This page (re)maps the curve of the young female figure, through immersive technologies. It (re)imagines the female body through a series of iterative digital experiments.
The (un)archive (Manning 2019) is read from left to right, (re)mapping the 3D rendering of the young dancer, from photogrammetry scans of sculptures from my young dancer aged 14 series to (be)coming a porous body in 360 encounters.
Each encounter was recorded at the event, using photogrpahy, moving image and 360 video to attempt to capture the encounter in its (be)coming. I am using the concept of a third eye as a witness to the participant being looked at during the encounter, and how this creates a sense of a performing body, aware of the gaze.
I am exploring the idea of how sensory encounters are described by the participant, some of them elicit a non-verbal reaction, or a series of exclamations as in the video below, archiving an encounter of the wireframe body in Aarhus 2018.
The screenshot above shows the final iteration of the VR artwork, where I took the original solid body, on the left, and combined it with the lace-like scan from a fibre-glass render, and the virtual foot which I flipped to create a cave-like structure below.
For some this created an (un)stable bodily response to the ground and shifted the participants' sense of proprioception ( from the Greek proprio to grasp one's somatic relation to the ground).
The video above and the stills on the right show two participants in the VR iteration of Imperceptible Dance 2, which included the virtual foot flipped to create a cave-like structure below the participant. This iteration was shown at DMU in June 2018 as part of the CTEO conference that I co-organised with several universities as part of an AHRC/M4C funded project.
It is interesting to note the different embodied responses by these two participants. Whilst the participant above notes that the grids which delineate the virtual environment make her feel safe, in that there is a boundary to the virtual space, the foot with it's "three metres or so" space underneath gives her a wobble. Ruth Gibson describes this as a "weird giggle" a playful sense of altering your proprioception, your bodily relationship to the ground.
Note, how the participant on the right, leans into the virtual foot underneath her body and seems to play with this sense of the ground being unstable.
These somatic responses are shown in the Interval, Imperceptible Dance.
Photogrammetry process and liDAR scans
The following images and videos map the data captured whilst I was an artist in residence at Invisible Flock, a studio based at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It archives the process of liDAR scanning a beech tree in the park, a process which uses high resolution laser scanning to create a 3D image of an environment.
Beech (Fagus Sylvatica)is traditionally associated with femininity, although it is actually monoecious, meaning both male and female flowers grow on the same tree in April and May, and they are pollinated by the wind.
In Celtic mythology, Fagus was the god of beech trees, hence the name. The tree was thought to have medicinal properties and its leaves were boiled to make a poultice which was used to relieve swellings. Forked beech twigs are also traditionally used for divining.
I chose an old Beech tree, which was possibly 40 metres high, due to it's knotty branches which looped back on themselves inviting the viewer to look upwards to the vast canopy, or a child to scramb up the branches!
I am exploring the notion of the unstable body (Manning, 2009, as a biogram, a shifting, polymorphous image that, at first, appears to show an ancient beech tree with twisted branches that slowly shifts to become a sculpture of a teenage form, a porous body intertwined with a transparent tree.
I am interrogating how to decode (from the Greek lit. translate) the curve of the young female body and it's relationship to nature. As children are curious and use trees as playgrounds to climb and explore, I am playing with this notion of the porous body as part of the tree; a liminal space where a young girl can go to escape and to find solace in nature.
Scan Process
The scan is repeated four times from different angles, to capture the surfaces and texture of the objects, the scanner must compute three checkerboards placed on the surrounding trees to stitch the point clouds together. Each scan lasts 12 minutes, and I have recorded the sound of the susurrating leaves, and the wind in the branches for the duration of the scan.
The final videos show the process of Artec scanning, which uses laser Photogrammetry, extracting 3D information from photographs or objects. The process involves taking overlapping photographs of an object, structure or space and converting them into 3D digital models. I am transforming 3D prints, made from bio materials, pine resin, corn starch and sucrose, into 3D digital models.
