Harmonic Movements |
Critic: Christopher Whitelaw | Spring 2013 | Pratt Institute | New York | U.S.A.
Project By: Milad Showkatbakhsh
Performance By: Anahita Moghaddam
Sufi whirling (or Sufi turning) (Turkish: Semazen) is a form of Sama or physically active meditation which originated among Sufis, and which is still practiced by the Sufi Dervishes of the Mevlevi order and other orders such as the Rifa'i-Marufi. It is a customary meditation practice performed within the Sema, or worship ceremony, through which dervishes (also called semazens, from Persian سماعزن) aim to reach the source of all perfection, or kemal. This is sought through abandoning one's nafs, egos or personal desires, by listening to the music, focusing on God, and spinning one's body in repetitive circles, which has been seen as a symbolic imitation of planets in the Solar System orbiting the sun. ( Source: Wikipedia ).
I inspired by the movements of the human body during this movements and decided to capture the moves and interpret them as a temporal formal aggregation atoms, units which entire universe is made of. The architectural aspect of this project underlies at this project lies in the interpretation of this dynamic moves. This project started with motion capturing a person using Kinect then using the captured data and restructure them as particles in motion.
You can watch the process in the bellow video where I captured my computer screen during the whole motion capturing process.