Hasta La Ideas

For over a decade I taught martial arts, and one of the hardest things is communicating to a novice how to correctly move a particular body part through 3D space. What I always dreamt of was to cover them in sensors, like that guy who played Gollum, so that they could “draw” glowing lines in space with their joints, providing a visible basis for corrections.

Teaching kung fu via hologram is probably a ways off, but performance artist Heather Hansen is doing something that reminded me of the concept: “Emptied Gestures,” as she calls it.

Using her body, charcoal, and a large sheet of paper, Hansen “draws” beautiful, Rorschach-like shapes by performing a series of yoga- and calisthenics-like movements while dragging the charcoal across the paper, tracing the exact position of her hands. As the lines are built up, the other parts of her body that come into contact with the loose charcoal powder provide incidental shading and gradations.

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