Abstract
In this article, we will describe the uneven conditions in which dance practices are being extracted and circulated by looking at how online gaming platforms have digitised and commodified human movement. The study of these controversial cases contextualised within the legal aspects of dance copyright are the basis to offer speculative courses for both dance practitioners. The first section explores the issues of digitisation and ownership of bodily movement within virtual spaces by looking at notions of disembodiment and dance as a commodifiable object. The second section illustrates the complexities of copyrighting choreography through a critique on how intellectual property regimes disregard collective and social practices. Finally, we will present alternatives for dance practitioners going forward by looking at how to protect dance as a digital object; the current initiatives to engage dancers with technological affordances; and the decentralising potential of blockchain networks to build new collaborative landscapes for the circulation of creativity.
Highlights
Nina Davies is a London-based, Canadian interdisciplinary artist
The amusing scene described above is not the first digital milieu of strange sociability and dance produced by Fortnite, the most successful video game in history (Fitzgerald, 2018), which was already popularised for allowing avatars to perform recognisable sequences of human movement, called Emotes
What is being described here is a more pervasive iteration executed through state-of-the-art motion capture technology which foregrounds and enlarges the difficulties already existing between dance and ownership
Summary
Nina Davies is a London-based, Canadian interdisciplinary artist. Her work considers choreography beyond its performative state by observing how it intersects with language and where it begins to take on commodified or material forms. It is the rise and dissemination of motion capture technologies that allow for human movement to be extracted for the use of moving images and video games.
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