
Floating Time
A virtual performance of deconstructed motion.
Team: Manuel Bonell, Flavia Mazzanti, Michael Bonell
Year: 2020
„Floating Time“ is a 3D Animation planned to be shown as a spatial virtual experience dealing with a performance of deconstructed motion in a virtual environment. The starting point of the project is the understanding of the concept of movement and its hybridity in time and space. Our interest lies, on the one hand, in the use of motion as a way of artistic expression through which performers transmit and exchange their sensations and feelings with a live audience. On the other hand, in the possibility to bring this performative layer from the physical to the virtual, exploring the moving body by fragmenting and deconstructing motion itself through the use of technology. In the virtual performance „Floating Time“, the movements of a performer are recorded through motion capture and translated to the virtual, where they get deconstructed and showed in space as a sequence, creating a virtual environment continuously generated and shaped by movements floating in time. The human loses its bodily appearance, turning into an animated configuration. As a visual reference, the project takes Stroboscopic Photography with the goal of bringing it from a 2D representation to a fully 3D configuration and experience in VR, where we can experiment the concept of movement and its spatial expression. A new virtual environment is shaped, ready to be experienced by virtual users. An environment which could not be perceivable in the physical world.




Starting from a performance in the physical world, the movements of a dancer/performer are recorded and translated to the virtual through motion capture technology. The data will be, then, translated into abstract particle formations in animation/simulation software. With the project “Floating Time” we would like to push forward the potential for artistic production and experimentation in a virtual environment, offering a space open to artistic expression, experience, encounter and reflection.