Ghost Catching

Ghost Catching is a virtual dance installation created by multimedia artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar in collaboration with renowned dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, Ghostcatching premiered at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in January 1999.

Among many laudatory reviews, Austin Bunn of the Village Voice heralded Ghostcatching as a “groundbreaking work... a marriage of science and art that poetically and magically fused drawing, dance, and computer composition." This unique blend of performance, filmmaking, drawing, and computer composition 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 preserving the performer’s mass or musculature. Thus, movement is extracted from the performer’s body.