Ball of Being - Koert van Mensvoort People are capable of recognizing familiar faces from great distance, even when facial features aren’t visible we manage to identify a person. This identification partly occurs on basis of clothing and body features, but mainly it uses the way someone moves. In the latter part of the seventies, James E. Cutting conducted a series of experiments concerning the movement patterns of humans, with walking patterns in particular. He had to make sure participants could only see the movement of the person walking, and that they wouldn’t get any other clues about the gender of the walking person. Cutting made this possible by highlighting the joints that were essential to the movement of walking, and recording these highlighted joints on video. The result of this was a crude form of motion capture, participants were shown a video of a series of dots that represented the movement of another person. The data extracted from these experiments showed that the way people move holds significant information that helps recognition of the other persons gender. This experiment inspired Koert van Mensvoort for the creation of Ball of Being. In this project a human dancer is motion captured. Additionally he visualised the information with a Flash-based 3D engine, so that only the little dots that were attached to the dancer are visible. The web is an ideal medium for this, since merely the position of these dots has to be transferred. No big, sluggish videofiles have to be downloaded. Because only coordinates are transferred there is a possibility to manipulate the coordinates in realtime. By manipulation a sense of recognition and alienation can be experienced. This movie can be viewed without any involvement, but the viewer can get involved by touching the dancer with the mousepointer. Online our body, most of the time, is reduced to a simple mousepointer, in Ball of Being the dancer is reduced to the essence of recognition, a number of moving spheres. Koert van Mensvoort is an artist, scientist, teacher, host and designer. Koert doesn’t commit himself to a certain medium or style, but uses all media to visualize his ideas; interactive cinema, alternative interfaces, texts, installations and public appearances. Most of his work involves the relation between people and media as well as reality and fiction. He likes to describe his work and himself as: “Investigating the strange and the beautiful. I use all media, I'm the homo universalis type of person”. Follow the hyperlink to visit the project at Ball of Being |
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