Movement Lab Symposium

Rehearsing a Breath is a 20-minute hybrid film that begins as fiction before dissolving into essay film and performance. Following a teenage girl who leaves her foster home after an unspoken violation by her foster father, the film explores how a child is forced into adulthood before her time.

As narrative reaches its limits, fiction gives way to memory, movement, and breath, where the body becomes the site through which experience continues to speak. Rehearsing a Breath asks what remains when certain experiences cannot be fully told, but persist in gestures, bodies, and the air we share.

Songa Mocap Library is an ongoing research project that seeks to address the scarcity of culturally-specific and openly accessible motion capture (mocap) assets. Most standard motion capture/3D asset libraries are constructed from Western-centric motion capture data. Thus, how can we create collections that center cultural nuance?

The installation presents a preview of the motion capture collection as digital motion sculptures presenting everyday gestures, whispering, gossiping, telling stories, embellishing, expressing exasperation, mourning. These fleeting acts are thus transformed into archived reenactments that invite the audience to reflect on embodied oral storytelling practices and further reframe motion capture as cultural preservation.

The installation We move in circles to feel the center bridges bodies without physical contact, playing with inter-somatic perception and haptic virtuality. Visitors experience a quiet, intimate exchange as they jointly control hand-tracked animations and sudden body-part swaps on individual screens. Simultaneously, a large-scale projection translates these hand movements into a real-time collage seen from across the gallery.

Forrest For The Trees begins in Chinquapin Bayou, Texas, where fisherman-painter Forrest Bess (1911–1977) lived, painted from visions, and eventually performed a surgery on his own body in search of meaning. The film moves with him: from the cellular to the cosmic, traversing the body as a site where belief, image, and knowledge converge.

Heard in the film: This body used to know the limits of its wholeness. Now it’s a system, a celestial-solar-lunar-fleshy system adding weather to the forecast, adding shadows to the night, adding hours to the days.

Red Study (for What Year Is It?) is part of an ongoing video installation that explores how we talk about time on the internet through online videos in which speakers invoke the “current year” to express expectations of progress. This excerpt investigates how projected light and architectural red light interact to produce the image, using color to explore how we perceive the present. 

Drawing on John Berger’s conception of home as an intersection of two kinds of time: one, made up of our horizontal movement upon the planet, and the other, our connection to the ancestral time of the graveyard—Vertical Time. Horizontal Traffic uses animation and performance to upend and transmit shifting perceptions of home through creating architectural relationships between memory, time, and the body.

Untitled (Realtime System) is a single-channel, audiovisual installation that generates an infinitely shifting digital cinematic assemblage in real time. Authored in the Max/MSP/Jitter programming language, the underlying code drives cuts, frame rates, textual inclusions, as well as pixel and sonic processing in real time.

The result is a shifting composition of image and sound that operates along the full chain of A/V experience as it continually undermines its own coherence, refusing narrative certainty, visual fixity, or temporal closure. The discernible imagery from the reworked source material acknowledges manifestations of the prairie in American media as a site of colonial, nationalist, and capitalist reverie while simultaneously calling into question the mediation that substantiates these depictions.

What emerges through sustained viewing is not a narrative but a condition, one in which contemporary media reveals itself as a live, volatile sensorial system whose meanings are always provisional, contingent, and materially produced.