From scripts to scores: Movement as an embodied material for digital interaction

From scripts to scores: Movement as an embodied material for digital interaction

Keywords: Full-body Movement, Materialization, Digital Interaction, Design, Communication, Boundaries, Scripts, Scores.

Today our environments are increasingly digitized and interactive. We generate data by the very way we move, from locative signals to accumulated traces outlining direction and intensity as well as computational and comparative information. These digital environments are currently being built, and ask us to decide which movements matter and which do not. In the design of movement-based digital interaction, movement becomes a material with which we may shape new expressions, functions and interactions. The borders and boundaries of decisions on movement that are set in binary code become a complex, meaningmaking communication. I suggest that we need to visualize movement data together with movement expertise in order to harness an agency in movement itself, namely the kinesthetic, embodied sensation of movement as well as the relational ways we may move with data. I discuss several projects whereby code and the conceptualization of movement are explored jointly. The aim of discussing such processes is to find ways to tease out the rich communicative potential of full-body movement for digital interactions by enabling an explorative, creative engagement with movement data and, in turn, movement.