While exploring movements on my own, I thought if i could include one of my hobbies as part of this project. Indoor climbing or bouldering. One of the reasons why i tried exploring this activity was the fact that is full of movements, which one small change can influence how one person gets to the top.
In bouldering usually, people climb ‘problems’ or paths. They can be separated in different levels depending how difficult the problem is.
As someone that likes to climb, it’s easy to put myself in two perspective. Climbing is a sport or an activity where you learn by watching how other people solve the problem, and then trying yourself. This allowed me to become the observer for a short while and watching how people get to the top, learn their techniques of keeping them on the wall. Do they pull their body and hips near the wall to keep their balance or do they prefer to have their arms straighten and use leg force to get up.
If we analyse the movement as a whole bodied experience few things show up. Some movements require slow and steady climbing while other the climber has to use momentum and strength to keep themselves up. Climbing down can be as challenging as going up. The legs need to placed securely on a stone or pushed to the wall to keep yourself balanced while going down.
Later today I met up with Jens. I explained that we as a group were lost, and that I feel not much work has been done, considering we should be presenting in a week. Jens explained that, we don’t have to so particular about the topic. Also when we pick a movement, we should try to figure out how changes can make the movement feel differently. We should ask ourselves why is that movement interesting to explore? Why would it be relevant for this project? Another thing is to try and create variations of the same movement.
He also explained what matters is trying to describe the movement with words. How can we use the language to explain what one feel when they do the movement? The focus should be on describing in all three perspectives, the two from us and the the machine based on how the computer learns the movements.
Pink Prototyping 