Introducing movement capture in art education

Recording and representing movement is becoming as much a feature of daily life as recording and representing talk and sound, and the digital technologies available to us for capturing movement are becoming increasingly powerful. However an interdisciplinary review of movement capture catering to an arts education audience has not been done. In this article, I theoretically examine the concepts of movement and capture before considering how methodologies and technologies used in movement capture has been historically significant in the arts. Through this interdisciplinary review, I will demonstrate how movement capture is a rich site of interdisciplinary convergence for the art education classroom and as a research methodology. It introduces new complex affordances for moving human bodies, affordances that have the possibility to extend means of human expression and understanding. But as movement capture becomes a richer and more complex feature of our visual material landscape, art educators must prepare our students to engage critically with how and what it means to move and why, and if, movement should be captured.