what lovely students I have!

I was thinking, after looking at some other surface pattern designers(http://www.ofpaperandthread.blogspot.com/
http://www.umbrellaprints.com.au/
http://olivemanna.com/55-stationery
http://printpattern.blogspot.com/2007/11/designer-rachel-cave.html) that perhaps the patterns need to be a bit simpler… not so much detail. So this is the latest, cherubs against a starry sky. I was inspired by a church visited in Lithuania.

celestial cherubs

I just tried another colour combination, wasn’t convinced by the last one, although I think it would look much nicer printed than it does on screen.

new colours

church… can’t remember the name. will try and find out.

The cherry blossom over water pattern is being printed onto wrapping paper tomorrow – very exciting! I’ve added some coy carp to give it a focus and something cute. I have three other patterns now that I think are also ready for print if these ones go well. The canary pattern is quite appropriate to Norwich, being our football team. The others are quite a random collection of images, which you don’t really see until closer inspection…

blossom with fish

all things pink for not so little girls

fresh colours and high heels

Tribute to Norwich's football team the canaries

cherry blossom over water

One nice thing about not having any paid work right now… I get to finish off all the projects I started and didn’t finish. I would really like to get some of my patterns printed onto fabric or wallpaper and into shops.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while – get my films onto my tango website: http://www.metrotango.co.uk/gallery.html

I met up with Heather today, who runs a music group for visual studies at the art college. We got chatting about improvisation. It was interesting how many parallels there are between improvising jazz and improvising tango dance:

Firstly In the way it is learnt: you have to narrow down the scope to just a couple of notes to play, or a couple of steps to make in order to get started. Too much freedom is paralysing and is met with fear, terror sometimes if the person is not used to thinking in this way.

The next step is repetition. A phrase of music or of movement is repeated to set up a rhythm or just as a framework to build from.

Then comes breaking out of the repetition, this requires us to take a risk. A foray into the unknown, with each note or step occurring spontaneously, judgment of whether the sequence was successful or not comes after but not during.

Heather is interested in the nature of improvisation as a life skill, and an education tool. Given that many of the skills you need to improvise; the spontaneous action, repetition for comfort, occasional risk taking by pushing oneself, are skills needed in life, she argues it would be beneficial to encourage improvisation from a young age. She talked about changing the way music is taught to encourage and nurture the freedom she witnessed in her 2 year old niece, who was happy to play notes without worrying about the outcome and how it would be received. For some reason, possibly the way we are educated, we tend to lose this freedom to express ourselves freely as we mature. Our focus shifts from process to outcome and we produce finished pieces of work.

The similarities in the way one learns to improvise were interesting, but even more fascinating was the similarity in our descriptions of why we like to improvise, what rewards us and keeps us going back to it as a means to find this reward. We both agreed that improvisation solo could put us into a pleasurable state of mind and we could feel quite swept away in it, but an interesting discovery was that improvising with a partner or group is when we have had the most powerful experiences.
On particular occasions we have both felt, Heather through improvised music with another person and I through improvised dance with a partner, something we described in remarkably similar ways.  A sense of extreme intimacy, that we ‘got’ each other. As if only in this state was our deepest truest self simultaneously revealed and understood.

I got home and started surfing the net, as I do, and came across these pages, all to do with improvisation and collaboration. some to do with flow, which I guess is what I’ve been talking about. There has been much talk about flow, but I have only heard it described as something possible to achieve when engaging in an activity one is very skilled in alone, I’m interested to find out more about this particular flow that you feel when you are working collaboratively in the same activity.

http://www.nancystarksmith.com/start.htm – Nancy Stark Smith apparently wrote extensively on flow in dance, I haven’t found any papers yet but I will keep looking.

http://proximity.slightly.net/ a magazine devoted to new dance/movement and improvisation practice.

http://www.dancebase.co.uk/pro-news/opportunities/mary-prestidge-contact-improvisation.html – Mary Prestidge: attending to the moment and keeping open and responsive to the signals within and outside of the body. Moving in contact with another person offers many options in terms of direction, and speed, resting and listening. It allows for the interplay of different energetic states creating unique partnerships and conversations.

