Gestural Publics [work in progress]
Gestural Publics is a multimedia dance performance and online motion capture archive that interrogates the social, political, and choreographic assumptions embedded in “stock” motions (generic, pre-recorded motion capture clips housed in online repositories that users can download for use in 3D animation and game development).
Stock motions are complicated digital assets; on one hand, they are flexible, free, and simple to use; on the other, they mostly enact cliched portrayals of violence, sexist tropes, and standardizing protocols for moving digital bodies. This project seeks to create a more nuanced and expressive method for creating and proliferating public gestures; one that takes stock motions seriously as choreographies in and of themselves, and uses embodied methods for their technological transformation.
Through live performance and archival practices, Gestural Publics aims to “impress upon the model,” be it social, animation, stock, or AI. It interrogates the complexities that emerge when an individual gesture becomes a shared, public artifact–especially the politics around standardization and normativity that such transformations encode. The algorithmic predictions that enable motion capture and AI motion generation often overlook or misrepresent bodies and gestures that challenge these standardizations. By using these motions as the foundational material for this exploration, the piece investigates and subverts them through active embodiment.
“The world, and thus worldview, presented by stock motions is one of sameness: standardized bodies tirelessly replicating standardized motions through digital worlds formed and decorated by standardized objects and materials. Such standardizing practices claim to be representative of the totality of the ‘real’ world, but in actuality represent no one; instead, they represent a fantasy (ideology) that people move with frictionless ease and regularity. This has political implications: that a “normal” body is compliant, controllable, and predictable. Stock motions present choreographic simulations of live bodies, and in circulating as choreographic material, they reproduce the normative patterns they encode. Gestural Publics seeks to make these patterns tangible and embodied, and to intervene in their formal and technical fantasies through choreographic practice.”
Model Behavior, system:go
Process diary for Gestural Publics
Project Collaborators
Jesse Perlstein (music)
Bree Breeden, MK Ford, + Peter Pattengill (performers)
Wantong Yao (Technical Research Consulting)
Presentations
Forthcoming March 2026: WIP showing at All Too Human, Ammerman Center Symposium on Art and Technology
Funding + Support
Creative Capital
UCLA Department of World Arts + Cultures/Dance
stay informed
Learn about my process & thinking at my substack, system:go, and find out when I have performances of this work and more.