Hello -- To bring two relevant works that involve coding and dance making to the attention of the list... best scott ******************************************************************** TAP By James Buckhouse in collaboration with Holly Brubach with dancer Christopher Wheeldon and programmer Scott Snibbe Commissioned by Dia Center for the Arts/ Presented in cooperation with Creative Time http://www.diacenter.org/buckhouse/ >From on line introductory text by Sara Tucker: "Relatively few computers remain isolated from the internet, and given the explosive increase in the use of cell phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), pagers, and other wireless devices, our potential for connecting is continuously expanding to the point where we are perpetually, if intangibly networked. James Buckhouse, a young, San Francisco-based artist, became interested in making a work that responded to the cultural and social transformations that emerge as we learn to navigate and adapt to ubiquitous, multi-layered networks and the information that traverses them. With Tap, Buckhouse and his project collaborator, Holly Brubach, present a PDA-based artwork that exists in the overlap between digital public space, physical public space, and the more personal network of person-to-person exchange. Tap can be downloaded from the internet, received from one of several beaming stations located in public spaces around Manhattan (when the piece was originally premiered -- I don't think these sites exist any longer - sd), or beamed directly from one person to another. Once loaded onto a PDA running the Palm operating system, the artwork begins. A male or female figure stands fidgeting, ready to start. The user can work with the dancer to practice steps, to improvise new dances, or to choreograph new dances from a palette of sixteen steps. The character will stumble, throwing its arms up in the air in frustration, bow askance sheepishly, and continue, despite repeated mistakes. With practice, the character gradually gets the steps right, sometimes lapsing, but eventually mastering each step. Whether improvised by the character or choreographed by the user, dances can be saved, re-worked and exchanged. They can then be beamed directly from user to user or posted and retrieved from the permanent dance archive on Tap's website. A screensaver version is available which allows for exploring the steps with a character that is an experienced dancer." ******************************************************************** LOL (a dance software): by choreographer Myriam Gourfink, with the collaboration of labanotation specialist Laurence Marthouret and computer scientist Frédéric Voisin. http://www.sleazeart.com/FlashVersion.htm Scroll around and find LOL to read a translation of a text by Myriam Gourfink describing the project -- the following is an excerpt from the translation: "I thought it was too bad to favour form and orientation in the choreographic composition and I was curious to know what the most secret and less visible parameters in breathing, thoughts, looks could generate, so I decided to structure the dance and calculate a few combinations (defining moments) chosen randomly from the possible combinations of 6 parameters (f,b,o,i,e,r) assuming that each of the draws could be a combination of these elements from 1 to 6 and knowing that a combination could only be withdrawn once and that the value of each parameter (found during the workshop session) should be calculated at the same time within an uncertain function. To go further in this direction, I also randomly chose the order of the possible combinations. However this did not keep me from making a final choice, these calculations were just a reflection mean. I deciphered (knowing that this would be danced) a great deal of draws and I did not hesitate to rewrite some of the passages. >From then we started to think about the conception of a dance writing software " LOL " with the help of Frederic Voisin (a computer scientist, a music assistant and an ethnomusicologist who works for the IRCAM), the help of Laurence Marthouret (a choreographer who follow the Notation Laban syllabus at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris) and the help of Kasper T. Toeplitz (composer). We intended to invent a tool to write the movement and to compose an a priori choreography and not to note down an already existing dance." ******************************************************************** ---------------------------------------- The Dance-Tech mailing list has recently moved to a new address. To post a message, send email to dance-tech@dancetechnology.org. To unsubscribe, send email to lists@dancetechnology.org, with the words "unsubscribe dance-tech" in the message body. ----------------------------------------
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