a circle. Though Eadweard Muybridge first published these images in a scientific series called Animal Locomotion, their mannered poses reveal an awkward attempt to make art from analysis. Less than a decade after his dazzling innovations photographing horses and athletes at the Stanford Barn, Muybridge captured the movements of a dancer.

In 1999 choreographer Bill T. Jones donned a suit of infrared-emitting diodes and performed a series of improvised movement sequences in front of a bank of specially designed cameras. When experimental artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar used the data gathered from the diodes to model an animated sketch of a dancing figure, Jones was unnerved. He likened it to seeing the back of his own head and labeled the process "ghostcatching." The name stuck and became the title of one of Kaiser and Eshkar's first major collaborations in motion capture.

The technology they used with Jones descends from Muybridge's pioneering work in the 19th century and finds its modern parallel in the special effects studios around the Bay Area. One of the leading developers of the technology – Motion Analysis – is based in Santa Rosa; companies like Electronic Arts in Redwood City and ESC Entertainment in Alameda have used motion capture to create computer effects for John Madden Football and The Matrix Reloaded, respectively. While the entertainment industry has used motion capture to render digital effects and animate video games, Kaiser and Eshkar are recording a palette of movements with it to produce novel works of art. They've traced the dancing of Jones, Trisha Brown, and Bebe Miller, and by placing markers on the hands of Merce Cunningham, they even allowed the octogenarian to perform his own motion-capture work, Hand-drawn Spaces.

Over the next few weeks a fortunate coincidence brings three of Kaiser and Eshkar's collaborations to the Bay Area. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company's BIPED is performed at Zellerbach Hall Feb. 6; Pedestrian, an animated video projection, is on temporary display at the Exploratorium starting Jan. 22; and a new installation called Arrival premieres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Jan. 16. Though the works are similar in their fundamental technique, taken together they present a developing story in digital art – or the multiple frames of a new aesthetic.

BIPED, commissioned by Cal Performances in 1999, features choreography by Cunningham and visual decor by Kaiser and Eshkar. Two of Cunningham's dancers, Jeannie Steele and Robert Swinston, provided movements for motion capture, which Kaiser and Eshkar rendered in varying degrees of abstraction to create 28 minutes of material. The animated figures range from impressionistic drawings that hold their form to bodies made of sticks that disperse with each leap and coalesce with each landing. These images are projected onto a screen at the front of the stage and reflected off strips at the back, creating a three-dimensional environment in which the live dancers interact with their own "ghostcaught" forms.

In a recent interview, Eshkar told me that he tries to reinterpret a sequence of gestures in ways that "keep the integrity of the motion as it was captured." Kaiser has written about a process of creating "an expressive figure that you can see through like an x-ray; an animated frame that fully reveals the motions mapped onto it." In BIPED animated figures and their real-life sources literally overlap onstage, and the tension between a dancer's movement and its digital abstraction becomes the focus of the performance. "Our dance work is all about beauty," Eshkar said. "Beauty and creepiness."

The zombielike world of Pedestrian was first presented as a movie projected on a New York City sidewalk in 2002 – a scrolling, computer-generated "kite's-eye view" of urban scenes in grainy black and white. Apparently Pedestrian has been mistaken for live surveillance footage, though it's hard to imagine how its eerie, synthetic figures could be seen as real people. In contrast to the dotted shapes and gestural drawings of BIPED, the bodies in Pedestrian are fleshed-out forms interacting in a virtual world. As with all computer animation, the addition of detail only seems to increase the sense of artifice. Here we see crowds of dronelike figures interacting according to unseen algorithms and playing out mini-narratives in a taxonomic collection of everyday movements.

The motion library for the individual gestures in Pedestrian is taken from the captured "phrases" of only eight individuals, including trained and untrained performers, adults and children. Elements and combinations from this library animate the characters as they maneuver through the projected cityscape. These animated puppets seem enslaved by their actions, or possessed. When a man shadowboxes in front of a reflecting window, the movement (taken from Eshkar himself) engages in combat with its own image, as if struggling to avoid being captured at all.

While BIPED presents live dancers interacting with their ghostly abstractions, Pedestrian invites people to survey a self-contained world where mundane movements resolve into unsettling patterns and poignant vignettes. Arrival, which is part of Yerba Buena Center's "Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts" exhibition, creates an even more interactive and synthetic environment. The installation consists of a projection on the rear wall of a small room, showing unstable images of dissolving interior spaces, with figures and scenes moving forward and backward through time. A knob on a desk in the room allows viewers to loop the projection in either direction, giving them what curator René de Guzman calls "a God's-eye view" of the action.

The theme of surveillance emerges through the top-down perspective (repeated from Pedestrian) and the action of Arrival's characters as they play out various scenes of interrogation and pursuit. Here all the motions are captured from a single trained performer, Alexander Horwitz, who was coached by the artists to move like a character from a video game. Unlike the artificial bodies in Pedestrian that make everyday movements seem strange and synthetic, Arrival's animated figures provide the ideal vehicle for video game-inspired gestures. By tailoring the movements to the animated image, Kaiser and Eshkar reverse the process of motion capture; using similar hardware and software, they are able to create something entirely new.

The latest innovations in motion capture, like those of many developing technologies, tend to get overexposed. Filmmakers and computer artists struggle against the inadequacies of their techniques, often pushing CGI to the limit of its credibility and appeal. Kaiser and Eshkar manage to stay within these limits by defining the boundaries of their technology in terms of dance and the beauty of movement. Instead of marching lockstep with the latest trends in digital art, they have captured an idea in its leaps and bounds. With BIPED, Pedestrian, and Arrival, we get a chance to see this idea in stop motion.

'Arrival,' part of "Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts," is on display Jan. 17-April 4. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (first Thurs., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $3-$6. (415) 978-2787. 'BIPED,' with "Ground Level Overlay," is performed Feb. 6, 8 p.m., Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph, Berk. $26-$46 (half price for UC Berkeley students). (510) 642-9988. 'Pedestrian' and 'Liquid Time Series' are on display Jan. 22-April 18. Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Exploratorium, Seeing Gallery, 3601 Lyon, S.F. $8-$12 (free for three and under). (415) 561-0360.