Reconstruction of Actors' Bodily Performance and Aesthetic Turn in the Context of Digital Media

Abstract

As motion capture, virtual production, digital doubles, and post-production compositing become increasingly embedded in screen production, the actor’s body is no longer merely a complete physical presence recorded by the camera. It has become a productive material that can be selected, encoded, fragmented, recombined, and re-imaged. The crucial question, therefore, is not whether digital technology will replace the actor’s body, but how embodied experience enters a media system, how the continuity of character action is preserved through image reconstruction, and how the actor’s subjectivity is repositioned within a collaborative production network. Drawing on performance theory, body aesthetics, and embodied cognition, this study reviews research on digital bodies and actor training, proposing a four-layer model of bodily reconstruction: corporeal presence, media translation, image reconstruction, and relational regeneration. On this basis, it identifies three interrelated shifts in digital screen acting: from the integral body to the editable body, from bodily visibility to embodied perceptibility, and from a singular performing subject to a collaboratively generated subject. The study argues that digital technology does not diminish the value of the actor’s body; rather, it relocates where bodily meaning is produced. The aesthetic value of acting increasingly depends on whether intentional action, relational response, rhythm, and embodied experience can survive technological translation and remain perceptible to the spectator. Accordingly, acting education should extend beyond conventional physical expressivity to integrate bodily awareness, camera-scale control, media collaboration, and image-based reflection.