White Glove Tracking

Michael Jackson performing Billie Jean at Motown 25, with a yellow box following his white glove from frame to frame

Yellow box example by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, from whiteglovetracking.com.

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.

Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth made it as a 2007 Rhizome Commission, with backing from Eyebeam. I built the Flash version of the remix kit (credited as “J-Dubs” on whiteglovetracking.com) and put the code and data on GitHub in 2008.

How it worked

The performance runs 5 minutes 35 seconds, or 10,060 frames. Instead of writing complicated code to find the glove, Evan and Ben asked 10,060 internet users to each click and drag a box around the glove in one frame (project writeup, May 2007).

It was supposed to be a silent launch for a couple of days of beta testing. MetaFilter found it first, then Digg picked it up and traffic “simply rocketed” around May 4, 2007. MetaFilter commenters suggested serving frames in random order, which was more fun, so they switched. Per the writeup:

The site’s own tally is 125,000 gloves located within 72 hours. One Digg commenter summed it up: “It’s great that we’ve cured cancer so we can now dedicate resources to other important projects like this.”

The remixes

The data went out free as wgt_data_v1.txt, along with the video, audio and projects for Processing, openFrameworks and Flash. People sent in visualizations, like Zach Lieberman’s speed-as-height piece, David Wicks’ flocking gloves and Jonathan Cremieux’s glove on fire. Tim Knapen crossed it with Mickey Mouse in January 2008.

Flocking Gloves: tangled white and orange trails on black, drawn from the glove data

Flocking Gloves by David Wicks, from the White Glove Tracking gallery.

A still from Speed = Height, which maps the glove's speed to height, showing Michael Jackson on stage

Speed = Height by Zach Lieberman, from the White Glove Tracking gallery.

The Billie Jean Wikipedia article with a pointing-hand cursor driven by the glove data

Wikipedia Entry by Evan Roth, from the White Glove Tracking gallery.

In May 2008 Evan posted a compilation video shown at the New Museum. The top ten contributors got ASCII art prints: one made from the glove’s X-Y coordinates, one from every contributor’s email address.

Two ASCII art prints: a white glove on black paper and a pixel pointing-hand cursor on white paper

Contributor prints by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, from whiteglovetracking.com.

Slide titled White Glove Tracking, Evan Roth (2007), with the yellow-box frame and 125,000 tracked gloves in 72 hours Slide from FAT Lab's PechaKucha Berlin talk by Aram Bartholl and Tobias Leingruber, 2009.

Where it showed

Coverage included Rhizome (July 2007), Make (Phillip Torrone, January 2008) and VizWorld (July 2009).

See also: FAT Lab