Spatial Design | Textile Art | Immersive Interactive Storytelling ITP-Blog About
Aug 15, 2018
VIDEO SCULPTURE
More Avatars – The Swimmers
The Swimmers is an ongoing augmented reality project that explores the transformation of competitive swimming into a digital, sculptural experience. The work examines the swimmer’s body in motion as a repeated gesture—disciplined, suspended, and transformed—within a reconstructed, augmented space.
The project captures the essence of physical training, where memory and performance are translated into virtual bodies that exist between presence and simulation.
The first stage of the process involves creating avatars using Fuse and animating them through choreographed movements in Mixamo.
This initial iteration centers on the moment of immersion, presenting bodies that dive, hover, and re-emerge within a blended landscape where competitive swimming shifts towards abstraction. Videos of open-water swimming races unfold in the background, expanding the swimmers' environment and immersing the viewer in a layered, hybrid spae.
In the second iteration, the perspective moves underwater into a reconstructed space where the swimmers' performance is continuously tested. Here, muscle memory becomes a repeated rhythm—each stroke an instinctive response, a measure of endurance, and a mechanism for survival. Beneath the surface, movement is stripped down to its essential patterns, revealing the tension between control and vulnerability within the submerged body.
Through the use of augmented reality, animation, and video editing, The Swimmers creates a layered environment in which competitive swimming is recontextualized as a digital performance. These technologies expand the ways the body in motion can be observed, allowing performance to move beyond documentation and into an immersive, sculptural experience.