Tag Archives: dance

Research Critique: Costume and Textile

Utam Moses (choreographer) and Eric Lindsay’s (composer)”The Space Between Us” is a collaborative electronic music and modern dance piece for computationally enhanced dancers and MAX/MSP, a programming language for interactive music and multimedia.

the space between us
The dancers’ costumes are augmented a wearable microcomputer (LilyPad Arduino), a wireless transmitter, and various sensors.

The costumes are embedded with LilyPad Arduino technology. One of the dancers’ (with the round skirt) costume combines LilyPad components and an XBee (wireless transmitter) together with pressure and flex sensors connected by conductive thread, which detects and transmits the movements of the dancer to the composer’s laptop, which are then used to generate and control sound within a MAX/MSP environment.

lilypadMainBoard
Lilypad Arduino Board

 

“The e-textiles facilitate interactivity between dancers’ movements and the music that accompanies their dancing, transforming the power dynamic between composer and choreographer by putting the power of live musical improvisation in the hands (body) of dancers. This relationship extends an unprecedented power to dancers, who are most often constrained by the decisions made previously by a composer.”                                                                                            – Eric Lindsay

For the costumes to achieve functionalities and expressive capabilities, sensors are to track the most communicative motions of the dancers, the music controls had to be sensitive to the gestures onstage but conspicuous enough so as to ensure the audience knew what movements elicited which kinds of sounds, and the costumes had to withstand duress from stretching, heat, and perspiration.

im2
Instead of a dancer’s movements being a slave to the fixed constraints of a pre-composed piece of music, the wireless dance costume puts the power of live musical composition in the hands (body) of the dancer, who can explore and improvise new shapes and structures within an otherwise free musical environment.

This project uses Arduino kit which is an open source technology. It is important as all Arduino boards are completely open-source, empowering users to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs. The software too, is open-source, and it is growing through the contributions of users worldwide. A worldwide community of makers – students, hobbyists, artists, programmers, and professionals – has gathered around this open-source platform, their contributions have added up to an incredible amount of accessible knowledge that can be of great help to novices and experts alike.

 

Project Hyperessay #1: Concept Statement / Narrative Overview

Touch

What is “touch” in the third space?  How does it feel to “touch” without physically touching? How do our digital representations in the third space connect to our corporeal bodies during the “touch”? How has the “virtual embrace” transformed the way in which we engage in social media and digital communications?  

To get better answers to these questions, we have been explicating the concept of “touch” in the third space throughout the first half of the semester by exploring such topics as “the virtual body,” “distributed presence,” and the “third space.”

The objective of the collaborative project Touch is to investigate critical concepts and fundamental artistic concerns inherent in the emerging form of live networked performance in the third space, through creative dance movements, interactive wearables, smart textiles, audio-visual arts and the Critical Response Process (CRP).  

This collaboration between School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the School of Arts, Media & Engineering at Arizona State University is happening on Thursday, April 21 (SGT) in a third space where the artist Angeline Young and students of ADM will perform as a collective body. And the performance will be live broadcasted over the Internet to expand the experience of the networked performance to the global audience despite of the spatial divide.  

 

Proposal_Touch
Touch explores how proximity and distance has reshaped, challenged and transformed the way in which we engage in social relations and human contact.

 

 

Virtual Embrace in the Third Space

“Virtual Embrace” can have many interpretations. It is an entirely new way of negotiating proximity, of sensing the other person, of coordinating the actions, of balancing the scale. As a dancer, I interpret these interactions between artists as an exchange of personal histories, experiences or aspirations expressed through movements and the creation of live audios. 

I discussed in one of my research critiques the idea that the dancer, instead of dancing to the music, became a composer or musician playing the music with her body/costume/space as a musical instrument. The wireless dance costume powered by Arduino Lilypad and motion sensors puts the magic of live musical composition in the hands (body) of the dancer, who can explore and improvise new shapes and structures within an otherwise free musical environment.

As a result, the virtual embrace will mainly happen in the form of a collaborative dance performance. However, it is still unique because the music created by Angeline will be heard by us through the third space. Each of us will react and move differently to the sound based on our own personal experiences and feelings, at the same time creating new audios which add on more layers to the current sound track. Both sides of artists thus are able to “touch” each other through generated sounds. As the process unfolds in time and space, Angeline and we will build a sense of affiliation and mutual understanding. Our dance movements although not pre-choreographed will look in sync and the audios we create through dance will eventually become a harmonious blend of personal narratives.   

 

Research Critique: Costume and Textile

 

Dance in its Most Pristine Form

Without the fixed constraints of a pre-composed piece of music the artist’s personal narrative is embodied through pure movements – dance in its most pristine form.

In my research critique of dance performance, Eiko & Koma’s iconoclastic work combines slow and nuanced movement vocabulary with bold theatrical design. Whether performing in a theater or in natural sites outdoors, Eiko & Koma often move as if they are not human. Although this is not exactly what I imagine our movements will look like, I do like to borrow the simpleness and directness from their dance. Essentially, dance is a way of communication. 

Eiko and Koma
Eiko and Koma

 

Touch is not fundamentally about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of art practice. It is about what we have been researching for half of the semester which is called “the virtual embrace”. We hope through this experiment of telematic collaboration, we could have better answers to the amorphous and intangible nature of human communication in the third space.