Archive for learning
March 29, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under studio, media, video, teaching, TONY, dance and technology, science, space, physics, apples, computer graphics, opengl, education, performance, school, pedagogy, astronomy, learning, hermes, arts, double feature, animation
Last month I wrote a guest post on Matt Gough’s blog quodlibet titled math skills. It addressed the question of what fundamentals of physics and mathematics should be included in the dance technology curriculum.
Since dance-tech is in its infancy and still forming as a field this is an open question. This issue is not simply about inserting math and science into an arts curriculum but more so about how these two worlds partner. The action is reciprocal, math and science inform the dance and dance-tech provides new ways of knowing math and physics.
Force is one of the central landmarks of physics pedagogy. Gravity is Newton’s force.
And to use the force you must learn the force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about forces.
So is dancing.
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
November 5, 2007 at 4:48 am · Filed under dance, home, culture, apple, environment, life, learning, inspiration, hans rowling, TED conference
“Culture is the most important thing I would say. Because that is what brings joy to life. That’s the value of living.” - Hans Rosling at TED
I’ve had a bad cough/cold for almost two weeks now, so in an effort to help eradicate it for good, I pretty much spent the day on our couch. Doug left for Arizona at 4AM this morning, so I was unfortunately on my own in my loud foggy world (I’m glad he’ll finally be able to get some sleep tonight though!).
We got an AppleTV when it first came out, hoping it would be as amazing as almost every other Apple product we’ve been able to get our hands on, but unfortunately we were a bit disappointed (it’s possible, though, that we were expecting too much). The only thing we really use it for (rarely) is watching YouTube videos on a big screen (they actually don’t look so bad, and the searching and selecting interface is pretty good).
So today, I felt like I needed a little extra nerdy inspiration, and so I caught up on watching some of the videos of speakers at the yearly TED Conference. I was fortunate enough to come across this talk given by international health professor Hans Rowling, in which he uses his incredible graphing system to visualize statistics about the world, particularly analyzing data that can begin to help figure out how to pull people in developing countries out of poverty.
After showing his revealing Trendalyzer software (which was apparently bought by Google 10 days after this conference - you can play with it here!), he pulls up one simple powerpoint page (above), detailing and rating the MEANS and the GOALS for improving people’s lives. The conclusion was that while economic growth is the most effective means of development, culture is, in the end, the ultimate goal to strive for.
“It’s a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious.”
He then removes his shirt (exposing a muscle tank decorated with lightening bolts) and proceeds to demonstrate the ancient Indian tradition of sword swallowing, driving home his point (through culture!) that the seemingly impossible is possible.
Amazing. See for yourself…
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
May 29, 2007 at 7:07 pm · Filed under SLOAN, ballet, music, david hallberg, ny times, choreography, mirror neurons, brain, memory, diane solway, dr. daniel glaser, wired magazine, nova, learning, steps, numenta, jeff hawkins, htm, intelligence, frederic franklin
In an article in the New York Times this morning, Diane Solway takes a look at how dancers manage to remember all of their steps. Particularly in the cases of ABT or NYCB (for this article Diane watched ABT dancers - our own Mr. Hallberg included - learning parts), it really is a major part of the job. In the article she says that ABT will rotate through 21 works this season, by choreographers of varying styles, and I know NYCB usually falls in the 30-50 work range for an eight week season.
This article really interested me, as it touched upon a lot of things I’ve been curious about for a while. Personally, when I read about studies on the brain and then think about how it may apply to how my dancer brain learns, retains, and then spits out choreography, it totally fascinates me. I remember reading an article a few years ago (I think it was in the Times magazine) about mirror neurons, and how when we are watching a movie, or watching anything for that matter, there is a part of our brain that actually mirrors the actions we are seeing and thinks, in some respect, that our body is actually doing them. This is something that sounds so familiar to dancers. You know… You are watching someone else perform a piece of choreography that you know, and sometimes your muscles actually twitch in reaction to recognizing the movement. And the fact that you can be sitting down, watching someone perform a series of steps, while at the same time thinking about how your body would dance those particular steps, and then stand up and repeat them.
Dr. Daniel Glaser talks about dancers basically learning the choreography in chunks (he calls it “chunking” - a term I’m sure ballet dancers will love) and that they form these chunks based on things like rhythm or imagery, spatially, or even from an inner monologue. These chunks or phrases are what then become strung together to make one long movement.
Dance is a language. Once you learn the language, you can begin to predict what steps could come next based on combinations that have become familiar to you. This is obviously very useful when it comes to ballet, where when someone says “tombé pas de bourrée glissade assemblé” you aren’t thinking of each individual step on it’s own, because it’s a recognized sequence in your ballet vocabulary. For the most part, in classical dance, there are only so many steps that can physically link to other steps based on where your body, your weight, and your momentum are at that moment. The fact that you can predict, to some extent, a handful of next possible steps, greatly cuts the amount of time it takes to learn a full sequence of steps.
I started thinking more about the whole predicting thing when I read an article in Wired about Numenta, a new company formed by Jeff Hawkins based on theories from his book On Intelligence. One of the first things Numenta has created is a software that attempts to mimic the process of human thought, based on what they are calling Hierarchical Temporal Memory (or HTM). They describe HTM as “a new computing paradigm that replicates the structure and function of the human neocortex”.. If you feel compelled to read more about it, you can click here, but really, the way the process was described in the Wired article reminded me a lot of why it’s so much easier for a dancer to learn choreography than a non-dancer.
But that’s even with the music element stripped out. The second you add music, that’s’ just another layer that helps us immensely. It’s amazing how your boss can say, “So-and-so is out… I need someone for the first movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet tonight. You did it at some point over the years… Do you remember any of it?” And at first you try to think of the steps, and you think. “No I definitely have no recollection of a single step in the entire piece.” But then you hear the music, and it’s all right there, like magic. In the NY Times article Ms. Solway mentioned Frederic Franklin, who while watching a pas de deux that he had performed at some point during his 93 years, says, “It’s all in here, when I’m watching them, I can feel my muscles doing it.”
Ok, so after all that blabbing on, while I was looking for links to all these things… I found on NOVA’s website, a study by Dr. Glaser (who I mentioned above and who is in the current Times article), where he did MRI’s of ballet dancers and capoeira dancers (as well as non-dancers, or “native subjects” as he calls them) while they watched ballet and capoeira. He basically found that the dancers’ mirror neurons where working most when viewing their known style of dance, but still worked more than a non-dancer while viewing the unfamiliar dance style. Any dancer could have predicted that outcome, but it’s still interesting that they chose to test dancers to explore their theories on mirror neurons. Glaser explains it well in an audio clip on NOVA’s website.
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
