Tripping the Lights Fantastic

Into a brave new parallel world. That’s where genre-crossing artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar boldly take us with “Ghostcatching,” a mesmerizing virtual dance installation on view today through April 22 at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology.

Created in collaboration with famed dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones, “Ghostcatching” is aptly if eerily titled. Kaiser and Eshkar have in a sense stolen Jones’ body and soul for a seven-minute film that is the show’s principal work.

Using the digital technology called motion capture and 24 digital cameras, they have turned Jones’ fluid, real-life dance moves into a hypnotic swirl of computer-drawn clones, morphing and multiplying as they mimic Jones’ motion.

“It’s very much like a ghost, like you’re trying to catch a spirit,” Kaiser said recently from New York.

“Actually the theme of ‘Ghostcatching’ is identities,” he said. “It’s about many different identities. What happens when you’ve captured Bill’s motion digitally? Can you multiply other beings out of his?”

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“Ghostcatching” premiered at Cooper Union in New York in 1999. It is a fitting installation for UCI and its Claire Trevor School of the Arts because the school houses the first motion capture studio dedicated to dance at a U.S. university.

Kaiser, Eshkar and collaborator Michael Girard will be in residence April 9 to 20 at UCI, teaching classes in dance and digital technology. Girard and Susan Amkraut created the Character Studio software used to make “Ghostcatching.” They will work with UCI dance professor Lisa Naugle on a motion capture project called “Pedestrian” that digitally reconstructs the motions and gestures of foot traffic.

Projected on a large screen at the Beall Center, the Jones clones in “Ghostcatching” are angular, sinewy, slightly larger than life-size. They bring to mind the hyperkinetic look of Alberto Giacometti’s drawings.

The installation also includes digital photographs documenting Jones’ mutation from palpable flesh to computerized specters.

To start the transformation, Kaiser and Eshkar placed small reflective sensors resembling Ping-Pong balls on the main joints of Jones’ body. Then Jones performed a series of movements in a motion capture studio, surrounded by a circle of infrared cameras that recorded only the position of the balls, in essence rendering him invisible.

The cameras were synchronized to a computer that reduced the visual information to digital data. From that data Eshkar designed the virtual lines and angles of Jones’ body that appear in the film.

“With ‘Ghostcatching,’ we’re capturing only movement, not the actual physical appearance of Bill T. Jones,” Kaiser said. “There’s a beauty in motion that we’re sometimes distracted from seeing in dance because of the beauty, the actual physical appearance, of the dancer.”

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The film begins with a single digital figure confined to an upright box, making simple, almost mechanical motions. From that figure others emerge and are reabsorbed, over and over.

Eventually these apparitions and their trajectories tangle and freeze in a kind of linear frenzy until a figure breaks free. It performs in front of a mirror--the traditional method of viewing and capturing motion in a real-life dance studio. Other clones move behind the mirror.

Such cloned choreography may seem simpler or more magical than dealing with a whole troupe of human dancers. But if it seems a portent of our aesthetic future, it is nonetheless “in some ways an act of impoverishment,” Kaiser said.

“With motion capture you lose physical presence, facial expression, musculature. And, of course, there’s nothing like seeing an incredible dancer like Bill T. Jones on the stage.”

How did Jones feel about losing his individuality to a computer? “In the first session he was very suspicious and defiant, like, ‘This could never capture me,’ ” Kaiser said.

But he changed his mind pretty quickly.

“It’s just uncanny when you see these designs moving on the screen,” Kaiser said. “Even in these abstracted bodies you can feel intention and desire.”

SHOW TIMES

“Ghostcatching,” Beall Center for Art and Technology, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UC Irvine. Opens today, noon-5 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday, noon-8 p.m.; Thursday, noon-5 p.m.; Friday-Sunday. Free. (949) 824-6206. Also “Melding Motion Capture Dance,” a lecture and demonstration by Kaiser and Eshkar, Winifred Smith Hall, UCI. Free. April 18, noon.