Voguing Memory
Video Installation
Contributions:3D Design, Motion Capture, Installation Design & Production, Spatial Storytelling, Video Editing
Production Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Substance Painter, AutoRig, Maverick, Premiere Pro
This video installation investigates how the queer body carries memory, transforms, and resists disappearance through movement. Within an immersive environment, viewers encounter a film where gesture functions as both expression and archive. Through motion capture of voguing, I animate virtual queer bodies whose movements hold traces of lived experience and collective memory.
In the film, digital figures wear metal prosthetics, altered skin, and visible scars. Their bodies show rupture and reconstruction. Through voguing, they assert presence not through perfection, but through marked and remembered form.
The project began with an interest in the body as a surface shaped by intervention. Influenced by Hannah Levy and Ivana Bašić, I explore the tension between metallic structures and skin-like materials, treating synthetic elements not as decoration, but as structural extensions of the body.
The installation translates bodily tension into space. Inspired by the sharp precision of new-way vogue, two suspended monitors are held by surgical arms whose angular joints echo the lines of the dance. The structure functions as an external extension of the body, linking flesh and synthetic form.
I collaborated with performers from the ballroom community and also recorded my own voguing through a full motion-capture setup. Using OptiTrack cameras and Manus gloves, I captured fine-grained movement nuances and retargeted them in Unreal Engine with the IK Retargeter system, allowing these gestures to inhabit my digital figure.