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Ghostcatching / Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, with Bill T. Jones
March 17 - April 22, 2001
www.riverbed.com
Ghostcatching 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.
Ghostcatching is a digital film of Bill T. Jones' motion-captured movement and includes large-scale prints showing the process of Jones' metamorphosis from performing body to hand-drawn figure.
Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar are New York-based digital artists whose collaboration has explored the integration of digital art, dance, drawing and computer animation. In particular, their work highlights the integration of motion capture with dance, using projections for art gallery installations.
In addition to their visionary work in motion capture, Kaiser and Eshkar are internationally acclaimed multimedia artists. Paul Kaiser's work spans several distinct fields--experimental films, texts for voice, interactive digital art and virtual dance. Shelley Eshkar is a multimedia artist and experimental animator. Eshkar's innovations in three-dimensional figure drawing and animation have aroused considerable attention in the fields of computer graphics, dance and architecture.
Bill T. Jones is the artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and one of the greatest living solo dancers. He has received many honors and awards, including a MacArthur "genius" award in 1994.