White Glove Tracking was a crowdsourced project to isolate Michael Jackson’s iconic white glove from his legendary 1983 performance of “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 TV special.
This was the performance where MJ debuted the moonwalk to a national audience.
The Project
We divided the performance into 10,060 individual frames and invited the Internet to trace the white glove in each one. Contributors used a simple web-based drawing tool to outline the glove frame by frame.
The result was a complete dataset of glove positions that could be used to create new visualizations, animations, and art pieces.
Collaborators
- Evan Roth - Project lead, concept
- Ben Engebreth - Development
- Jamie Wilkinson - Development, promotion
- FAT Lab - Production
Links
Press
The project was featured in Wired, Creative Applications, and numerous art/tech blogs. It was also exhibited at galleries and festivals worldwide.
A FAT Lab project, 2009