The Motion Experience Lab is a series of ongoing short term projects which take place each semester focusing on applied design research of extended motion within the context of performative interaction and interdisciplinary media creation. Inviting renowned guests as sparring partners, designers and artists of her own teaching and research field, Prof. Nina Juric initiates a temporary exploratory living lab within a varying conceptional framework of cross-disciplines. Each time, the aim of this is to research hands-on in high-tech environments presented by guests on custom-made prototypes and designed artifacts. The higher aim is to extrude them like a studio or innovation lab into progressing conversation pieces and developments dealing with aspects of motion, spatial performance, interaction and experience design. These interdisciplinary frameworks arise from time integrated media environments like art, theater, dance, film, advertisement or show business. In that realm of Image and Motion, contextualized time and an advanced notion of space are the essential parameters to foster an embodied experience. It’s quick, it’s techy, it’s hand-on, it’s action – a vibrant, highly interactive learning format, which is methodically inspired by the performing arts.
Motion Experience Lab #01:
Germany’s Next Top Motion
Within this short-term project, students from KISD worked together in a motion capture studio created especially this week. The aim was to create and stage a live performance in 4 days using custom-made real time motion capture tools in space created by PIPS:LAB, NL. Conceptually, it was based on poems. Two teams worked on a performance snippet, each max. 5 minutes long, which were live shown at the Friday presentations.
Motion Tracking meets Storytelling meets
Cinematography
PIPS:lab has conquered the theater, pop and art world
in the 15 years of their existence. Using unstable media, the multi-talented group members have truly become masters of the unexpected. A PIPS:lab production never meets the expectations. But no PIPS:lab production is ever complete without the input of the audience.
The past years, PIPS:lab experimented with the Mo-Cap, a Motion Capture Studio that transfers movements in 3D into data. One of the tools that derived from these experiments is the Potator. The Potator is an installation that processes peels of images into a simultaneous combination of paint and canvas in live 3D on stage.
Lettering & Poem in Space
The multi-dimensions in which a performative media space like the one created has to be designed and brought to a live action, is offering a lot of unseen ideas and possibilities to storytelling and graphical live expression in the future.
Motion Experience Lab #02:
Visual Music – Loops in Space
For the Motion Experience Lab #02, Prof. Nina Juric invited a good old VJ-fellow: Michael Titze from Pfadfinderei. He is a motion designer, visual artist and a part of the Berlin collective Pfadfinderei. For five years, he is touring the world with famous artists. Apart from the projects in his studio in Berlin, the focus on live shows has changed in recent years.
During this workshop, we fundamentally dealt with the scope of VJing and its context, with the topic of Visual Music in general and especially with the video loop as a designed performance module. We discussed the structure of a live performance, style and transferred it to our own applications. Furthermore, each group created video loops and integrated them conceptually into their own stories and performances.
In addition, unconventional paths, research results, and motion experiments also played a role in this process. Once we had determined the basics, we looked at more specific questions such as video mapping, sound synchronicity, and midi mapping. In the end, we discussed and evaluated the results in a big live show.
The goal of the workshop was to gain the ability to understand the fundamentals of a live performance as a VJ, to create the necessary and bring the whole set into a performative form including extensive documentation.
