Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of the Disappearing Blackness

The movement of black bodies has often been captured by motion-tracking/sensing technologies in different contexts and situations, from animation cinema to facial recognition, from art to police preemptive profiling. As often argued by critical and media theorists, digital technologies of this kind operate an interesting ambiguous datafication of the black body, by filtering data along a subtle and shifting border between the invisibility of the captured body and the visibility of its movement. This article will discuss the motion capture of Savion Glover’s tap dance performance for the animation movie Happy Feet. Applying an interdisciplinary perspective given by the encounter between dance and movement studies, philosophy and cultural studies, the article tries to move the discussion beyond the simple critique of digital technologies as neutralizing forms of representation, and beyond the theoretical and practical attempts to preserve a ‘lived-in’ and ‘body-specific’ experience of the racially identifiable body. Instead, a different theoretical perspective is given, through which the motion capture apparatus can be defined as a differential marker, a machine that allows for an ‘immediated calculation’ of movement and race. Amplifying the humanly and digitally limited understanding of experience as data elaboration (datum as object of perception and knowledge), and putting data in relation to feelings, it is possible to understand the digital capture as a way to preserve movement, its singularity or its ‘datum of difference’, from a universal sameness of movements without bodies.