choreography, creative process, embodiment, humanness, lenses, painting, performing, physical thinking, research, virtual reality, writing

Extending the Body v2: MOCO’22 Practice Presentation & Publication

Tara Burns
September 12, 2022


Extending the body was presented at the 2022 International Conference of Movement and Computing as an embodied practice in Virtual Reality (VR) using real-time movement improvisation as the creation of visual movement traces in the VR painting program Open Brush (an off-shoot of Google’s Tilt Brush) in Oculus Quest.

The accompanying paper “Extending the Body: An Embodied Practice as Choreography in Virtual Reality Performance” can be found published on the ACM digital Library at doi.acm.org?doi=3537972.3538014.

The iteration created for the International Conference of Movement and Computing/MOCO’22 was filmed in front of a green screen and transmitted from the Oculus Quest through the camera of an Ipad and composited in Reality Mixer. The composite was then tweaked in OBS and sent to stream on Twitch.

The next 3 images are from the first full test run
But feels big
I started testing in costume so I would have a compendium of test runs on Twitch.
Only certain brushes would go in front of my body
These shapes are my favorite
Here you can see the “shadows” on the green screen bleeding through.

The rehearsal process was documented on Twitch in the week prior to the MOCO’22 conference to accrue a compendium of iterations on the platform while practicing the set up and improvisational process.

Videos of the Twitch compendium coming soon.

Behind the Scenes (below)

Putting up the green screen – Not a lot of dancing space!
Testing with helpers!
“smoothing” the green screen DIY style
I broke the controller while dancing – I hit the desk
I fixed the controller
This is how I prepped the green screen prior to each run to get as many of the wrinkles out as possible (that’s a broom). In addition, I used a double filter using Reality Mixer (which doesn’t require a green screen in optimal conditions) and then putting it through a green screen filter in OBS because of my not-optimal conditions