Embodied Mark Making: Reframing motion capture and drawing as disruptive and collaborative pedagogy

This paper investigates the integration of experimental motion capture into a collaborative drawing workshop as a pedagogical strategy to foster embodied learning and multimodal thinking in creative education. Facilitated by UNSW's Drawing Research Group and involving visiting academics and animation students from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the workshop explored drawing as a time-based, spatially immersive process, extending traditional mark making through full-body movement, motion capture, and collective experimentation. Activities ranged from large-scale floor drawings to sensory tabletop exercises, scaffolded through creative prompts that encouraged play, improvisation, and non-verbal communication. Emphasising process over product, the workshop reframed motion capture as a generative material, subject to distortion, abstraction, and surprise, rather than a precision tool. Drawing on Bishop's Artificial Hells [Bishop 2012] in which disruptive strategies for participatory art are prioritised, as well as embodied cognition, posthuman creativity, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), the paper argues for a reimagining of authorship, assessment, and participation in art and design education. Findings highlight how multimodal, collaborative tasks foster student agency, critical engagement with digital materiality, and experimental learning literacy. The workshop affirms the value of interdisciplinary, sensorimotor-rich environments that blur boundaries between drawing, performance, and media art, modelling an inclusive and future-facing pedagogy.