A New Genre

I saw a review in the Guardian guide booklet last weekend about the dance company ‘chunky move’ from Melbourne. A small extract:
‘…a pioneer within the arena of dance and new technology, having created a genre that is part live performance and part visual installation. In Mortal Engine, one of its signature pieces, a network of lasers and video projections react to the dancers as they move, triggering patterns of light and sound across the stage. Aggressively invasive of the dancers’ space yet richly beautiful in texture, these effects create layers of virtual choreography and drama.’

chunky move, 'glow'

I looked them up on you-tube and was duly impressed… blows anything I can do out the water! – look at the dance film page on this blog to see the video I found. But still, I think what I’ve been trying to do… although it doesn’t look as pretty yet, is quite an interesting idea. It attempts to program improvised choreography, based on rules I follow whilst dancing… interaction with and avoidance of other bodies in space, and moving by singling out and following different parts of the music.

giving up on boids

Below is the last version of boids I used before I made the decision to give up on them completely and begin to program from scratch a set of rules for pairs of coloured circles to obey. I just found the boids object to be too chaotic. No matter how I calibrated it, the results looked like flocking insects or animals (not surprisingly) but not like a model of human behaviour in a milonga. Back to the drawing board. Not entirely wasted though, I took forward a couple of nifty equations worked out for calculating distances between two objects in a 2D space – the expression: expr sqrt((($f1-$f2)*($f1-$f2))+(($f3-$f4)*($f3-$f4))) is based on the trig equation: a squared + b squared = c squared, to give the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle. (dredged that one up from the recess of my GCSE maths mind. Never thought it would be useful again at the time!). Also the expression: expr (($f2-$f1)/2)+$f1 to find the coordinate midway between two other coordinates on one axis. this is the point about which the pair of dots orbit. actually, I could vary this value so that they don’t always orbit about their combined centre. Hmm. must do that tomorrow.

jitter boids adapted

Anyway, the version shown in this screen grab had five pairs of boids, each pair had an attract point governed by the position of one of the five boids in the boid6 object. The 6th boid of boid6 would have been invisible, a space for the real dancing couple. This one was intended to keep the other couple representations away from the real couple.

dance floor behaviour

My programming isn’t up to much, but I imagine the way to go about simulating a dance floor would be to come up with some simple rules to govern decisions made on the direction taken by each dancing couple.

1. Dancing couple comprises two people. Person A, person B.
2. A is the leader, therefore most of the time A walks forward, B walks backward, either diagonally or directly in front of A.
3. Sometimes B moves around A, very occasionally A moves around B.
4. Due to the embrace being uneven, moves are easier on the open side, which means there is a tendency towards anti-clockwise rotation.
5. Each dancing couple has to maintain the distance between them and the couples in front of them. If a space opens up in front, slightly to one side, they move to fill it. (still following the movement rules 1 – 4)
6. If the couple in front is dancing a little bit wildly, the distance left between them and the next couple would be greater.

I don’t know, maybe it’s interesting, maybe not… Any dancers reading this who would agree or disagree with those rules?
I might film a milonga from above and trace the paths of each person, see if they hold true, see if the paths make a nice pattern.

external, structural aspects of the dance

I think new development in the visuals is less of a comment on the sensation or internal aspects of the dance, and more about the social, external experience of a dance floor. Its a representation of action and reaction between me and my partner, and other dancing couples, and also to some extent the music. The freezing aspect is a musical accent: when the music freezes, the dancers may well do too, and so it makes sense that the visuals do the same. The various objects orbiting the tracked object are representing other couples on the dance floor, and so it also makes sense that when a grand gesture is made, for a example an energetic boleo (kick), the surrounding objects (representing other people) would get out the way. My challenge with the patch is to make the boids behave in the manor of other couples on the dance floor. To do this, I need to program each object to orbit in a pair, then each pair to orbit the space (anticlockwise is the tango convention) whilst avoiding each other and reacting to each other in other ways (for example staying further out of the way of more energetic pairs).

I’ve altered the patch so that instead of sending the coordinate information to a graphic window, it gets sent to a matrix which loads colour pixels into a jit.window – a video window. This was to make it more compatible with the existing patch (the one with the ripples), and also to give me more freedom to process the information with video filters.

