An Introduction to Performance Capture by Ed Atkins скачать в хорошем качестве

An Introduction to Performance Capture by Ed Atkins

For MIF15, artist Ed Atkins is drawing back the digital curtain with Performance Capture. Performance Capture will be an exhibition, a studio and a singular document of MIF15. Taking place at Manchester Art Gallery over the course of the Festival, the exhibition will provide a unique and reflexive insight into the production of a computer-generated moving image work. Performance Capture takes its name from a process that records, maps and renders the movements of a performer on to a computer-generated figure, an avatar who performs as the digital double for the performer — in this case, performers of every stripe from the MIF15 programme. The exhibition, curated by Ed Atkins, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, will be laid out as stages of a production process, leading from one to another across three rooms at the gallery. Performances by MIF artists are captured onto computer, digitally modelled, cut and soundtracked, and then screened in a perpetual cinema of the ever-accumulating rushes of the footage. Each part of the process will be open to visitors both as behind-the-scenes exposition and exhibition; an examination and ambivalent exemplar of contemporary image production. Over four Festivals, MIF has established a commitment to presenting work from artists at the leading edge of performance art – from Il Tempo del Postino (MIF07) to Marina Abramović Presents (MIF09) to 11 Rooms (MIF11) and Mayfield Depot (MIF13). Performance Capture takes this engagement forward into the digital realm. All mobile phones must be turned off or switched to flight mode when entering Performance Capture. This is to prevent interference with the technology in use. Disclaimer: A disclaimer isn’t something I would usually consider, regardless of the changes made to a project. The nature of these sorts of experiments is that they will change more or less dramatically before completion. Performance Capture is, however, unique insofar as it’s a work that only really exists after the fact. Over the course of the festival it is being made – whatever that ‘it’ turns out to be. Therefore lots of the information on this site was always going to be speculative. Optimistic, to be sure, tho certainly realistic, given the information we – the team behind it – were working on. Things have changed, however – and in ways that are, in fact, entirely concomitant with the concepts and formal logics at work within the project. Most conspicuously, certain of the technologies that we began working with have been jettisoned. Mainly because they were not capable of reproducing the kind of nuances performances I had conceived the work as having to have. It’s ironic, really, as the things we have shed, kit-wise, are some of the more exclusive and industrial pieces of hardware: the stuff that promised the most amazing performance; the stuff that is, usually, the sole prevail of Hollywood and multi-million dollar budgets. For example, the full-body capturing, in the end, felt incapable of creating a sufficiently recognisable, empathetic representation. Similarly the original face-capturing hardware. Both of these technologies had formed the bedrock of the project and what we thought was achievable. In the end, however, we have gone with hardware that manages to convey more accurately, and more movingly, essential aspects of the participant’s performances. Namely the face and hands, those loci of expression. Part of the project is a critical perspective on technologies of remediation: those things that promise to represent, whether that representation is an image or a politics. That certain technologies were not up to the task affirms an insistence implicit in Performance Capture: that there is an irrecuperable aspect to mortal, incorporated life – things about us that cannot be reproduced, used, essentialised. The failure of the tech is the success of our discretion, our antagonism.