← dancework menu

Bodytext

2010. Interactive performance installation by Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley & Garth Paine.

Bodytext is a performance work that involves speech, movement and the body. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer's movements causing texts to interact and recombine with one another through their subsequent compositional arrangement. What is written is affected by the dance whilst the emerging recombinant descriptions determine what is danced.

Bodytext questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.

---

CREDITS

• Visual artist: Simon Biggs.
• Choreography & performance: Sue Hawksley.
• Audio composition: Garth Paine.

• R & D supported by artists' residencies at the Bundanon Trust, New South Wales, and the VIPRe Lab at the University of Western Sydney.

PERFORMANCES & PRESENTATIONS

• Premiere performance: SEAM 2010 symposium - Critical Path, Sydney, 2010.
• Performance: DanceLive! 10 - Woodend Barn, Banchory, 2010.
• Performance & presentation: Figures of the Visceral symposium - University of Edinburgh, 2010.
• Presentation: Bodies in Movement international conference - University of Edinburgh, 2011.
• Performance & presentation: Gaming the Game conference - UC Davis, 2012.
• Presentation: International Conference on Multimodal Communication: Language, Performance and Digital Media - Lisbon, 2013.
• Presentation: ISEA 2013, University of Sydney, 2013.
• An earlier iteration of this work, <bodytext> by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley was presented at the Digital Cultures Lab, Nottingham Trent University, 2005.

VIDEO

• ► work-in-progress performance, Critical Path, Sydney 2010

WRITING

• ✐ Biggs, S., Hawksley, S. & Paine, G. (2016) Bodytext: somatic data as agency in interactive dance. in: Fernandez, C. (ed) Multimodality and Performance, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, UK, pp.179-186.
• ✐ Hawksley, S. & Biggs, S. (2006) Memory Maps in interactive dance environments. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 2: 2, pp.123-137.
• ✐ Fedorova, K. (2020) Tactics of interfacing: encoding affect in art and technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
  - a book by Ksenia Fedorova in which she discusses ✐ Bodytext.
• Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2019) Digital Uncanny. Oxford University Press: New York, NY.
  - a book by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in which she discusses Bodytext.
• ✐ Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2016) The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects. Screen, Vol 57 (1), pp.1-20.
  - an article by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in which she discusses Bodytext.