Art Gallery of NSW · Dance Visualization · Digital Placemaking

Acts of Holding Dance


Acts of Holding Dance transforms human movement into persistent visual traces. It turns a static architectural surface into a responsive narrative layer—making choreographic intent and community presence visible over time.

Dance as data Time visualization Civic narrative surface Site-specific installation
Acts of Holding Dance - Installation concept
Role
Artist · Designer
Client
Art Gallery of NSW
Format
Installation · Projection / AV system
Core idea
Visualize movement as accumulated memory
Timeline
Ongoing (multi-venue)
Deliverables
Visual system · content prototypes · installation-ready outputs

The goal was to make dance legible to broader audiences without flattening it. Instead of illustrating a plot, the work visualizes how movement holds time: gestures leave residue, accumulate, and slowly become a map of presence.

Design rule

Treat movement as memory: traces should persist long enough to be read, but change enough to feel alive.

From body → data → trace

The project is built as a repeatable pipeline: capture movement, extract meaningful motion features, then render them as a visual language tuned for architectural scale. This makes the work portable across venues and adaptable to different choreographic contexts.

Capture
Movement input (recorded or live) becomes structured data.
Translate
Key motion attributes are emphasized (timing, repetition, density).
Render
Traces accumulate as readable layers, balancing persistence and refresh.
Site
Compositing and contrast are tuned for the physical surface and distance.
Acts of Holding Dance - Trace system concept

Viewers see a surface that behaves like a living archive: movement appears, lingers, overlaps, and fades. The result is a readable choreography-map that invites curiosity—especially from people who may not “speak” dance.

Legibility

The system favors clean shapes and temporal contrast so the trace-language can be understood quickly.

Emotion

Persistence creates tenderness: a feeling that someone was here, and that the space remembers.

A façade or interior surface that “holds” dance over time—layering motion into a visible memory. The piece reads as both abstraction and documentation: not a story arc, but a durable record of presence.

If you only watch 10 seconds…

You understand the premise: movement becomes trace, trace becomes history.