Section Editorial: Human Movement as Critical Creativity: Basic Questions for Movement Computing

This text poses a number of basic questions to the Computational Culture reader, and beyond, concerning the computation of human movement. The formulation of these basic questions (and broad problems) hinges on the need to better understand the nature of creativity, which according to this author, may be a key driver in the emergent field of research known as Movement Computing. These “basic questions” all gravitate around a prime concern, which is to critique the way in which machine computers affect movement-based creativity, and movement-based thinking. In addition to providing a general picture of critical literature orbiting this largely practice-driven field, and as well as introducing the reader to the two other essays and commentary section included in this issue of Computational Culture, this essay argues that Movement Computing is a mode of computation that embraces messy and open-ended work, and that it can be adopted as a framework for transdisciplinary research across a number of embodied and computer-based practices (beyond Dance and Computer Science). In this broadening context, the essay seeks to give more definition and priority to the critical and ethical perspectives, which according to this author are sometimes ignored in the Movement Computing research community.