| | Posted by Tony
I have of late become obsessed with time machines. They are everywhere and my apprehension of them is expanding. In our contemporary landscape, where space is almost fully dominated, time is the frontier and battleground. Telling radical history and making radical culture shapes the future. Time machines are war machines and in the hands of both propagandists and bandits. We make them today with cameras and computers.

Cinema is a time machine. Cool thought, but others came up with it first. Bergson and Deleuze helped develop this line of thinking. One idea: images pass messages between the past and future through the present interface of memory and perception. The creation of art and culture is a mode of tele-portation and time-travel. These portals are accessed through viewership and cognition. Another idea: cinema’s control of moving images frees storytelling from the dictated velocity and chronology of time. Our modern media technologies are time machines in their capacity to stretch, cut and manipulate the time-code. This is transformative to our consciousness, interaction…and our dancing.

Time machines have become the theme of the first few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. One of our first projects uses differential time rates to escape the perceptual confines of a Newtonian clockwork universe. The goal is to give dancers cinematic control over time contractions and dilations, while they are dancing. Computer vision algorithms are used to combine dancing and cinematography into a single practice. The record rate continually responds to the dancer’s input, providing equal amounts of visual flux between successive frames. If there is much action in the visual field the camera speeds up to catch it. If the dancing slows to an adagio the camera slows down too.

Have a look at what kind of visual artifact it creates and think what kind of time machine you would like to dance with.

Algorithm and Dance: Tony Schultz
Music: “Turkish” by Disco Nap