About Me (Fran Hatt)

I set up this blog to help me keep track of my collaborative practices unit on the MADP (Master of Arts Digital Practices) course at NUCA (Norwich University College of the Arts), I continued to use the blog throughout the degree and now that I have finished I am keeping up the habit to document other personal projects.

The main project on the course, which you can find many enries about has been a MaxMSP Patch that tracks the motion of dancers in a space and uses the information to create patterns (also generated within the programme) and project them back onto the dance floor. In essence making an interactive dance floor.

Other projects I worked on during the course were to do with the extinction of languages, which culminated in an e-mail campaign with a visual representation on a website (no-longer active) and another thinking about natural rhythms which resulted in two dance films.

A little about me…

I’m interested in tango, art, design and music.

I studied for my Ba(hons) Graphic Design at Cumbria College of Art, specializing in design for the moving image, then went to work at Anglia TV, first as an assistant editor then as a graphic designer for news graphics and regional programming.

Dancing has been important to me from a young age, studying ballet, tap & modern from the age of about 5 until I was 16. I stopped then for a while, getting interested in Martial Arts whilst at Art College, but returned to dancing when I started working; first Salsa, then Jive, and for the last 7 years Argentine Tango.
I also studied music from a young age, learning to play the piano from my mother who was a music teacher, then Flute and music theory when I was older at a Saturday music school.

Over the course of the Digital Arts MA I have became increasingly interested in interactive design. I find pieces so much more engaging when I’m required to make a contribution, however small. I don’t believe it’s only ‘creatives’ that like to create, it’s human nature, everyone enjoys making something beautiful, but not everybody can. Designing for interactivity has to design a framework, rules for placing images in certain places so that who ever is interacting with it, whatever their artistic flair, cannot fail to achieve the intended result. It’s difficult, so much of design is about making decisions that you’re not always sure why you’re making. Why something looks better in one place than another. But to design a framework you have to take a step back and try to understand why you put something somewhere. Why your intuition leads the decision. fascinating stuff!