Nipun Kumar

Riddle of the Sphinx from Nipun Kumar on Vimeo.

I have seen many dance performances and figure skating competitions on TV where the commentary and jury would describe movements of the dancers using terminology like clean lines, spinning into a perfect cylinder, smooth and proportional curves, good balance, beautiful arch etc. which are commonly used attributes in the process of making architecture and interior spaces.

This project aims at exploring, interpreting and experimenting with the relationship between body, body movements and Cartesian space. This installation requires three back-lit projection surfaces forming the 3 Cartesian planes namely the floor/XY plane, the front/XZ plane and the side/YZ plane assembled in a configuration of three adjacent faces of a cube. This installation was first designed for a dancer/performer. Three infrared cameras each track infrared LED’s mounted on the performer’s wrist and ankles. Wrist and ankles now behave like a paint brush and space becomes the canvas which is being mediated through the three screens.

Each movement, gesture is not only broken down in its orthographic tracings on the Cartesian plane but also in time. Sometimes the tracings would leave a continuous trail of the movements exposing the passage of the body and create a memory, a kind of a footprint of motion tracks in space. Eventually I would like the tracings to toggle between dashes, lines, dots, 2d-shapes and 3d-shapes giving us multiple experiences and establishing a relationship that we might share with these geometric graphical representation and space. The representation of simple twirl could be realized as a ribbon revolving around the performer or it could be a series of dashes stepping in and out. Waving hands could be an arc of a circle or it could be the shape of a fan blade chopping the air.

This project intends to investigate how our bodily actions relate to the space in which we live. The architecture that surrounds us is legitimized as an extension of space of our body in which we can perform various tasks and functions required for today’s urban survival. With present construction and building technologies architectural spaces are becoming more fluid and try to mimic the nature and movements/flow anticipated for a designated function of a space. The advent of these non-linear methodologies in the fabrication of architectural spaces is being termed as “digital architecture”. Similarly a “digital space” is defined differently by graphic designers, electronic/interaction designer, product designer, web-developers, cybernetic theorists and also architects.

Now that the discourse of digital space and digital architecture is so convoluted this project will try and define what possible digital relationships can be established with architecture, body and movements. These literal translations of movements onto architecture itself could unfold new avenues of investigations between body as a constant performer in space. This might be the germination of a “digital place” as space which is experienced by dissecting motion and movements in a dynamic digital behavior creating a transient space in tandem with the body embodied in that space.

The human body itself transforms from its birth to death, from crawling to hunching. It is conditioned by the phases of physical development and the nature of motion varies for each juncture of life. Hence the nature of movement is always in metamorphoses and the spatial and architectural context witnesses these changes in movement patters generated by us.

Body + Space + Drawing from Nipun Kumar on Vimeo.