“In days of intense and pervasive digitalization, the numerification of movement requires a broader thinking, or perhaps a rethinking, of what movement itself is (or what it can become). And it is precisely this rethinking that is at stake here: Can it still be defined or thought as movement, when an actual, physical body has been replaced by a string of running data? What happens to the thought of movement, when movement is processed by a digital system? [..] In motion capture and animation software, what we have thought as the infinite virtuality of movement thus becomes visualized as a series of algorithmic paths traced by points, the points in turn resulting from the calculation of parameters and their relations. The program only seems able to remember and manipulate movement’s limited physical possibilities, rather than its infinite potential: for the computer, infinity becomes a number, or a string of numerical data expressed in binary code. But is this string of data, the points and lines remembered by the technology, really ontologically different from a virtual body? Or can the digital variables preserved and manipulated by the program (as variations based on relations that remain constant in the computer’s algorithm), stand for what Deleuze defines as the virtual “variety” of ideas or, as he also defines it, a variation of relations themselves, which is ultimately for him the object of a transcendental (rather than empirical) memory? ” ( from “Moving without a Body. Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts”, Stamatia Portanova, The MIT Press, 2013)
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