As we struggle with the chaos of our existence on earth, we look to the order of the universe for purpose. Proper Motion is a vibrant, non-verbal VR encounter with the night sky that examines the human desire to find meaning in the patterns of nature.

You find yourself in a clearing on top of a hill in a wide landscape, the stars overhead. Around you, a colourful choreography of beings and objects unfolds, each following its own rhythm through three acts. The controller in your hand turns into different interactive instruments. Following the premise that everything changes into something else at some point, Proper Motion remaps musical and visual found materials into a completely new, immersive experience. 

The innovative technological core of the project is the process behind the creation of the interactive soundtrack. We use advanced techniques of real time sound synthesis, sonic manipulation, and ambisonic spatialisation directly connected to the visuals and the interactions, creating emergent musical forms.

What happens when the billion year-old light of a star talks to a sixty year-old piece of electronic music that causes a dancer’s hand gesture, captured some years ago, to move in a completely different way?

Proper Motion is a joyful reflection on the search for significance in natural structures that connects us all, throughout space and time.

PROCESS

Nature runs its course and doesn’t care all that much about humanity. We look at the world around us and think that there must be some logic, some narrative that brings meaning to our human existence. It drives our culture, religions, superstitions.

Proper Motion started as a subconscious response to the pandemic and our urge to make sense of a global phenomenon that changed all of our lives. Quite instinctively, images and symbols appeared, and coalesced with found sounds and movements. 

Realizing that everything is connected, we wondered how closely we could integrate recorded human motion with recorded music in another place and time.

The composition of Proper Motion began with a selection of electronic music pieces from the 50s to the early 70s. We used a set of digital sound analysis tools to reduce the archival music to abstract tones and sounds from which we built a new score. Various machine learning algorithms were used to create further intricate blends with scientific recordings of disturbances in the earth’s atmosphere. Processes used in mapping electromagnetic spectra to audible sound frequencies were reverse-engineered, like the sun’s radiation or the pulse of the earth passing through a meteor shower. Each composition in Proper Motion is connected by sound analysis processes within Unity in order to interact with the dance motion capture files, and other animations throughout the experience. Seemingly unconnected bits of found material are combined to form a new order.

The result is an interactive audio-visual poem that, although inspired by our current global situation, turns into a universal story about natural patterns and how we interpret them.