Birgita Siim

The introspective project explores the emotions that arise during the design process, reflecting and interpreting them through the movement of the body. The publication presents visual data from emotions mapped through choreography and conveys the moving body two-dimensionally. The focus is on nine emotions that accompany the design process (chaotic, tense, confused, fast, tired, cheerful, drunk, shaking, satisfied), which can be transferred to the physical movement. The aim of the work was to create a system for capturing these bodily states graphically in order to translate an expressively moving body into a static form and suggest a new way of recording dance. As movement is three-dimensional and includes emotions and performativity as well, it is impossible to translate all these elements losslessly –  there are many ways of converting them and mixing the results.

Movement could also be mapped through its surroundings, that is, not by where the body is but where it is not. When using a virtual background, moving in front of a web camera generates occasional glitches – the surroundings of the body appear in the picture as irregular spots. All the scenes with these spots have been captured as screenshots and converted to graphic visuals. In addition to the elements created from virtual glitches, the trajectories of different parts of the body (head, right hand, left hand, stomach, right foot, left foot) have been mapped to describe the amplitude of the movement of different body parts. The whole translation process went through two stages: from dance to graphics and from virtual to print media. Thus, the project mixes the roles between dancer and designer, where designing takes place in motion and the graphic compositions are choreographed.

Next video gives a grasp of the converting process. Nine emotions were translated to a physical movement, which appear in virtual glitches.