“When a movement is motion-captured, Manning argues, digital technology breaks its virtual wholeness, dissecting its potential relational web and mapping it into bits of numerical data. In order for the mapping to work and for the capturing system to be able to read the motion, a specific (and very limited or simplified) kind of gesture is required, a linear, clearly traceable displacement replicating a sort of gestural conformity to the software, diminishing what a body can really do. For Manning, the unmappable virtuality of a movement’s preacceleration, or the virtual tendency of the body toward movement, toward relation, is what allows a displacement to take place and form. At the same time, relation is also what allows memory to be generated, for example, in rehearsal, during which it appears not as “a recurrence of the same,” but as “difference embodied through movement”: remembering the relation and its potential changes as recollecting the future. On the other hand, a visible, already actualized movement is all that is necessary for software detection, usually a displacement of a limb or of the whole body across space; the virtual double or twin of the gesture is left out of the picture” (Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a body : digital philosophy and choreographic thoughts: The MIT Press, 2013)
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