Heritage Futures
Motion Capture as a Site of Cultural Transmission: Reframing Embodied Slavic Heritage Through Digital Improvisation
Dr Lucie Sykes
Independent Artist-Researcher
- Date
- Time
- -
- Room
- A03
- Format
- Interactive demonstration
- Chair
- Deborah Ward
Presentation abstract
Abstract
This interactive demonstration foregrounds motion capture (MoCap) as a dramaturgical and analytical environment for exploring how embodied cultural practices, such as folkloric dance, are transformed through digital mediation. Drawing on practice-as-research with performers, I introduce the Sculptural Qualities Framework (SQF) to analyse how skeletal markers, trace-forms, and real-time feedback loops generate new relational and perceptual conditions for movement. Motion capture is approached not as a recording tool but as a co-creative system that shapes attention, improvisation, and embodied decision-making.
In this interactive demonstration, I present a work-in-progress that draws on my Slavic folklore heritage and the myths of Vesna and Morana. This short performance evolved over the last few years and was recently developed as part of the AA2A residency scheme at Nottingham Trent University. In this work, I examine how intangible heritage, in the form of folklore dance movements and storytelling, can be reimagined in XR environments. The myth provides a cultural substrate for investigating how digital dramaturgy extends and reframes the traditional narratives. Therefore, it demonstrates how motion-capture environments can serve as “a gateway” between embodied heritage and contemporary digital performance. The real-time visualisation in Unreal Engine (LiveLinkXR) becomes a sculptural space where physical action and digital form co-shape each other, emerging with sculptural qualities that support cultural transmission.
This interactive demonstration contributes to cultural heritage discourse by repositioning folklore as an applied context (Bendix & Hasan-Rokem, 2012) rather than the conceptual centre through the use of digital storytelling. Thus, digital storytelling becomes a method for safeguarding, transforming, and revitalising embodied traditions within technologically mediated spaces.
Meet the presenter
About the presenter
Dr Lucie Sykes
Dr Lucie (Lee) Sykes is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher Her live performances and multisensory installations invite audiences to take a moment to notice, reflect, and reconnect with themselves and others. Lucie is interested in how the body-mind connections of the performer and audiences’ shapes, connects, responds, within interactive ecological and technological environments. To achieve these sensorial encounters, she uses cutting-edge technologies such as motion capture, 3D printing, projection mapping, and augmented reality to offer a rare opportunity to experience dance-theatre performance in a new light. Her research dissemination of various high-profile publications and symposium presentations in the UK & internationally.