Standstill

I am happy to announce a new publication titled How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications (PDF of preprint), published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. The paper is based on the Sverm project, and was written and accepted two years ago. Sometimes academic publishing takes absurdly long, which this is an example of, but I am happy that the publication is finally out in the wild....

Yesterday I presented a paper on motiongrams at the Sound and Music Computing conference in Copenhagen. Today I will present the paper A study of the noise-level in two infrared marker-based motion capture systems. This is a quite nerdy, in-depth study of the noise-level of two of our motion capture systems. Abstract With musical applications in mind, this paper reports on the level of noise observed in two commercial infrared marker-based motion capture systems: one high-end (Qualisys) and one affordable (OptiTrack)....

On Thursday we are organising the first Norwegian Championship of standstill at University of Oslo. This is part of the University’s Open Day, a day when potential new students can come and see what happens on campus. Besides the competitive part, the championship is (of course) a great way to gather more data about how people stand still. The art of standing still is something that has been a great interest of mine for the last year or so, and I have been carrying out different types of smaller experiments to understand more about the micromovements observed when standing still....

Yesterday Miles Phillips{.url} suggested that the word “motionlessness” may be what I am after when it comes to describing the act of standing still. He further pointed me to a web site with a list of the world records for motionlessness. The rules to compete in motionlessness is as follows: The record is for continuously standing motionless. You must stand: sitting is not allowed. No facial movements are allowed other then the involuntary blinking of the eye....

[caption id=“attachment_1283” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Plots of a neck marker from a 10 minute recording of standing still”] [/caption] As mentioned previously (here and here), I have been doing some experiments on standing still in silence. One thing is to do it, another is to talk (or write) about it. Then I need to have words describing what I have been doing. To start with the simple; the word silence seems to be quite clearly defined as the “lack of sound”, and is similar to the Norwegian word stillhet....