I highly recommend these two films on Maya Deren:

Maya Deren: Experimental Films

In the Mirror of Maya Deren

“dance graph= city, choreography= day’s excursion through the city” is a poor metaphor. it should be …

choreography = city
composition = list of places to visit in city
improvisation = wandering the city

performing or matching dance graphs is more akin to composition, or replicating a real, or constructed performance.

a key issue i take with the paper is the matching of different graphs and their modification into new ‘paths’. the ‘hard’ constraints etc., do not recognize that walking in a straight line is a distinct technique from walking a curve.

but back to the city metaphor, that’s the issue i’m taking in general, that basic dance principles and concepts are generally ignored or broken when computer science starts trying to model dance.

I wanted to personally invite you to participate in an online reading group I am starting. See the invite here.
http://thewinger.com/words/2007/performance-and-pedagogy-20-the-reading-group/
The first book on our plate will be Andre Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement. The soft cover version can be ordered here.
http://www.amazon.com/Exhausting-Dance-Performance-Politics-Movement/dp/0415362547
Forward this invitation to anyone you think would be interested in participating. Write me if you have any questions.

Tony Schultz
http://thewinger.com/words/category/tony/

A good place to start would be to try to understand what I mean by a “dance graph”. I did not invent this idea by any means but it is an important concept that is worth taking in. You could check one of my early posts, “Dance, Space and Place”. This can be viewed at
http://thewinger.com/words/2006/dance-space-and-place-wing014/

Since you are looking to get into the gritty details and clearly don’t need my blog’s digested version try looking at some of the science.
Interactive Motion Generation from Examples. Okan Arikan. D. A. Forsyth
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/okan/papers/s2002/s2002.pdf

This paper is a good primer for understanding a movement vocabulary as a directed graph. A path on such a graph would correspond to a single phrase or choreography. (I understand the word choreography could be, and should be, defined in any number of ways that would not fit in this usage. I mean a dance that is well defined and set and can be repeated the same way each time it is danced.) Your statement that “arguably each particle has a path” is not quite right. In this directed path model a single path is indeed a single choreography. Here is a good metaphor: dance graph= city, choreography= day’s excursion through the city. Anyway check out the paper. It has good references too.

I have no problem pointing you in the right direction for your own research but I will not simply share my source code with you and the rest of the internet. Thats not the way things are done you will find if you read any science paper. Source code is valuable intellectual property and usually not given away for free. I am planning to release a SDK for developers to use for their own projects. It will be free until projects are sold for commercial purposes. Then there will be a licensing fee. I will also have my thesis published within the year which will surely be available online. Here you can go through all the examples, mathematics, pictures of original data…etc. (Enough to make you sick of chromatic particles.)

I think I have been quite generous with my time to write this to you. I only ask that when exchanging words in this public forum that you try to be a bit nicer (for lack of a better word). PLease don’t say nasty things about Sara Rudner, I care for her deeply and it hurt me the way you invoked her name.

Also note that though we are hurdling toward the post-human we are still partly human and have human feelings. If you wish to be critical, do it constructively. Don’t describe me as part of a population of “programmers, who for the most part don’t have a clue about dance, or dance studies”. Those words are harsh and untrue. I am a physicist. Even a computer scientist would grimace at being called a programmer. I am also a dancer and thinker. I post dances online and talk about performance theory.

Check out my post “Performance and Pedagogy”.
http://thewinger.com/words/2007/performance-and-pedagogy/
It has good ideas and good dancing. We are on the same side. We are trying to get people to think. We are not in a contest Anais. There is enough room for both of us here. If you don’t like some of my work, fine, ignore it, or if you are going to criticize it do it constructively and maybe even with a bit of humor.

Believe me when I say this Anais, I really look forward to exchanging ideas with you. I don’t however look forward to reading scathing reviews of my research like I just sold you something and you are an unsatisfied customer. Everything I post online is a free gift. I fund my own research so I can own it. I would like to share it with artists. I am not making surveillance technologies or weapons. I am not competing with you for arts dollars either. I am not a threat to you. You might even find that we become friends if we can find the right way to talk to each other.

If you send me your email I have a ton of papers I could share with you regarding computer vision. Hope your dancing is going well and that you are well. I would like to hear more about your work. Maybe even post some video. It would be a gift for all of us. I hope the tone of this response is a cue to the way in which I would like to continue our conversations.

Talk to you soon.

Tony

i enjoy your fighting spirit. it has led me to a deeply somatic place where i have done some much needed soul searching.

before responding i felt compelled to consult my horoscope as rob brezsny sees it. he is usually right on and today is of course the vernal equinox.

he writes:

“People with a fraction of your savvy and resources may try to manipulate you into serving their aims. Politely ignore their pressure. This is a time when you should be enjoying your hard-earned goodies with pure relish, not worrying about them or defending them or trying to adjust them to fit anyone else’s specifications.”

with this in mind please understand why cordial decline your invitation to scrap. i do look forward to future exchanges with you. tonya plank, kristin sloan and i are planning an online reading group that will start will a critique of andre lepecki’s “exhausting dance: performance and the politics of movement”. this would be a great opportunity for us to share ideas in a more constructive and conscientious manner.

regarding this current clash of opinions we should simply agree to disagree. i say tomato and you say potato.

I started this round-up last Thursday. I might keep doing it. I’ll see how it goes. Please let me know what you think. – Early dance blogger Rachel Feinerman returns after a long hiatus. Rachel talks about life, marriage and…

(ps. in the mean time da…nce has been moved to another server and is now reachable as http://www.daprice.be. would you be so kind to adapt the link as it avoids being redirected?
Thanks!)