a study in choreography for camera

electronic tap solo

if you can’t see this video try here.

RPM’s Remixed

Föhn

only skin

– tetheredto

what is it i bare, and why … muscles moving seductive and sinuous. for the maker, myself or the audience?

i’m not sure i care anymore … when its empty its clear, and when it has meaning /purpose it’s the last thing on your mind.

they are there to look, i am there to been seen. see what you will, its only a performance – it’s only skin.

scrape your knee; it is only skin
makes the sound of violins
– joanna newsom

connectivity

© matrianklw

it’s typical; i start work on a networked performance project and loose my network connection. i hope this isn’t a bad omen.

until now, my experience of performing in networked choreographies has been video based. and those which i have enjoyed most have involved some perception / feedback of the audience. dancing in a box 2.5 square meter box, with camera relaying the outside to the inside, and the inside to the outside in a dislocated space was … odd.

in this work the audience were purposely lead to believe i was co-located in the gallery space, when actually i was in the storage room of the building. the identical boxes (one in the gallery, one in storage) were solidly constructed and surrounded by do not touch signs. you couldn’t hear me moving about inside even with your ear to the side. however, the box in the gallery space was fitted with contact microphones, so i could listen to the physical-auditory actions / effects of the gallery spectators.

the movement architect‘s (choreographers) concept was to examine the nature of presence within the mediated performance. so whilst the signs read ‘do not touch’, they were an invitation to touch. no gallery staff were posted in the room and the finger and hand prints of people who had already touched the white boxes were visible.

so how intimate was that, mediated dislocated space?, well for me no more or less intimate that a telephone call, and at time just as intrusive. i rarely get any form of system control in dance technology works, and this was no exception. it’s not so much that i objected to being on show all the time, but that some ability to filter my presence would have been nice. there were people i hid from, people i wanted to get closer too, and deprived of any other contact there were feelings of intimacy.

as dancers we are conditioned to find and nurture intimacy even in the most difficult / public of situations. it is easy to assume, perceive and invent deep connections from superficial contact. but reading, and listening to feedback from the audience it becomes clear that contemporary spectators can perceive presence and intimacy in both networked and distributed performances.

it’s not just my training / bias, people want to believe and connect … and more than that they are used to intimate moments being mediated by a range of technologies. reaching to technology to reach out and touch someone is not so new, or unfamiliar.

room service

being on tour means that i can’t always get online when i want to, or need to. if i’m a little slow in responding to your emails or approving comments etc. please accept my apologies.

i think its clear to anyone that tony’s attempts to ridicule what i have said are a little childish. it is sad that someone who lectures at a university cannot respond maturely to criticism of his work.

address my critique directly tony, don’t avoid it or play games … share more about your work, give better explanations if you really think i am missing something. share more of your data, code and output.

your belief in astrology may make you feel better, but it certainly does not improve the quality of your work. and, if you are going to start a critiquing others work (i.e. andre lepecki) you should be prepared to have you own work examined in a similar manner.

il duello

– yakanama

i always find it interesting that the majority of those who ‘create’ dance technologies are unable to deal with criticism of their work. This is especially true of the programmers, who for the most part don’t have a clue about dance, or dance studies … tony schultz is a perfect example of this.

tony posted a belated comment on my post chromatic particles in which he takes offense to my critique of his work. In spite of tony’s protestations, his work is flawed for the application he suggested it might be used for … documentation and notation. go back to doc&rec 101 tony, and take some notation classes while you are at it.

the model does not get “confused” or fail to “work properly” when the legs fuse together, it simply represents the legs as a single particle when there is occlusion between mirror limbs. this single particle representation of the legs together is sufficient for the detection algorithm to function and for the viewer to perceive what is happening, and thats all the only work i need to get done.

And just for reference from his first post …

I primarily talked about my thesis research and how it can be applied to the problems of notating and documenting dance. My research uses computer vision algorithms to represent the body as a set of chromatic particles. Once the body is reduced to numbers it becomes possible to automatically recognize different poses. Once these landmarks are identified the computer can generate a map of the movement space in the form of a dance graph.

The bottom line is that your approach is deeply flawed when applied to dance notation and documentation.

If your software deals with occlusions or mirror limbs by blending them into a single limbs then it is failing to identify landmarks correctly. So yes, your software does get confused when trying to map the landmarks, occlusion is not equal to fusion, it is misidentification. so is not a useful contemporary dance notation because it fails to notate what is happening. anyway splitting hairs over the function of the markov models and the aims of your software is does not distract from the overall problem. Maybe you also don’t realize that orientation is a component of posture, and the visual representation you are using is very poor at delineating between different orientations.

You cannot reconstruct properly from the software / example you have shown … Representation of two legs as a single object does not tell me what is happening with the legs. All i have seen of your work is automated systems that replicate and (re)visualise post-modern (post-judson) choreographic principles and practice … Its no wonder that sara rudner and twyla tharp find your work interesting. I mean really, they are hardly guiding lights in dance and technologies practice. telling me they find it interesting does not change the fact that the chromatic particles are a poor tool for notation and documentation.

You don’t really know what to look for in the dancing body to select and apply the appropriate mathematical models.

And yes, i have read your other posts, which equally show a lack of depth in dance and dance technologies history / theory. You seem deeply unaware of what you are replicating in dance technology and the finer aspects of dance arts. Don’t confuse me for a twirly that does not understand your mathematical / computational approach … I do. And i can see where it is misapplied. So if you want to really defend your work, share your code.

i am not sure what you mean when you refer to my style of choreography. the video presents only a single path derived from the graph extracted from a set of improvisational data.

Firstly your explanation of a single path here is poor, as arguably each particle has a path. So i will assume you mean the general motion path (which is a crude approximation, like your representation). The graph, or whatever you want to call it has stylistics elements common to hiphop/street dance vocabulary. thats what i was referring to as your choreographic style.

Its also interesting you don’t show the original data set and source, was there to much divergence between the two?

shared transcriptions

– robo7

there are times i’m asked to ignore the technology when improvising, to ‘let it do it’s job’ whilst i do mine. of course the people asking me this do know that i’ll draw on aspects of the mediated output (video, audio etc) but what they want to see are two separate processes.

firstly they are looking at my engagement with the improvised score, transcribing concepts and context into embodied motion. secondly (or maybe firstly) they are considering how the software transcribes my output based on its on conceptual scores (patches and modules).

the technology is my partner, like one of those duet forms where dancer b follows dancer a but rather than mimesis (mindless copying) creates new material from what they see. we perceive, interpret, transcribe and output. there is no collision between us, no uncomfortable liminality.

when the system doesn’t work, its no more jarring than being out of sync with a physical partner. sometimes less so, i’ve never been dropped my software … except from a telepresence broadcast, and that didn’t hurt too much. in the better systems i’ve worked with, i sense the human element of the technology, or at least the processes of transformation and transcription that we share.

for me the richness of myself and the technology is the gradual teasing out of the processes we are engaged in. not things hidden from view but layered and perceptible to those who look with knowing and open eyes. that is the beauty of improvisation, and with the right performance technologies my practice is richer in diverse variations.

recital of gestures

waiting in airport for a transfer (to taiwan)… dreaming of the flight attendants:

– jenwang

(click on the image for the full set)