BreakBear 2.0
Posted by Sloan
BreakBear 2.0
Another take on Tony’s video of break dancing bear toys, just for fun.
I love that the little guys are dancing on an Apple laptop. Those are my kind of bears.
Music by DJ TopShelf at podsafeaudio.com
Archive for break dance
Break
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Sometimes it takes a mad scientist to push the boundaries. Its my responsibility to puncture surfaces and open up the interstitial spaces where we beg the questions: what is science, what is art, and what is dance?
Here is another big question. What are the aesthetic criteria that make something dope? I don’t know… sometimes we can only show by example. For me, the best way is through dance. Below is a dance I made called Break with the most simple of media machines: stopaction.
Dancing bears are dope to me. Click on the image to watch the video. Download it with a right click. Maybe even watch it fullscreen. Add music to it, stick it on your ipod and make it your own.
This dance is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license.
Enjoy.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
Steal This Dance
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Here is another dance using my interactive time-machine system.
There has been some talk over on Great Dance about intellectual property rights as it relates to dance. Creative Commons is a beautiful thing. The idea that someone can own the rights to a dance seems absurd to me. All dance is derivative because it is about communication. The idea of owning a dance seems as silly as owning a word. The dance below quotes Viola Farber, Merce Cunningham, Christopher Williams and B-Girl Angel. Like DJ Spooky says, it is in the remixing of culture that we find something original. Feel free to steal this dance. Perform it exactly as I did if you like. Play the video however you like, just give me a shout-out, keep it intact and don’t use it to sell anything. The music Emptyness by Gahnah was also distributed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License.
Enjoy 
Recent Posts by tony schultz
Time Machine 0 | WING013
| | 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
Recent Posts by tony schultz
The Winger is a Dance Technology
| | Posted by Tony
Thank you for the introduction. It is exciting to communicate here. The Winger itself is testament to the way technology is changing dance. The democratization of space for showing and talking about dance, through the internet, is transforming the way it is seen and practiced. Communication technologies such as blogs and message boards facilitate relationships between artists and opens discussion with viewers. Free video over IP services provided by sites such as blip.tv or YouTube provide an open trading ground for anyone to share dance media with the world.
Three years ago, in the summer of 2003, I traveled to Paris. Having heard it had a rich breaking culture I decided to seek it out. Since there is no academy of breakdance this journey depended on developing relationships with individual human beings rather than institutions. Through Bboy.com, a great web forum started by Fresh of LA Breakers, I ended up contacting and meeting b-girl Angel and b-boy Cuser. These two people are some of the most creative and beautiful artists I have ever met. They were so kind to me, taking me into their home, feeding me and bringing me to practice with them so I could learn and participate.
This experience fundamentally transformed the way I think about culture making and dancing. Finding real people dancing, not on stage but in the world, made me shift my perspective on where art comes from, where it belongs and what function it serves. Those who are compelled to create and advance these forms are often not professional dancers. They train hard and sacrifice simply because they know this work is important.
I have maintained a close relationship with Angel over the years and was so excited when she came to New York this summer to compete at the We-B-Girlz, 25th Anniversary Breaking Event at Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Since meeting Angel three years ago she has finished her Masters in English and American Culture at the Sorbonne and moved to London to teach and dance. There she is part of an incredible b-girl crew known as Flowzaic. Its members Rowdy, Genesis, SunSun and Angel all came to stay with me the week of the event.
Of course, the best footage I found for the event was posted on The Winger. Angel is the amazing dancer at the end of the video. King Uprock tries to follow her into the circle after her first set. He quickly rethinks that proposition when Angel goes back down. I would do the same thing.
Having Flowzaic stay with me, feeding them and showing them the city was by far the highlight of my summer. I hope to see them all soon and I will definitely keep you abreast of what they are doing. Until then, here is a clip from Battle of the Year in England. You can see their use of canon and lyricism at the end of the clip is pushing the form into a richer aesthetic.
None of these relationships would have been possible without the internet’s capacity to open up broad communities. The Winger is a wonderful communication technology for those in and around the dance world. I am really happy to be contributing and am excited to share my work and that of my students and friends. This will be a great outlet to get people thinking and discussing science and technology as it relates to dance and our future kinesthetic.
