“Intangible Body” (2016) is an experiment in motion capture of dance choreography and fabric. The project resulted in a short film that was created via motion capture composited with video footage of a dance performance by a veiled dancer. This was one of the ModLab’s first projects exploring embodied gesture and movement for virtual environments.

This project connects research on movement for virtual environments with practices of gesture, media, and gender in the Muslim world. Working with a dancer who performs under an abbreviated name in order to avoid state surveillance, the project draws parallels between sousveillance and the anonymity produced via the motion-capture process and between veiling as a gendered and policed activity and “veiling” as a technocultural practice of character animation.

Project Director: Emelie Mahdavian

Project Collaborators: Michael Neff, Kriss Ravetto

Music by Gretchen Jude

Dance by Aisan Hoss

See the full film here:

Intangible Body from Emelie Mahdavian on Vimeo.

Emelie Mahdavian describes Intangible Body:

“This experimental film explores censorship of Iranian women’s dance performance and what constitutes a woman’s ’body’ in the digital age. Given that women ’dancing’ in public is illegal in Iran today — and even animated movies are censored — we set out to play with the edge of what constitutes a body, a dance, or an Iranian woman…

Created via motion capture composited with video, the film has three layers, each representing one aspect of the dancer’s body, but without any video of her figure appearing in the final film: the motion capture figure is controlled by an algorithm tied to the speed of the dancer’s movement; the music is entirely sampled from her voice; and the fabric with which she danced was isolated in the video via chroma keying to create a residue of her interaction with a prop that invokes the presence of the absent dancer.”