June 1, 2008 at 8:42 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, physics, guggenheim, works & process, Karole Armitage, Brian Greene, world science festival, Jim Gates
This weekend brought the World Science Festival to New York. From Thursday through Sunday science came into focus through various lectures and performances throughout the city. On Friday night I went to see Armitage Gone! Dance present The Elegant Universe as part of The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series. This new dance work by Karole Armitage was inspired by theoretical physicist Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe about string theory.
The work consisted of three different chapters, each based on a piece physics. First relativity, then quantum mechanics and last string theory. According to the Armitage website, this triptych is meant to “unveil the central drama of current theoretical physics” namely the incommensurability of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the promise of “string theory, which resolves the conflict and revolutionizes our understanding of the universe.” Each chapter was itself split into sections the title of which was projected through the dark on a large sheet of paper held by two dancers. I enjoyed this as a theatric pedagogical device. My favorite section was Quantum Foam.
The dancing was much bigger than the stage space. Armitage has beautiful dancers all of whom are great to watch and the Guggenheim stage is terribly small. This made it especially wonderful when the dancing came off the stage and into the aisles. I always enjoy watching dancers close up especially when they its large fast movement and you know there is a possibility you might get clipped in the head. Hey, I like danger.
Blending physics and dance is also risky. If they are not thoroughly mixed, the combination of these two ingredients can create an excess convective heat. Framing the dance work, theoretically and chronologically, was talk by Karole Armitage and physicist Jim Gates director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland in College Park.
I wish Jim and Karole had spent more time trying to bridge the gap to have a conversation with each other rather than trying to teach the audience about either physics or dance. Opening up any line between the arts and sciences is valuable so I will try not to be to critical. Perhaps if they spoke about something as basic as symmetry they might have been able to have a more enlightening exchange. As it stood their conversation didn’t seem very productive for each other or the audience.
It is not that often you open up a dialogue between these two fields so I had high hopes. Physical theory and dance composition certainly have things in common regarding operations in time and space. Thanks to the Guggenheim for hosting the dance and talk. The performance of music by Lukas Ligeti held its own amidst all the high legs and high minds. The whole event and reception were enjoyable.
I hope events which help connect dance to other fields continue to be developed and sponsored.
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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.
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October 10, 2006 at 10:03 am · Filed under TONY, sarah lawrence, space, cartography, dance graph, dance technology, directed, graph, maps, physics, place
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| Posted by Tony
Dance is a space craft and space is complex. Physics gives us powerful abstract representations of space that can be useful in this navigation. The trick is to exploit dimensionality to encode change and multiplicity.
At any moment the physical state of a particle can be represented by its position (where it is) and its velocity (where it is going). The 3 numbers associated with each of these quantities together form a vector, a list of 6 numbers. This vector can be thought of a single point in an abstract 6 dimensional space. By extension, the state of a 10 particle system, at any instant, can be represented by a single point in a 60 dimensional space.
What about representing the human body?
Many articulated systems are modeled this way, including proteins, robotic assemblies, and the human body. A human skeleton’s position, orientation and articulation is reasonably approximated by a single point in a 90 dimensional space. The body’s velocity, rotation and change in articulation can be represented using another 90 dimensions. Any action of the body can be represented by a point or set of points in this 180D space.
Idea 1:
At any instant, the physical state of a body can be represented by a point in a high dimensional abstract space. This is a state space.
Muscular, gravitational, structural, environmental and inertial forces accelerate the body through different states. In dancing, the body freely navigates the continuum of states, and over time, carves an extrusion of them. Back in state space, this extrusion maps to a line of connected state points. This line points forward in time; it is directed. This line has no breaks, says Zeno, since moving from one state/point to another means passing through all the states/points in between.
Idea 2:
The changing of a body’s state carves a directed path in state space. Here dancing is a form of path making, a line of flight in space.
We use maps to navigate this space. The study of dance is a kind abstract cartography. Places in space are identified and named. Standing upright is a place and the name of that place is first position. Whenever I come to first position, or move through first position, I use it as a landmark to get my bearings. I know many paths that come to that place and many paths that leave from it. It is well mapped and has many crossings.
Idea 3:
Learning to move is a form of cartography. Identifying places in state space gives us the capacity to know where we are and where we can go. We drop breadcrumbs as we dance, and like Hansel and Gretel, hope to find these crumbs again so that we might find our way.
Over the past two weeks, in my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students have been exploring this idea. We have built the computational machinery to identify points in state space and use paths of dance between these places to build a map in the form of a directed dance graph. A special program had to be built to travel this graph.
The nodes of this graph represent the named places in state space. Connecting these nodes are paths of dance represented in timecode. The player traverses the paths by taking a “random walk” along the graph. This allows the dancing to tunnel across time, to proximal paths in state space, while maintaining kinesthetic continuity. All of the cuts are made by the computer based on the random sampling of the of generated histogram of tunneling probabilities. A recording of one such walk is seen above.
We all dance in the same abstract space and collaborate in its mapping. Since no one person can inhabit all parts of this space we expand our understanding of it by reading the maps of others. This project has been going on for thousands of years and now technology can be used to advance it. Dance is a space craft and we navigate it collectively.
Algorithm: Tony Schultz
Dancers: Hadar Ahuvia, Ashley Byler, I’Nasha Crockett, Jessica Long, Erin Reck, Sarah Richison, Sarah Rosner and Lily Susskind.
Music: “Diss Location” by High Alert Status
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