Before I leave the room, tired and ready to go home, I look back in after Ihave turned the lights off. The 8 cameras positioned all around the room, on the walls and in the ceiling grid splay their red light across the floor, the computers, the chairs, staying on, always capturing, always seeing.

I am working on a project that I call Becoming Dragon. The aim of the project is to do a 365 hour immersive performance in Second Life, using a Head Mounted Display so I will only see Second Life and a Vicon motion capture system to map my physical movements back into Second Life. The project is a collaboration between myself, Chris Head who’s writing the mocap code, Kael Greco who’s working on the stereoscopic code for the HMD, Anna Storelli, our modeler and Ben Lotan, our documentarian.

The motion capture system is composed of 8 cameras, a smaller version of the 24 camera system in the performative computing lab. Each camera has multiple circular arrays of lights which put out infared, near-infared or red light. At the center of these arrays is a high quality digital camera equipped with a networking board, which sends its data in real-time over the network to the MX Ultranet router and to the host machine which controls the entire assemblage of cameras. You cannot look at the cameras too closely for too long, because your pupil doesn’t close to shield you from the infared light, so there is a possible danger of eye damage. The cameras look at you, but it is dangerous to look back.

Last week we installed the Vicon system into the reconfigurable lab that will be the location for the performance, which will happen in December. Todd Margolis of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and I spent that week installing the Vicon in the lab, moving cameras, running cable, wrestling with software. We discussed my living situation for the performance, where the bed would be, where I want to be tracked, if I want to be tracked while sleeping, where the audience will stand, access to the sink, and tried to arrange the cameras to cover the tracking area. The cameras cover the most area at an angle, and need to be at multiple heights, to insure that at least 3 tracking markers are seen by at least 3 cameras at all times, to provide position and rotation data in 3 dimensions.

From the Nintendo Wii to the latest iPod touch, the body is being brought back into the interface, the general public now has access to cheap motion capture technologies, and is using them largely for entertainment, for now. The Vicon system is not the latest motion capture technology, such as markerless motion capture or 3D cameras, but it is a robust and reliable technology, still used widely in the gaming and medical industry.

While the Vicon is referred to as a Motion Capture system, there are actually two modes it can be used in. One is to capture and record motion data, specifically x, y and z coordinates for markers as well as rotations in x, y and z directions. Another mode, the way I will be using it, is to send real time motion data over the network. Chris Head and myself have worked on a bridge to interpret the motion data and send it to a script in Second Life. When the system is in use this way, it acts as more of a digital prosthesis. One moves one’s body and sees that motion doubled on screen instantly. The sensation is one of extension or mirroring. The Vicon also has kinematic information, where you can label parts of your body as rigid bodies, such as your forearm, and the live data contains that information as well. So while the system can be used for capturing bodies, recording their position and replaying it at a later time, it can also be used to track bodies in real time and represent that motion in various ways, as points or with 3d models overlaid on top.

For the purposes of my project Becoming Dragon, we will be sending the motion data to Second Life, to control the location and movement of an avatar there. We’re still in a development stage, but will be doing extended test runs in November. I’m planning on doing a day long trial and a few days, to build up to the goal of a 365 hour immersion in December.

I’ve been training with the head mounted display (HMD). Today I used it for over an hour. The sensation when coming out of the HMD is strong, your eyes feel strange, your movement seems too strong. Coming out of the HMD today I walked through the hallway with my head lowered, looking ahead, with a vaguely subversive feeling, like people don’t know what I’ve been up to, doing something out of the ordinary, in my strange explorations of synthetic space. When I’ve been in the HMD for long periods and have a feeling of nausea, it’s such a visceral feeling. I have a sense of urgency as I head to the coffee cart to get a carbonated drink, shedding the usual daily concerns. My awareness shrinks in closer to my body, feeling the muscles in my jaw and neck, waiting to get back to normal.

The Vicon system strikes me as a hyper panopticon. For the system to work, 3 reflective markers on your body have to be seen by at least 3 cameras at all times. It is a form of hyper-surveillance, where every movement of your body is measured down to less than a millimeter by multiple 4 megapixel cameras simultaneously. The system works by flashing the red strobes very quickly, which reflect off of the retroreflective markers and capturing a greyscale image of where the markers are. There are a variety of strobes, visible red, near infrared and infrared, all part of the system at once.

Even being in the lab, there is a strange sense as you look around the room at all these MX40+ cameras looking at you. Starting up the Vicon IQ software that runs the system, all the cameras flash their red circles of led’s and then varous colors of indicators lights, blue and green, like an organism coming to life. The software faithfully reports the frames per second of your life being captured, hovering around 120, although the max is up to 2,000 fps.

Today there are already applications such as Buddy Beacon for devices like for the Helio Ocean and the iPhone which can automatically update your facebook profile with your gps coordinates, ostensibly for your friends, who can also be your Buddy Beacon buddies, and you can track them on a map in real time. Perhaps twitter and facebook status will evolve into real time motion capture streams, where your friends can see what you are doing at any moment. With 3d cameras and computer vision, such an application on a phone is realizable today. With the accelerometers and gyroscopes in the Wii and the new iPod touch, motion and direction data is available, so the slow speeds of satellite GPS can be enhanced.

Yet with the current lock down nature of products like the iPhone, can consumers have any trust in what manufacturers will do with such data? Definitely not. Now that the Wii has been cracked, one can expect the imaginations of hackers to interpret the body to start flowing with ideas, although I expect we’ll see lots and lots of sex games. While the history of performance art and feminist art has engaged with the body, reimagined it and opened up so many possibilities, perhaps it is Wii hacking enthusiasts who will bring together the body and technology in new, as yet unimagined ways. Hopefully the body modification communities who are into suspension might get together with the Wii hackers and something really wild will emerge. Maybe the electrostim crowd will be the bridge, or the folks over at slashdong. Cheap access to motion capture technologies might develop into a particular kind of tactical media, like the recent book tactical biopolitics, allowing a mass reintroduction of the body into the network.

I know I’ve always been one who enjoys getting attention. I can’t help but wonder, sitting at the center of all these cameras, if this is just yet another attempt to be seen. My last attempt, participating in a queer open source porn laboratory, definitely involved me being seen, but I always felt like something was missing. Porn, while transgressing bounds, has its own parameters and limits.

Everyday I get coffee or something of the sort and someone calls me sir or man, and in that moment I know I’m not being seen. Maybe I’m trying to make up for that. Of course its a futile goal, to hope to ever really be seen. Maybe that’s the goal I’m always striving for with my lover, to be close enough to someone who actually sees most of me. Still, here, with these cameras, I think the sense that they are a kind of prosthesis is accurate, physically, informationally and emotionally. I would imagine that Second Life is this for many people, filling in the space where something is missing, a gap, even if it is the gap of the yearning to escape the confusing chaos around us.

Fortunately, I am reassured that the cold, repetitive, constant gaze of these cameras will continue when I leave and shut the door behind me, after I look back at them on my way out. Or maybe not, with the current situation, any kind of future for capitalism is hard to imagine right now, much less one that involves expensive technology. Unless we look to Argentina, and the economic crisis there in 2001, which led to a future of resistance and autonomy. In Argentina we’ve seen not only autonomous worker run factories and collectives, but networks of autonomous factories exchanging goods and services among one another, creating new assemblages and networks of autonomy. That is what gives me hope for imagining future prostheses, that they may be made outside of the gatekeepers of corporations, by artists and people in resistance, forging new possibilities for the body and subjectivity, arising out of a whole different set of assumptions and goals from the ones that have produced today’s technologies. [posted on techno tranny slut]