2 results
Motion in Place: a Case Study of Archaeological Reconstruction Using Motion Capture
- Edited by Mingquan Zhou
- Iza Romanowska, Zhongke Wu, Pengfei Xu, Philip Verhagen
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- Book:
- Revive the Past
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 17 August 2012, pp 98-106
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Summary
Abstract:
Human movement constitutes a fundamental part of the archaeological process, and of any interpretation of a site's usage; yet there has to date been little or no consideration of how movement observed (in contemporary situations) and inferred (in archaeological reconstruction) can be documented. This paper reports on the Motion in Place Platform project, which seeks to use motion capture hardware and data to test human responses to Virtual Reality (VR) environments and their real-world equivalents using round houses of the Southern British Iron Age which have been both modelled in 3D and reconstructed in the present day as a case study. This allows us to frame questions about the assumptions which are implicitly hardwired into VR presentations of archaeology and cultural heritage in new ways. In the future, this will lead to new insights into how VR models can be constructed, used and transmitted.
Key Words: Motion Capture Data, Reconstruction, Virtual Reality, Experimental Archaeology
Introduction
Experimental archaeology is often cited as an important asset in the study of human interaction with material culture, especially in remote periods of history where there are few other sources of data on the human interventions which constitute the archaeological record. This has found many expressions in the discourse of archaeological theory, including the so-called chaîne opératoire, or ‘operational sequence’ theory (see e.g. Bar-Yosef and Van Peer 2009). However, due to an understandable desire to adhere to empirical evidence, means of inferring the human movement behind those interventions are rarely considered in the computational reconstruction of archaeological environments. The most obvious reason for this is that buildings, features and artefacts can be understood and reconstructed (whether digitally or not) from empirical archaeological remains, whereas there is little or no direct evidence for how people might have looked and moved through the spaces they created. Approaches which seek to go beyond this are methodologically fraught, resulting in a limitation of the scope of 3D reconstruction, both as a tool for archaeological research and as means of presenting cultural heritage to the public. The impact on the user's experience of those reconstructions is also limited. In a review of 3D visualization in archaeology, Gillings states: ‘[I]t is worth noting that one of the most striking things about archaeological Virtualmodels is the lack of people in them.
Anatomies of Live Art
- Edited by Maaike Bleeker
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- Book:
- Anatomy Live
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 March 2008, pp 187-204
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Summary
Our constant invention of machines and interactive processes to multiply and extend bodily relations to the world is mirrored in the transformations of theatre, its physical organization being tightly intertwined with its dramatic contents. In the past, the shaping and experiencing of theatre have been hugely modified by advances related to mechanics and electricity. Information and communications and biotechnologies are in turn prompting new means to expose live art, and new conceptions of the performing body. Yet all these technological forces continue to animate a theatrical corpus, which is as ancient as it is metamorphic. This text cuts across history to reveal some of the ways in which anatomies of contemporary live art seem to perpetuate the primitive vitality of theatre.
Theatre Architectures as Social Anatomies
The structural characteristics of theatre architecture s reflect the anatomy of the body politic that they convene and contain. The principles of social organisation are written into theatrical venues ranging from early open air settings for processions and site-specific action, through to dedicated, sealed architectures which have marked theatre history since the Renaissance. Like the anatomical theatre, these architectures have been shaped by multiple, mutually determinant forces and goals. Vectors of perception (sightlines, acoustics) and social mores dictating public rank and station are instrumental in ‘exogenous’ concrete design questions like choices of scale and materials, to be compared with simultaneously active ‘endogenous’ questions proper to the poetics of theatre, attempts to engage, enthral or alienate an audience being as bound up in dramaturgical processes as in physical construction.
The endo/exogenous distinction is however largely formal, in that social and physical architectures are inextricably and vitally interwoven in the staging of live art; indissociable links between dramaturgical and architectural languages are evident throughout theatre history. Staged space literally offered readings to French court ballet spectators: social status and correlative physical positioning of royal gallery viewers allowed them to decipher symbols in choreographic floor patterns. Three concentric circles represented Perfect Truth, two equilateral triangles within a circle represented Supreme Power, etc., in addition to imposed values such as the sovereign's monogram (McGowan, 1963).