Person In Time Project Ideas

I’m pretty excited about this project and sort of in awe of the possibilities; I haven’t really gathered my thoughts enough to have fully fleshed-out ideas, but some areas of interest that have stuck with me:

Elder Wisdom/Intergenerational Communication

  • Marcell Esterhazy’s timelapse of his grandfather eating a bowl of soup has seriously stuck with me since we watched it in January. It’s so captivating to me.
  • My family is originally from Pittsburgh (despite this year being my first time living here) – my family roots are all over the city, my parents met here, grandparents and great grandparents lived a few blocks from where I live now, etc. Not very many people are left…(though they are all buried in the same Jewish cemetery in Millvale). But this is a special place for me to be living right now. This project might be an opportunity to capture that somehow…though I’m not sure what that would look like.
  • I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational communication lately, passing down knowledge, etc. How might I capture elder wisdom in a novel way? This was somewhat inspired by a previous classmate who captured elder wisdom through a series of interviews. With the tools in this class, I could definitely go beyond audio.
  • To build upon Marey’s motion capture suit of the “average male gait,” (see photo below) I am interested in capturing the gait of other bodies – seniors, children, etc. through chronophotography or stroboscopy.
Marey’s chronophotography in the original motion capture suit

 

The Digital Grotesque

I’m also very interested in this concept of the digital grotesque, and am really drawn to artists using motion capture to distort the human form. Cool 3D World projects, copy/pasting parts of the human body (like adding an arm to a knee), the walk cycle projects, and animations of bodies sort of “melting” or being pulled through holes in the floor…all of these are super intriguing to me.

I don’t have a specific idea yet for this one, but I would love to learn how to work with motion capture and particles and distortions in general. (I remember Nica saying something about knowing how to do this…we should talk :))