Choy Kai Fai Wants To Create Bionic Dancing Men

Since the Kinect’s launch late last year, we’ve been seeing motion tracking of the body used as a digital control interface in a rapidly increasing number of projects. We all knew the potential of this kind of interaction and only needed a commercially available, hackable device to make it an everyday reality. We’ve seen hundreds of incredible Kinect hacks surface, but of course there’s always someone who emerges with work that’s far ahead of the pack. In this instance, we’re talking about Choy Ka Fai, a Singapore-bred, London-based new media artist who is performing bionic movement research and using the human body as a platform for experimenting with digital memory.

Similarly to Daito Manabe’s Electric Stimulus project, Ka Fai’s series of experiments Prospectus for Future Body attempts to adapt the human body to a futuristic digital landscape. Inspired by the idea of galvanic response or “animal electricity,” the research aims to create artificial and involuntary movements in specific muscle groups through exposure to electrical stimuli. Choy Ka Fai’s next maneuver puts a machine between the brain and the muscles in order to find a way to make these sequential movements a functional form of expression.

So far, there are three experiments in the series that address this very cyborg-y issue and investigate the possibilities of using muscles and organic memory as digital media. In Eternal Summer Storm, muscular vibrations are translated into sound waves that are simultaneously recorded and transfered to another body in real-time. The goal of the piece is to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tasumi Hijikata’s Butoh choreography using only archival footage from “A Summer Storm”.

The second experiment and video, Bionic Movement Research Archive, is a compilation of different undertakings conducted by Ka Fai that examine the processes behind designing actual digital muscle memory interfaces for the body.

The third piece, Notion: Dance Fiction, is a performance done by a “dancer” controlled by the hands and will of a VJ. Using a database of the most iconic dance movements from the 20th Century, Ka Fai maps out these dance steps in real-time by sending digital muscle memory “implants” to a “dancer’s” active muscle groups.

As the videos show (though it may be difficult to understand at first), there are small differences between the choreographies. There’s no doubt that there are still limits to the reproduction of these organic “memories” in natural bodies, but it's striking to see how little they seem to interfere. If today body memory is one of the pillars of nontransferable subjectivity, perhaps the emergence of a physically manifested “collective memory”—made from audiovisual recordings and shared by electrodes that generate unintended stimuli—may be the most material evidence and representation of post-modern subjectivity.