Project proposal (draft)

“Embodied dance technologies” (working title)”

Embodied Technologies is a research project that explores possible relationships between dance and technologies that deals with dance as a fundamentally embodied experience and expressive and emotional medium. A series of explorations will deal with dance with an augmented expressive body, dance as a networked (possibly interactive) performance and the mediated and electronically visualized dance performance.

The project is a highly personal envisioning of bridges between technology and dance. Having danced since I was three years old, I have no other experience with it than a fundamentally embodied one. Dancing for me is very personal, emotional means of expression that encompasses my body rather than my mind. I believe this is the fundamental experience for any dancer because dance as merely a mechanical execution of choreographed movements is unimaginable. Current explorations of dance and technology such as 3D motion capture, computer generated dance avatars and almost linguistically translating pieces of computer code to dance often strike me as illogical and unfitting to what dance is, or at least means to me. Such abstractions, that almost stretch dance into an immaterial, disembodied experience seem to be more in favor of technological advances than the development of dance. The aim of exploring the three themes in this research project is to come to grips with what it is in dance – understood in the broadest sense – that triggers me, what characterizes the experience of dance as an embodied experience and how technological interventions and amalgamations can expand this experience of dance as dance. This practical research and the experiments will result in a number of informed concepts. One or more of these can be expanded on in my major project.

Dance and the augmented expressive body

The possibilities of augmenting the expressiveness of the body by means of technology will be explored in this theme, such as letting the body communicate with music synthesizers or lighting, in which the dancer is the source of all elements in the performance. A strong emphasis will be put on the reversibility of the relationship of music to dance: what happens when e.g. music is made to follow movements rather than the other way around.

The mediated, electronically visualized dance performance

In what ways can the dance performance be mediated and stored, how can it be visualized in ways that take into account the characteristics of dance that cannot simply be translated to an scientific understanding of the anatomy of the body, space, and movement. If we can say that dance has more complex qualities of eg. forces of attraction, pushing away, touch and intensity of movement that cannot simply be broken down into discrete points in space or a sequence of movements or steps.

Dance as a networked performance

In this theme the possibilities of external input will be explored. How can an open system be constructed that allows for variations as imposed from an ‘outside’, directly affecting the performance.

Projectplan_draft

Budget_draft

FEEDBACK

Feedback to this proposal consisted of concerns that it might be a little bit too much to do in 6 weeks time. Exactly because I have such a fuzzy understanding of what interesting connections there might be between technology and dance (with the focus on dance rather than on for example, motion capture which in my view takes away from what is dance and adds to the technology rather than the other way around), I should experience these possibilities by trying things, doing small experiments that I might expand on later. Instead of doing more research and risking to start conceptualizing everything in advance, I can stay in the fuzziness for a little longer and be surprised by whatever comes out of these experiments and how I might draw on them to feed into a bigger idea/project/concept. In short, I have simplified the above into a few experiments that I can do in the next few weeks, this live action research can be reflected on critically, and then expanded into a bigger project, incorporating one or more of the conducted try-outs. The projectplan and budget are not accurate with regards to this new plan.

This week I have gathered the materials I need to set-up three experiments that all link to measuring the body and the physiology of the body.

Experiment 1: Human sound conductor

Having a sound signal (music) conducted by a human body (or rather, two dancers). Touch will allow the signal to move to a circuit, lack of touch will result in silence.

Experiment 2: Measuring bodily vibrations with contact microphones

Measure the vibrations of the dancing body and translate them into sound: making the body movements audible. I will do this by attaching contact microphones (piezo transducers) to the dancer’s skin. The transducer will pick up on the vibrations of the body and make them audible (through an amplifier and a speaker). I will find out how I can obtain values from these measurements that may possibly be useful to manipulate other outputs.

Experiment 3: Sweat detectors

Measuring the dancer’s perspiration to obtain certain values of the physiological changes in the dancer’s body. I will use several very basic moisture detectors (used for monitoring plants as well) to measure sweat on several places on the body and see how I can get it to return certain values (that can be used to possibly manipulate another output channel).