The Ghost in the Machine: Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones

What is it that we value in a human image? One priority—evidenced by the work of home videographers—is to create a sense of nearness to loved ones and events by capturing as much information about people and their actions as possible. Other image-makers, particularly portraitists, hope to draw in the viewer, allowing her to flesh out an image with her own associations and imagination. To do this, portraitists pare away human attributes and environment to arrive at a representation of something essential, something telling about a person. I'm used to seeing spare images of human faces and bodies in sketches and black and white photographs. But what possibilities exist for portraits in which people are identified only by motion? Motion capture and animation technologies make it possible to create portraits of people that consist primarily of human motion, replacing identifiable bodies with more generic forms. Do these images work as portraits? What is the impact of leaving the body behind?

Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar of the multimedia studio Riverbed explore this possibility as they collaborate with choreographers. In Biped, a 1999 work by Merce Cunningham, Kaiser and Eshkar create a virtual environment for a community of dancers, an environment that includes elegant, ephemeral virtual dancers performing movement derived from Cunningham dancers. In the 1999 new media video Ghostcatching, Kaiser and Eshkar use Bill T. Jones's recorded actions to animate abstract dancers in an 8¹/₂ minute virtual dance, a portrait of Jones as performer. Kaiser and Eshkar capture something essential about dancers and dancing in these motional portraits. This is especially true in Biped, where the virtual dancers complete a process of abstraction already at work in Cunningham's choreography. But, Kaiser and Eshkar's portraits also produce a realization of absence, a sense of loss that helps me appreciate the fullness of human motion and the importance of physicality to our lives. This is especially clear in Ghostcatching, as Bill T. Jones's often fierce movement is performed by gutless animated line drawings. Aspects of dance that seem fundamental become "ghosts in the machine" in these works, lost in the motion capture and animation processes. ¹ These works also help me realize what it will mean to be human in the twenty-first century, as individuals and communities shape and are shaped by an environment that is increasingly a complicated network of the natural, the socio/cultural, and the technological.

At the opening of Biped, I wonder if the technical brilliance of digital projections could possibly match the technical brilliance of Cunningham's dancers. They begin the work performing solos, each dancer perfectly thin in an iridescent, asymmetrically-cut leotard, each perfectly in control, placed, turned out, extended, each perfectly urbane and purposeful. ² As the work proceeds, digital projections by Kaiser and Eshkar and Aaron Copp's lighting immerse the dancers in a shifting world of image and light. Vertical poles or descending bars of light appear. The floor changes from light to dark. Dots and lines float randomly or combine to wheel across the space. Most spectacular are the huge virtual dancers that briefly circle or flit across the stage. Some of the virtual dancers seem to be made from colorful, firmly drawn lines, while others are barely suggested by wispy strokes. Spare, elongated, and articulate of joint, they evoke the movement sensibilities of their progenitors. Gavin Bryars's poignant music, a mix of string instruments and electronic sound, provides an aural environment.

Within this world, the fourteen material dancers calmly proceed, as my sense of them shifts. Sometimes I see the dancers as abstractions, as lines moving in space. As virtual bars slide down a scrim in front of the dancers, I see their bodies in segments, the lines of arms and heads moving separately from legs. More often, I see the dancers as...