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Nowadays, a growing number of human social behaviors and kinaesthetic habitus are encoded into information patterns enabling the prediction (and the determination) of our ecological interactions. All sort of human expressions can be theoretically dematerialized into numerical seqeunces, collected and then stored into digital archives for diverse purposes (health, marketing, surveillance, AI developpement, etc.). Human movement is at the core of this growing process of digitization and marketization of human data. Even though technical embodiment of human movement is not new, recent massive “exteriorization” of human capacities into technologies evokes a sort of general technical inscription of human kinesthetic behavior into digital archives.

Freqeuncies of Gesture is an ongoing performative-research project that explores the ways in which gestural repertoires can be captured and recreated as situated and somatic live archives. By using mixed techniques – ranging from live drawing, calcographing techniques and data visualization to motion analysis, interactive sonification and machine learning algorithms – we aim at studying how gesture’s traces can be archived through a technical device and re-situated in the performance. Our goal is to show how these mediations techniques allow us to draw attention to several gesture’s qualities that wouldn’t be otherwise perceptibles. From this perspective, we question the way in which embodied gestural know-how can be externalized trhough technical inscription (e.g. sound and grpahic traces) and then re-embodied in a new material form (e.g. the performative digitally-informed gesture). The outcome of this research is an interactive performance based on live calcographing drawing and real time movement sonification.