CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Dance Meets Cutting Edge Digital Creativity at an LA Workshop

The Creators Project: Last week, UCLA campus-located broad art center hosted the fifth edition of the Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL), a unique format for creative celebration, and the result of the first phase of research initiative Motion Bank. Seeking to provoke new and innovative creative approaches, the incubator spent five days solidifying one of its initial missions: to merging cutting-edge digital tools with contemporary choreography.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Well this kind of post really intrigues me since I'm taking a computing arts class. I like how movement from a human can inspire so many different things. Like that girl who is sitting down in a huddled position and they related her position to bricks. Just the shape of movement can create so many things. So these coding artists had to focus on lines and form within the movement of each person. Some of the pieces even seems interactive enough to where the person moving effects the entire function of the code. I love how the movement from the person seems to make the coding for these designs more organic then if a student just programed specific movements. I would love to focus on a piece like this sometime. Collaborating and creating a design that would relate to the movement of a person but would show up on a monitor has something completely different.

Unknown said...

I really like the idea of combining live action and media. It is one thing to have a dance performance and also have a separate media show. When you combine the two to make one cohesive story, it is even stronger if done well. I think the best pieces come out of groups of people with totally different backgrounds and specialties. Each person has a different way of thinking and different past experiences to draw from. Dance has a lot to do with shapes especially if you look at a person’s body in many different ways. Those shapes and formations can be turned into actual sculptures or designs on the computer. The comparison of the two different forms of art close together is extremely interesting. There are many ways that a feeling or story can be interpreted and presented. The combination of dance and media can appeal and express the same story in similar but different ways because of their nature.

Unknown said...

As a former dancer, I remember my ballet teacher constantly reminding me that all the routines she gave me were derived from the same foundation of steps. I simply had to latch on to the innate patterns, and natural progressions of a dance, or movement, or piece. Seeing the movements of a dance transformed and changed into data is a really interesting moment. I'm always really glad to see collaborations like this. The quantitative quality the computers and coded programs impose on dance (which is usually considered qualitative) really seeks to explore the boundary between the two. Using such an atypical lens to view dance will open new perceptions and understandings of the field, and will promote new explorations in movement and choreography. I find it interesting how the data presentations took on artful qualities of their own, challenging my perceptions of what data could be. I sincerely hope this collaboration continues, as the results in both fields could be quite useful and surprising.