Starting to look at improvisation Jazz theory: http://www.petethomas.co.uk/jazz-theory-beginners.html

Well, I’ve had a nice break from thinking about these things, spent some time hanging out in Brighton and some time dancing in Buenos Aires, and now I am back in Norwich at the college, teaching very various things on various courses. I think it’s time for me to take up my practice again… and now I can reclaim this blog no longer as an aid to submitting work to be assessed but just as a place to keep my thoughts in order and to post things I’ve been looking at and thinking about, hoping to create something from. It will be proof to myself that I really was interested in all this and not just trying to get a good mark. (which I did incidentally – distinction thank you very much!). A fresh start, a continuation but a new exploration.

In this evaluation, I have:

- Stated how the outcome of the project developed and changed from the initial masters project proposal and given some reasons to justify the deviation. Given a brief description of what the project turned out to be.
- Stated the learning outcomes, achievements and discoveries made during the progression of the project.
- Evaluated the potential successes and failures of the final performance piece. (it was written before the performance and assessment)
- Considered how the piece fits with current practice in contemporary dance performance.

masters critical evaluation

It seems to be coming together at last, my dots are actually quite adorable! Today I started to tweak the values to make the dots sensitive to different aspects of the music… trying to find the right speeds, the best frequency of bangs for certain functions. Eg, they get more excited and turn faster with high pitch notes… they get closer together in their pairs when getting closer to another pair… they each have different sensitivities to attacks and frequencies in the music so they change direction and the center point about which to turn in their couples at different times. They have really come alive. It’s incredibly simple to look at – just coloured dots on a white background, but the their movements are full of personality! A screen shot wouldn’t do it justice, their beauty is in the way they move. I tried to take a video screen grab to post an example of them dancing to some music, but my laptop is having none of it… I suppose she has been overworked today.

At the beginning of this project, when I was thinking about using flash to generate the pattern that would be created, I found a website that inspired me (I talked about it in the post ‘What to do with the data‘). Working with a friend (Mitchell DeBruyn) I wrote some action script trying to achieve a similar result. Subsequently I decided not to use flash for the project, mainly because I couldn’t find out how to get information from the real world into and out of the program in real time, plus I already had those systems in place with maxMSP from the previous project. Anyway, I’m very pleased (because it took us bloody ages!) to announce that the code has been given life elsewhere. I used it as the basis of the home page navigation device on the MA catalogue website, http://maexhibitions.com which I created in collaboration with Jonathan Harvey (who graduated from the same course last year) and Charlotte Vogel (who graduates next year).

Norwich University College of the ARts MA Exibitions Catalogue

Another website that I liked when I was looking around thinking about visuals was storynest. It has some really amazing flash animation and sound design work on it, the page I have linked to is one I particularly liked and which actually reminds me of some of the patterns created in the dance piece ‘glow’ – the video I posted yesterday.

the romance of letters

section of code describing movement on a circular path

Actually, that expression calculating a mid point about which to turn (that I mentioned in a previous post) wasn’t useful in the end. Instead, I used sin and cos of an angle multiplied by a variable radius to describe points on a circle that can change size, and a counter to change the angle over time so that by using S=O/H C=A/H T=O/A (another blast from the past) I could animate a circle moving on a circular path. The programing on the turquoise background describes how the circles orbit each other within their pair, and on the blue background how the pair move on a circular path around the space.

By changing the direction the counter counts (up or down) I can reverse the direction of travel. Around the space, I used the equation I mentioned before (the one that determines when two circles get close to each other) to initiate a change of direction around the room for the trailing couple, this prevents collisions. But, since in a milonga the direction of travel around the dance floor is anticlockwise, I also added a delay instruction on the message so that after a second the couple turn back and continue in an anticlockwise direction.

listening to the music

Within the pair, I used the objects ‘bonk’ and ‘fiddle’ to determine when to initiate a change of direction. Bonk listens for attacks in the music, which worked well with the percussive sounds of the piano. Fiddle listens for pitch and different types of sound, which worked better with the bandoneon. The idea is that the circles will move in accordance with selected parts of the music, as would an improvising dancer.