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Decolonizing Animation
  • ISSN: 2042-7875
  • E-ISSN: 2042-7883

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how an analysis of creating human avatars has been a catalyst for developing a critically engaged use of motion capture data. I demonstrate how my moving image practice responds to motion capture technology processes. This development of a methodological framework has been used to rethink how I construct virtual animated figures. Each stage of making considers data as a piece of interpretive information to create animation. I have examined three phases of production. They are integral to the fabrication, construction and mediation of digital humans found in motion capture libraries. These interconnected processes dominate how motion is captured and used creatively. By utilizing the means of production, my research investigates how cultural hegemonic practices facilitate notions of universalism. I discuss how a model of standardized visual identities is biased towards staging white male normativity as a prototypical human. This observation informs my challenge to find an expansive form of producing digital figures in motion. I have considered how the logic of categories utilized by motion capture libraries promotes a seemingly natural arrangement of racialized differences. Whilst this form of normative coding creates homogeneous bodies, I examine how my own racialized Black identity informs my methods for disrupting the reproduction of this system. My response to the hierarchical structure of colonial systems of order is investigated using theories of the human. These concepts are rooted in Black studies and are deployed as decolonial perspectives. My use of computational data offers an expansive and generative understanding of human movement abstracted from the body. This decolonial response moves away from considering representation in terms of external visual markers of my African Caribbean heritage. Instead, my technical processes navigate how dominant modes of creating virtual characters can rethink ideas of the human within a historical, political and sociocultural context.

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/content/journals/10.1386/ap3_00048_1
2024-09-04
2025-11-14
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/content/journals/10.1386/ap3_00048_1
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Using data as materiality
Animation Practice, Process & Production 12, 161 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/ap3_00048_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ap3_00048_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ap3_00048_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): animation; black geographies; black study; blackness; computational data; contested spaces; motion capture; racialized Black bodies

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