"Performance Capture" by Ed Atkins for Manchester International Festival 2015

4 - 19 July '15

For Manchester International Festival 2015, artist Ed Atkins is drawing back the digital curtain with Performance Capture.

Performance Capture is an exhibition, a studio and a singular document of MIF15. Taking place at Manchester Art Gallery over the course of the Festival, the exhibition provides a unique and reflexive insight into the production of a computer-generated moving image work.

Performance Capture takes its name from a process that records, maps and renders the movements of a performer on to a computer-generated figure, an avatar who performs as the digital double for the performer — in this case, performers of every stripe from the MIF15 programme.

The exhibition, curated by Ed Atkins, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, is laid out as stages of a production process, leading from one to another across three rooms at the gallery.

Performances by MIF artists are captured onto computer, digitally modelled, cut and soundtracked, and then screened in a perpetual cinema of the ever-accumulating rushes of the footage. Each part of the process is open to visitors both as behind-the-scenes exposition and exhibition; an examination and ambivalent exemplar of contemporary
image production.

http://performancecapture.net/