Friday, November 14, 2014
Coding and Choreography Combine in This Dynamic Dance Performance
The Creators Project: What do Kandinsky and breakdancing have in common? The answer may be Pathfinder, a generative visual language that continuously stimulates creativity during real-time choreography. Using the same primitive geometric forms that lie at the heart of Kandinsky’s “Point and Line to Plane” as a starting point, the tool generates points and lines that morph into planes and 3D models to inspire dancers as they transform their own bodies into different shapes.
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8 comments:
So yet again another example of technology coming in to join the arts. Using algorithms to create a dance? Is there something that someone misses when you take a human creator out of the equations? Yes, the algorithms are created by human’s hands so there is human touch. I do not know but could we be losing something. I already said this in the article,” Behind the scenes with Ray Harry Hausen” but are we losing something incorporated technology into our lives. I think I will be long dead before that questions can even start to be answered.
The video was interesting and I kind of liked watching the geometry more than the dancing and geometry. I just was not feeling the dancing in the videos. Not sure why exactly but it is something that just was not floating my boat.
Interesting, yes very interesting and we shall see where algorithms take us.
Like Adam, I felt as if the geometry and the visuals were more interesting and capturing than the dancers themselves. Maybe that was because, as I read the article, I learned that the dancers took inspiration from the geometric sequences. It seemed to me that their dances were more like the stuff of Dance Dance Revolution, when someone steps to the beat of an already planned dance, than an improvisation that coincided with Kandinsky's theorem.
That said, I did think the two mediums were interesting, and it sort of reminds me of the media I've seen in some of the plays at CMU and a show on Broadway called the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It's sort of cool that we're finding new ways to blend technology into movement pieces, and that we're using both science and art to create something entertaining.
After watching and reading the articles, I think this is a good learning device shall we call it. I wouldn't necessarily consider the best way to choreograph a piece but it totally could be. I actually love it when there are limitations, when you're trapped inside a box. I think that brings out how creative people really are. How far can they push within what they're given. When I say this, I don't mean confined with rules. Our body has limits, so for a dancer, if she wants to stay in one piece, her legs can't leap stage right as her arm goes offstage left and her torso twists into the audience... dancers are limited with their bodies and that's what makes dance so incredible, it's what they do with their bodies. Straying off topic, let's get back to the main subject: The use of simple yet not so defined geometry is used so the dancer/choreographer can interpret the shapes however they want to. They are not limited in what they can do. I think this would be a great tool for students who are learning how to improvise. A huge struggle that I myself have dealt with in dance, music, acting, etc. is improvisation, there is so much that can be done it's hard to figure out which one is right. Some people can feel it, but for others, it's not that easy. I think with this, people who struggle with improvisation can be guided a little but still given the freedom to do their own thing.
I thought this was an interesting example of joining choreography and media, but it din't have the same power as last weeks example with the ballet shoes. In that example the movement of the dancer was so well linked to what was showing up on the screen that the two art forms were inseparable. In this example, while the dancers and media are linked, you could have one without the other. Also, since the dancers' moves are reactionary in reference to the media, they were occasionally out of sync.
I found the animations by themselves to be more beautiful than when utilized by the dancers. The first half of the video didn't do much for me but some of the later parts where it was clear the actor's movement was in some way tied to the animation, I was more interested. Regardless, I love the concept of the project is toying with and can imagine great things ahead. Even just the phrase "choreographic research" is exciting. I respect the boundary they straddled between too literal and too abstract because it's always a hard thing to balance. I also appreciated their taking of inspiration from Kandinsky's writing. I have downloaded it to hopefully read in the future and it seems very similar to the way theatre artists talk about viewpoints as the building blocks for artistic work.
I think this is a great example, like many said, of technology being implemented in artistic performance. While I think the movement is great and that technology adds a lot to any piece when it is well utilized, I'm starting to see technology emerge so much in artistic pieces (like this one) that it is almost hard to discern whether the technology or the people are the primary performers. I think this new integration between man and machine is crossing into new territory as it becomes harder to us as an audience to discern whether more credit is due to the live performers or the programmers/designers that create such interesting content for us to watch that engages with these live performers. It is becoming a question of whether we credit this who influence the design, (the human performers) or do we credit the design itself (the software and systems that were designed to run these great visual displays). In this piece for example its hard to decide whose work to admire more the dancers whose movements inspire the images or the engineers and technicians work that transposes these movements into something entirely different. In this case I was more drawn to the geometric patterns and shapes being created than the movements influencing them, almost making the dancer a supporting element rather than a main driving force of the piece like they are. While the integration of technology in performance is great and can be use to create amazing displays I think it should be noted that it is changing the predetermined relationships we've come to know. Is new technology making the technician the next great performer?
This clashing of technology and arts could not be better described than a piece of beauty. Far too often is there this ideology that the technological idea that is most envisioned can not come together with art, yet here we are at it's birth with dance. I found it very pleasing to learn that when they were crafting the media they strove to make a point on fluid transitions much like what make a dancer most unique and special because when you think about it, it's not the special moves that make a great dancer and a movement piece that takes the views breathe away but rather how the dancer controls their body so carefully through the transitions that make art. And to learn the fact that such care was taken to make sure that it did not appear to the viewer the dancer was just mimicking the shapes but rather drawing inspiration only helps express the fact that this is at its core a very beautiful piece of new age art.
This is beautiful. It reminds me of the beautiful work done by Chunky Moves that incorporates media and human movement.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjOMualLVs
I find the most intriguing use of media and dance is when the images mimic and work with the human form's natural fluidity, a fluidity that cannot be repticated with theatrical lighting alone.
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