Gesture Residue / After Laocoön

3D-printed sculptural group, 2026
Motion capture, MetaHuman-based figures, ZBrush sculpting, 3D print

Gesture Residue / After Laocoön is a sculptural work developed through a chain of translations from live performance to digital data and finally to physical object. The work originates in motion-capture recordings of performer Aleksandra Arizanović, whose butoh-inspired movement formed one of the dramaturgical foundations of The Dream. Through the capture process, gesture is separated from the performing body and transformed into movement data, becoming a material that can be reconfigured, repeated and transferred onto digital figures.

The captured movement was applied to MetaHuman-based avatars and developed within the virtual production process of The Dream. Rather than treating motion capture as a neutral technical tool, the work approaches it as a sculptural and performative medium: a way of preserving tension, hesitation, bodily effort and ritualised movement after the live action has disappeared.

The final sculptural form was developed in ZBrush, where digitally animated bodies were reorganised into a compact, entangled structure. Limbs, torsos and gestures merge into a collective body suspended between struggle, collapse, ritual and transformation. The sculpture was then materialised as a 3D print, returning the immaterial data of performance into a tactile object.

The work refers to the classical sculptural group Laocoön and His Sons, but shifts the reference away from heroic anatomy and mythological drama toward a post-human and post-digital condition. Instead of representing a single tragic scene, the sculpture materialises a residue of captured movement — a trace of performance after it has passed through recording, simulation, animation, digital sculpting and 3D printing.

Presented within the exhibition The Dream at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the work functioned as a physical counterpart to the project’s moving-image and XR components. It made visible the passage from body to avatar, from gesture to data, and from digital image to sculptural form.