Movement Museum

We use our bodies to get things done, to communicate with one another and to navigate the world around us, often without conscious attention to detail. Movement Museum is an ongoing project that aims to capture and archive individual human movements using video recording instruments, large-scale projections and interactive teaching-learning frameworks. Movement Museum encourages participants to consider the various ways they move their bodies and the culture they create.

Movement Museum is located in and around a pop-up field station that can be assembled anywhere in about 30 minutes. It is an experiment with the concept of a mobile museum, one where research is performed, recorded and projected as part of a large-scale, public composition. As the project is further developed, we hope to make Movement Museum’s archive of individual actions available to be tagged, searched, sorted and repurposed by online visitors. Individually these recorded movements appear meaningless, like syllables of a verbal language, but when curated and composed, patterns and stories begin to emerge.

Movements are collected from the public on Movement Museum Expeditions - part research, part performance. These themed expeditions act as catalysts for dialogue within communities—for example, when movements on the theme of work spur conversations between intergenerational groups on the changing nature of labor, or when communication movements encourage thoughtfulness and understanding among groups that may have very different body cultures.