Motion capture (MoCap) technology has received significant attention as a tool for quantitative movement analysis. Rapid advances in machine learning have made MoCap more accessible and easier to use. However, critical reflection on MoCap’s pragmatic paradigm—how it is used in dance creation, education, and analytics—has not progressed. From a dance research perspective, this paper argues that MoCap implicitly presupposes a choreographic vocabulary centered on the human body. Furthermore, from a computational complexity perspective, it notes that living organisms do not perceive or regulate their bodies through recognition processes comparable to those employed by MoCap technologies. In response, the authors propose reframing MoCap as a navigational medium that facilitates interactions among bodies, environments, and other-than-human beings.
Yoshida et al. (Sat,) studied this question.