Archive for dance technology
April 8, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under dance, TONY, dance graph, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, video game, aesthetics, Cavin Moore, Michel Gondry, Meghan McCoy
This is a live dance composition interface that we built in my Dance & Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. You could also call it a video game. It uses the Wii controller to compose both dancer and viewer movement in a virtual space. This is an extended version of last years Dance Graph.
Gondry’s film and installation at Deitch Projects, Be Kind Rewind, presents a refreshing view of culture, putting value on process and participation over product and profit. Making computer games out of ourselves, our movement vocabularies and the environments we inhabit, follows this same philosophy.
“I don’t intend nor have the pretension to teach how to make films. Quite the contrary. I intend to prove that people can enjoy their time without being part of the commercial system and serving it. Ultimately, I am hoping to create a network of creativity and communication that is guaranteed to be free and independent from any commercial institution.”-Michel Gondry
moves: Cavin Moore
photo: Meghan McCoy
music: Real Nice by Should Have Thought of That
Recent Posts by tony schultz
January 24, 2008 at 6:10 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, dance technology
War and money…it’s not the same old thing. They are hot contemporary topics that demand our attention. The economy is in recession and our military aggression on the world has no end in sight. War and money are entangled in an exquisitely complex embrace and it is within this romance that we move move move.
It makes us move.
This is why dance, it’s technologies and their study can help develop greater understanding of how war and money are choreographed. War is a dance machine based on debt. Money is a dance machine based on debt.
The machine moves because debt makes us move.
I will take the time to elaborate these points in my next couple posts. The dance is coming so stay tuned.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
January 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under dance, guest, TONY, dance technology, interactive, research, sarah lawrence college, students, education, dance teacher, performance, project, choreography, discipline, pedagogy, process, learning, intelligence, fun, dance criticism, dance lesson, social network, improvisation, Julie Cruse, VICKI, choreobot
For the last meeting of my class last semester, 12-21-07, I had Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s EMMA Lab as a guest to share her research in developing Chorebot VICKI. VICKI stands for Virtual Improvisational Choreographer / Kinetic Instructor. She a virtual automaton who guides a dancer through a structured improvisation using randomly generated verbal cues. Upon initializing VICKI she describes her purpose.
She says:
Choreobot is designed to challenge a dancer’s movement skills, and asks the dancer to draw upon advanced improvisational interpretation. I am programmed to make dances using theme and variation as prescribed by my creator. I use textbook dance methods, but - I am unpredictable. The dancer will demonstrate as I begin my next new dance.
Read more of Julie’s description of the technology HERE at the project website.
Before the lecture demonstration Julie and I had to rebuild modules of the assembly so that we could get VICKI to talk off Intel-based Macs. Retooling software under time constraints can be terribly stressful but I am glad to report we patched things up in time for the class. Julie’s lecture/demonstration was wonderful. She took some time to explain her impetus for building the machine and gave the students a tour of VICKI’s inner workings. Next Julie fired up the choreobot and demonstrated how she danced under VICKI’s instruction. Next she invited the students to try. Watching the student’s improvisation was exciting.
The system forces the dancer to think on their toes and make quick decisions. With time I could see a dancer becoming expert at navigating in this environment. Julie has clearly taken the time to do this. For her it was the first time she was able to observe other people dancing inside her system. By the end of the class everyone was incredibly energized and immersed in conversation regarding future research using choreobot VICKI. Julie has left us with a copy of VICKI and has encouraged us to continue experimenting with and mutating the system.
Matt Gough has taken a good deal of time developing an analysis of this work. In particular Matt takes issue with the description of the work as an “artificial intelligence” simply seeing it as an automated version of Cunningham’s method of chance procedures. Julie has documented the critical discourse HERE.
I met Julie inside Sector 9 of the blogosphere. There she has made bold gestures regarding dance-technology as a field. Like Matt Gough, she has voiced discontent over the current state of dance-tech.
She writes:
When I hear dance and tech, I think - it better not be ANOTHER interactive audio/video environment. It better not be ANOTHER…
…dance contextualized by projected videos
…dancer controlled by robotics or sensors improvisation in real time that composes the score
…motion capture in real time translated to animated projections
…wearable technologies that do something with sound or video
…animated avatars in second life real time “telematic” improvising
I find such pugilistic remarks invigorating and am excited to see what trouble Julie stirs up in the future.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
January 4, 2008 at 4:49 pm · Filed under TONY, dance technology, community, blogging, communications, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network, discussion
I have been fairly quiet this semester on the winger, delving into deeper recesses of the blogosphere. Most of my writing has been on Dance Machines, the group blog for my class at Sarah Lawrence College, and in the bowels of the dancetech network. The dancetech network is similar to the inter-mission, they are both social networks run on the ning platform, and cast the ever enticing poly-panoptic gaze.
Its decription reads:
A dance and technology social network that aggregates and facilitates the flow of information and the distributed intelligence among movement, new media artists and theorists working in the confluence of embodied performance practices and new media.
It is interesting to compare the two. To view the intermission you have to be a member. You dont have to be a member view dancetech. The intermission has great graphic design. Conversations are friendly and straightforward. I especially like the fact that their is a member called theintermission whose interests include 1’s and 0’s and bodies in motion. This embodiment of many in one is Malkovichian and devilishly post-modern. It is a socialist gesture made through recursive induction.
The dancetech network is not such a friendly place. The site lacks the solid design of intermission/winger; the erratic changes in the layout make it feel more like battleground on some unstable landscape. Conversations range from metaphysical to ‘pataphysical. Forum conversations often run off topic and involve a significant amount of head-butting. The language can be cryptic, esoteric and vague.
And for all this I love it. Come over and have a look. The blog can be found here.
It is a great place to interact with people entangled in research involving technology and dance. It is where I met Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s Experimental Media and Movement Arts Lab. The work and interaction demands its own posting.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
November 5, 2007 at 10:37 pm · Filed under film, TONY, dance technology, event, hermes
November 9th, 2007 at Monkeytown
Two screenings: 7:30 and 10:00, $5
Reservations strongly suggested. Make a reservation at:
www.monkeytownhq.com
Welcome to the 4th-annual T-MINUS Film Festival: Bringing Time into Focus.
What slows down when everything speeds up? Why do things that move fast demonstrate a unique inner peace when viewed from a different speed? What are the defining patterns in the world of motion?
T-MINUS 2007 showcases a collection of imaginative and innovative work from filmmakers, scientists, photographers, dancers, printers, musicians, and passengers (as well as a few roosters) from around the globe - attempting to explore these questions through the creative medium of time.
This year’s festival presents 13 works encompassing a range of techniques and perspectives - from 16mm walks through NYC, to algorithm’s in dance. Through shifting sequences, interrupting motion, or shuffling timelines, each piece succeeds at illuminating the hidden corners of our world by bringing Time into Focus.
Including work by:
Charles Lim
Chris Jordan
Grant Wakefield
John Adderly
Luca Mugnaini
Luke Dubois
Nathaniel Stern
Peter Shapiro
Sameer Butt
Ting Hsing Want
Tony Schultz
Adam Kendall
Robert Dennis
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
·
Next entries »
