Archive for sarah lawrence college
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 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
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
October 8, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under dance, artists, books, training, teaching, TONY, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, blog, education, michel foucault, discipline, pedagogy, thoinot arbeau, orchesographie
This fall I am back at Sarah Lawrence College teaching Dance and Technology. All of my students are smart, engaged and still unsure whether I am really crazy, or just pretending. We have set-up our own class blog where we discuss readings and communicate about building dance machines. The blog is appropriately located at http://dancemachines.blogspot.com. Come over for a visit. Other folks seem to be taking interest. Matt Gough wrote an incredibly encouraging post you can see here.
For readings we have started out with sections from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Here is a part of that conversation.
Locating dance within Foucault’s framework of docility is both difficult and provocative. In attempting to pin dance to this trellis it becomes apparent that dance is slippery and cannot be easily categorized. It is clear however that discipline and dance are deeply entangled. Natasha spots this in the body of the soldier.
These men of the 17th-late 18th centuries were molded into figures with upright postures, programmed steps and structured attitudes; compare to ballet, especially, where all of these are instructed from an early age. Even the goals are similar - achieving honour and respect (of movement), grace, alertness, agility and strength. The quote on pg. 136: “A body that is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved”, is applicable to any dance class or performance, even improvisational. We are constantly subjecting our bodies to our aspirations and limitations, using the body and our knowledge to further its abilities for the task at hand, transforming it (whether in attitude or structure) to execute movements and improving it for the short-term goals and the long-term benefits.
Foucault opens his section on docile bodies with a reading of Montgommery’s 1636 military manual La Milice francaise. It’s description of the dancerly pikeman, who ‘will have have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible’ resonates with Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual Orchesographie. Written less than 50 years earlier, it had illustrated the strong linkages between choreography in the court and on the battlefield.
Thinking that making a dancer is just another instance of creating a docile subject (be it a soldier, factory worker, school child, or mental patient) can be uncomfortable to say the least. Janet points out how subtle power mechanisms can operate to form the subject.
For example the idea of coercion - that the power structure is being so fully and well imposed because of the fact that it’s being slipped in the back door, so to speak. “Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious,” (p. 139). It’s not being beaten into people, it’s “proper” execution is being rewarded. It is being made convenient. I think that these ideas have a very great relationship to the more “open” versions of modern and contemporary dance technique. Even when we are not working from highly stylized and codified techniques, we are still being instructed by a teacher, being ordered into levels, being auditioned for placement and so on. Therefore if we are properly disciplined in WHATEVER is the “proper” kind of “technique” (even if that is merely a general body awareness?), we are being subject to a certain power structure based on WHO decided what is “proper”.
We are inside a discipline machine with all of the spatial and temporal markers Foucault describes. This class demonstrates that. A component of the dance {1,2}/3 or graduate study in the department of dance at Sarah Lawrence College. The class is physically located in a distinct place within a time table. The time and space within the class is also divided and in doing so controls the physical activities of the participant bodies. Some stand, some sit, some on the floor, some on chairs, some speak, some erase, some write and some read. We move inside the computer for a spell. Then there is time and space designated for dancing. Our bodies and activities are seem well placed within space, time and the structure of the academy.
But, Sarah Rosner pushes back with a contrarian maneuver.
I think the thing that hit me most about the idea of discipline via the control of movements is how much i DIDN’T feel like it applied to my experience of dance.
And Sarah Richison voices related discontent, but finds in it a contradiction.
say you revolt. are no longer docile. escape from prison. you find some way to do some other dance. so you move off and do your own thing and someone follows you. someone wants to do your dance. are you then the new discipline? yes. you have manipulated their body, right.
For those of you who were looking for straight answers I fear that we have none. Instead we are left with a set of contradictions and a general understanding that dance is slippery, at times obedient and located, at other times disobedient and dislocated. Here are one, two, three, four dances, two made inside the institution and two made outside. Dissect them with regards to this contradiction between dance’s discipline and disruption.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
June 25, 2007 at 6:55 pm · Filed under dance, welcome, TONY, sarah lawrence college, wingers, ASHLEY, a o movement collective, alaska, stormy
Hello readers!
We’d like to introduce a new and intriguing member of The Winger family, Ms. Ashley Byler.
(Above, her Winger avatar, Stormy. Below, pictured with her composer/friend Softi.)
Ashley comes to us by way of Winger contributor Tony Schultz who taught her and collaborated with her in his Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College.
She has a BA in music and psychology, and a MFA in dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Ashley has created many original works in the past and is currently developing a new work with The A.O. Movement Collective, based out of D.C. and will travel to Ketchikan, Alaska soon to continue making work.
Welcome Ashley!
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
May 14, 2007 at 2:56 pm · Filed under video, TONY, sarah lawrence college, Sarah Richison, twyla tharp, project, new york dance
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
This past Sunday the Sarah Lawrence dance department participated in College Showcase: Works by Tharp, at the Joyce. The project brought together dancers from five New York colleges to perform works by Twyla Tharp. The picture above was taken during the Sarah Lawrence tech rehearsal using a slow exposure to capture the movement.
Barnard College, Eight Jelly Rolls (Jelly Roll Morton)
Hunter College, Country Dances - Excerpt (Traditional American)
The Julliard School, Deuce Coupe - Excerpt (The Beach Boys)
Marymount Manhattan College, The Fugue
Sarah Lawrence College, The Fugue (lecture demonstration)
This was a fun project to be a part of. Read the New York Times review here. Sarah Richison and I presented a video from a computational project we had been working on. I describe this project in a previous post. The video was shown in the lobby as the audience entered. It looked good on their fancy HD screen and I was happy that Sarah and I had re-shot all the footage to make everything look as crisp and clean as possible. Unfortunately I didn’t post about my showing beforehand since it was unclear, up until the last minute, whether we would be able to show the work. Intellectual property issues clouded things and the work had to be renamed Dancing Markov Networks. I didn’t mind the change however since it gave a more scientific description of what the project actually was.
Earlier in the week Sarah and I had the pleasure of presenting our project at the Joyce Soho during the last part of a Dance Talks presentation by noted dance historian and critic Marcia Siegal. Talking with Marcia Siegal was an honor and a pleasure. She is an incredibly accomplish writer, academic and thinker in the field of dance and dance studies. We were a bit star struck. Sarah even brought one of her books for Marcia to sign. It was great to talk about our work with such an engaged audience. I definitely hope to keep in touch with Marcia Siegel in the future. She had a great enthusiasm for exploring ideas about dance through computational methods. It always feels good when people take genuine interest in your work.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
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