created 2025-04-15, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Dance World Solo Dance Dance Notation, Orchésographie
Motivating concepts
In a thought section of Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater - Critical Dance Studies, I was considering this dataset. Thinking of An Attempt At Exhausting a Place In Paris by Georges Perec and how I was curious about when he wrote his observations.
Say I have a device which records the position of my body at every point in the day, or if I spent the day documenting my position.
Right now, it’d be something like this:
I’d make the document exclude all of my surroundings (such as the fact that I am at a desk, comfortably typing, sitting improperly in a chair).
I’d be curious really about which key poses are the shape that I’ve been most of my life. It’s like a pretzel, having a predominant shape. Or maybe I’d be curious about my average shape, every position I’ve been in blended together and semi-transparent. Rare but important actions appearing ghostly.
But thinking to this day, my obsessive documentation of my position during the day, would be punctuated with logging the fact that I am recording. So, it’d be man who is writing in a notebook.
If I weren’t using 3D models, or even if I were assigning categories to my actions (characteristic groupings like walk-1, sleep-right-side-2) each log would have with it the shape of me within it, documenting.
Like,
Walk-1
Walk-2
Writing-1
Sit
Writing-1
If I’m going to be exactly accurate my writing to document myself must be added.
If I were extremely accurate, I suppose the second I wrote, I’d be in a halted state of writing. I’d need to document the fact that I was writing. My life would be
Walk-1
Writing-1
Writing-1
Writing-1
Writing-1
Writing-1
...
Freespace
I think I grew up with these spacecraft shooters, like Freespace, that had enemy tracking in the HUD. That’s the kind of disconnected object rotating in 3D space I am thinking of, in the bottom left corner.
That’d just be a cool thing to have and look at.