Animating the Kinetic Trace: Kate Bush, Hatsune Miku, and Posthuman Dance

Abstract This project emerges from a recent research-creation project involving MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware animation program where 3D models can be maneuvered, posed and choreographed into various dance sequences through the use of motion data and digital manipulation. In a dance translation that involves the choreography for Kate Bush’s song, “Wuthering Heights,” a Microsoft Kinect, and the freeware interface MikuMikuDance, created for Japanese virtual idol, Hatsune Miku, dance is revealed to be both rooted in the body and distributed across collective bodies and screens. By relinquishing biometric control, and allowing data to “dance,” this project eschews mimetic realism for an attempt to learn the machine’s “truth,” and proposes failure as a mode of resistance to systems of control, making way for an assemblage of relational bodies that dance within and through one another.