Motion Bank

Originally founded by choreographer William Forsythe in Frankfurt, Motion Bank has been uniquely combining dance studies, software development and design under one roof at Mainz University of Applied Sciences since 2016. The interdisciplinary research focuses on the fundamentals of digital dance research, the digital documentation of dance, and the use of digital technologies in dance practice. For research projects Motion Bank cooperates with numerous partners from the performing arts, higher education in dance, archives and other academic and cultural institutions. Motion Bank has longstanding expertise in the digital documentation, archiving and transmission of dance, in researching choreographic processes and dance-immanent knowledge as well as in supporting creative processes through digital technologies. This also implies exposure to numerous subfields of computer science and digital design: web development, website and interface design, interaction design, image and video processing, software architecture, machine learning and artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality applications, motion capture techniques as well as data modeling, analysis, and visualization. Motion Bank's goal is to take this diverse expertise beyond dance and into other research areas. Part of Motion Bank's research work also involves developing its own software and building, operating and expanding its own digital research infrastructure.