I see something interesting in this discussion which reflects a transition that we as humans are making between machine age thinking and digital thinking, ie. for the moment we we would like to be able to have technology that can differentiate minute details of the still and moving body: shape, position, velocity, displacement in space etc. but I feel that as a choreographer we don't want to lose sight of our individual creative processes that are fueled in part by intuitive thinking processes. The goal would be to synthesize "objective" data eventually in a more fluid manner, more in tune with intuitive creative "logic"... Jocelyne Danchick Andy Clarke <andy@kinonet.com> wrote: The following message was posted to: dance-tech > My answer to this is quite simple: what's lacking (in much of the > work but not necessarily intrinsically in the technology) is > human-ness and intuition. > > Maybe Andy's suggestion of having a system that "automatically" > recognises parts of the body, and therefore how they function (?) is > one answer. This was after one of the biggest breakthroughs in > animation. In my work I've always tried to go the opposite way -- > less information used more intuitively can often yield more human > results. > > Too much objective data can only obscure what's going on within and > behind the movement, imho. Just to correct one factual point, I never said that this system should recognise "how [parts of the body] function". My email only said that the system should perform some more sophisticated shape recognition at a low level, and make these available to the user. This will provide us, as performers and choreographers, with the data that we need to interpret how the body is moving. I feel that at the moment, we are just "making do". As I mentioned before, it is technically possible to recognise a hand by its shape. Are you saying it wouldn't be useful to have variables easily available that tell me this is where the performer's left hand is, this is where their right hand is, this is where their head is, and so on? I can't see how having this type of data would "obscure what's going on within and behind the movement". Surely it can only help? I seems to me that it is far more useful to have a system that can tell me that the performer is moving their hand fast, than to have a system that just says there is something, somewhere on the stage, that is moving fast. If the system can't recognise the performer's hand (by its shape), then it seems to me that we are forever in a situation where if we want to track the movement of a hand, we have to say to the dancer "don't move anything else too fast so that I know that the fastest moving thing is your hand". In other words, we have the program influencing our choreography and this is, I presume, the last thing we want (the other current workarounds to this issue are equally constraining). Andy Clarke ---------------------------------------- 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. ---------------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com>The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. --0-1041726025-1051355424=:60205-- ---------------------------------------- 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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