A couple of things from the world of dance that isn’t performed. One is an essay from The Chronicle Review, Dancers as Living Archives. It’s slightly New York focussed – Martha “satan” Graham (not even deserving of an upper-case ‘s’-satan), Balanchine, Yvonne Rainer and Trio A. I was hoping for something a little more intellectual or scientific in respect to dancers’ formidable ability to corporeally recall movement, especially when the conscious mind doesn’t. To watch a dancer’s body remember the movement, and to see that recollection permeate their conscious mind, or to experience it, your own body moving as if following an unseen map is perhaps the single most profound cognitive aspect of dancing.

Other kinds of memory, like my laptop harddrive, which is certainly a part of me as are my own internal memories (haha). From the newly discovered and instantly rss-ed splines in space is an scribbling on top of dance video. Kinda like a Photoshop plugin for video, and probably something you could do through Final Cut Pro/Motion/Shake if you were prepared to go through the pain of learning these applications well. Zach Lieberman‘s Rotosketch makes it easy.

Rotosketch is quite simply an intuitive tool for sketching, doodling and notating on top of video,such that the marks that are made are linked in time with the video. This allows theuser to draw strokes along the the axis of time, as well as the normal x and y axes,and for those strokes to augment, analyze, interpret, or even obliterate a video sequence.

— thesystemis

rotosketch

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