Zach Duer

Body, Full of Time is a solo choreographic work performed and created by movement and media artist Scotty Hardwig in collaboration with visual artist Zach Duer, sound artist Caleb Flood, animator Nate King, and designer Estefania Perez-Vera. Using motion capture, projection, and interactive avatar designs, the work presents a chimeric vision of the human body fragmented in the cyber age, examining the relationship between physical and digital versions of self. The dance emerges in the space between the human and the virtual, with the body both as active sensor and passive recipient to technological currents. In choreography, stage design, and sound composition, the work draws upon old and new ways of making, melding ancient ways of creating and dancing with more contemporary currents in digital culture.

This performance integrates inertial motion capture technology with custom software to freeze, record, and playback portions of a controlled avatar linked to the movement performer. In this way, the choreography is re-coded in digital space so that two simultaneous performances are happening: the movements of the live body alongside the “digital choreography” of the avatar and animations. This is a hybrid performance work that draws together the visual languages of dance, choreography, stage design, sound, visual art, 3D and 2D animation techniques, and contemporary digital aesthetics. It is in this blending of art forms that we are researching embodied fragmentation and multiplicity in three-dimensional virtual space. One of the goals is to investigate this hybridity of form between traditional choreographic arts and the potentialities provided by digital technology. In form and in content, the work investigates the relationship between physical and cyber forms of embodiment.

The work also follows a somewhat classical structure with three movements. In the first movement, we see the human body in a raw form (it's a very physical, highly choreographic section with minimal projections), in the second movement, we see a duet between the performer and an avatar responding and coded to respond to movements in various ways. In the third movement, we see a pacified, passive body being actively "scanned" by projection mapping software. The three movements take us on a surreal journey from the body as active, into a hybrid technological space, and finally into a passive body subsumed by technological forces.