Scanned
"Scanned" (2000) is a work by Christian Ziegler.
Scanned
A dancer performs movement phrases of 1 to 15 seconds, which are taped by a video camera. A digital video scanner collects movement over time and renders a new visual composition of danced phrases as a final picture. The choreography can be seen by the imagination of the viewer.
Statement by Christian Ziegler
Following my involvement in 1993 with the production of Bill Forsythe's digital dance school CD-ROM, "Improvisation Technologies," I have been interested mainly in the topic of reorganizing space and time.
I tried to develop a tool to support the performer's memory of movement and dance.
In the nineties, photographers experimented with combining a desktop scanner and a pinhole camera. Given the slow movement of the scanner, every moving object was distorted in relation to the speed at which it was moving. Some figures looked Giacometti-like; others, like pancakes. I found this distortion of body proportions interesting, which is rather a long exposure display process of particles of a moving body. With displaying movement over time I wanted to be able to start a visual dialog with the dancer on stage.
I reconstructed the experimental situation using a scanner and pinhole camera, but the results were insufficient. I had to simulate a process in which both the scanner and the scanned object were in motion. I considered digital video as a 3D videocube of stacked videopictures. This object can be sliced in several dimensions of space and time. Now its even possible to control direction and speed of the scan as well as resolution and speed of movement of the scanned material.
