04302011

04302011 is a 5 minute, 30 second video portrait of 38 New Yorkers, made with a 3d laser scanner. I used Maya to texture, render and animate the final result: an identity parade of the digital remnants of their faces, some mere scraps, rotating in and out of the light.

The glitchy, fragmented look of these scans results from my misuse of the high-end 3d laser scanner, which was never designed to capture the body. When faced with breath and movement it breaks down, generating conflicting and overlapping spatial coordinates.

Subjects must close their eyes to protect themselves from the laser beam, and this generates other referents too: their serene expressions evoke memorial portraiture, and together the display could be seen as a kind of gallery of the dead.

Body/Traces

Body/Traces: 30 second trailer from Sophie Kahn on Vimeo.

Body/Traces (USA/Spain) was an EMPAC Dance Movies commission for 2008-9, supported by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts – Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA.

Body/Traces is a digital stop-motion 3d animation composed of thousands of 3d laser scans, made with a DIY laser scanner made from LEGO.

It is designed to be shown projected in a darkened room for a small number of visitors, with the dancer at life-size and the video on a continuous loop.

Body/Traces premiered as part of the Fall 2009 Season of EMPAC’s Dance Movies Commission, supported by the Jaffe Fund for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. For more information, see the schedule of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, located in Troy, New York.

An article featuring the four works of the 2009 Dance Movies Commission appeared in the online edition of the Times Union.

Body/Traces then screened in Ghent, Belgium, at the DANSCAMDANSE Dancefilm Festival. More information may be found at the website for the International Festival of Ghent for Dancefilms/New Media.

In February, 2010, Body/Traces traveled to Tokyo’s National Arts Center. Body/Traces was one of the “Jury Recommended Works” of the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival.

In April 2010, Body/Traces was featured in the Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne.

Body/Traces featured in two festivals in June 2010: the International Videofestival of Bochum, Germany, and the Dance Camera West Dance Media Film Festival in Los Angeles, California. For the latter, it was installed in a bank vault in downtown Los Angeles during the Downtown Art Walk.

In February 2011 it was shown at Dance New Amsterdam in New York, as part of the Frameworks Dance Film series.

Co-directors: Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra
Choreographer: Lisa Parra
New media artist: Sophie Kahn
Dancers: Lisa Parra and Tina Vasquez
Sound: Sawako Kato
Editor: Lisa Parra
Editing assistance: Silvia Zaya Serra
Engineering assistance: David Barrett-Kahn

Here is a video from our EMPAC residency, courtesy of EMPAC’s Mick Bello. (No sound.)

The making of Body/Traces from Sophie Kahn on Vimeo.

This is a video from our EMPAC residency in 2009.

The making of Body/Traces from Sophie Kahn on Vimeo.

You can see:

-me calibrating our DIY lego scanner
-our very patient and long-suffering dancer Tina being scanned (with Lisa draped in black to hide from the laser)
-the laser line changing as she is scanned (the software uses this information to create the 3d model)
-the Lego scanner in operation
-the 3d model coming up on my screen
-the 3d model being rotated
-Lisa editing the footage