In these screen grabs, the pattern has been built up by a pair of boids orbiting the mouse position (which will eventually be the performing couple’s position on the floor) and leaving trails of their paths.

I was thinking that perhaps the dancers should erase the pattern with their actual paths so that they are always dancing in a clear space. I’d also like to make the orbiting boids leave a smoother and more delicate trail… I guess its something to do with the metro timing but I haven’t figured it out yet.

progress report

Tom pointed me in the direction of a very nice little maxMSP patch written by Eric Singer. Its uses a flocking algorithm to make graphic objects (boids) orbit around the mouse position in the manner of flocking animals/birds. I’ve been messing around with it, and have wired it up so that they change colour and speed depending on the position of the wiimote, and at the same time follow the position of a person on the dance floor through the camera tracking system I already have in place. I can make them freeze by pointing my foot up (if the wiimote is on my ankle). I want to make them leave a trace of their path, that’s what I’m going to look into today.

article in the guardian

Creative calculations

Working with dance and music has opened my eyes to the dramatic potential of mathematics

‘The wonderful thing about such collaborations is that you are never sure where they will take you. As we spent a morning learning the tango, my mathematical eyes couldn’t help seeing a dance full of geometry. Follow the lines drawn on the floor by a tango dancer and there are the arcs of circles and lines that the Ancient Greek geometers used. I found myself performing a tango-inspired dance to bring alive the mathematical construction of a perfect hexagon, surely a first in the history of mathematics and dance. The power of these sorts of dialogues is that they end up pushing everyone’s boundaries in new directions.’

What to do with the data

I’d like to try getting my existing tracking system to control a flash file.

I found this site recently, when I was looking around at flash sites for inspiration in the last project.

http://www.screenvader.com/root.html

I love it!

First off I love the movement of the animation in the initial navigation. I think this would work so well in my environment if I could figure out how they did it. I don’t want text, but if I could make a pattern move in this way, it would be like the floor coming up to meet every step I took, and falling away on all sides. This is something I like to feel – and I don’t think its an idea unique to tango, martial arts and yoga have this feeling of connection with the ground. drawing energy from it, moving it through your body and out into the world.

Another thing I love on this site is the random image generator. Above are four images that were generated randomly on four consecutive clicks. Its like what I was thinking about with regard to a tuning of a space. setting up parameters and rules so that however the elements are thrown together inside it, they will work. Designing a template, a structure that will allow random elements to play and interact within it, always creating something beautiful.

I must admit, when I went to the site just now to take some snapshots of the screen, I started to become selective. I didn’t take the first images generated because I wanted a good one, one I felt looked ‘designed’ . This is what Eno Henze was talking about at the lecture on Generative art I went to in Berlin last month (‘generator-x‘). The altered role of a generative artist… not so much the creator as the curator. He writes the programs that generate the art, but doesn’t directly make it. His artistic role is in selecting the images that he exhibits. Not dissimilar to the role of a photographer or editor I suppose.

New ways of tracking movement

I’ve been thinking about new ways to gather data from the dancing bodies. The movement I want to use to trigger an animation is the ‘boleo’. It’s the movement that results from a sudden change of direction in the energy of the lead. This can be back to forward horizontally, which sends the follower’s free leg straight back and up – it feels and looks like a whip, if you can visualize the motion of a hand cracking a whip, this is what the dancers do with their whole bodies, the leader is the hand, the followers body the handle and her leg the tip of the whip. If the reversal of energy is circular, from clockwise to anti-clockwise, the movement of the leg is also circular, the toe draws a loop in the air. These are the patterns that can be seen in the photos I posted last week.

Anyway, I digress. The point I was going to make was that I have been trying to find a way to capture this movement digitally. Way back when I was first thinking about the project, it was suggested that a colour on the sole of the followers foot could be picked up by my camera and colour tracking device, but it was nowhere near sensitive enough to be able to do that. I thought about a microphone on the shoe, which would be ok for footsteps, but not the movement I want to capture as it is silent. Recently I’ve been investigating accelerometers. I found (or rather somebody told me about!) these sites…
The need for the “CUI” (In the Media Arts and Technology program, we explore new metaphors for artistic interactivity that connect the physical world with the virtual realm.)

and this one…
Contextual Computing Group: Bluetooth Accelerometer

http://www-static.cc.gatech.ed… (This is a small wireless sensor platform providing a bluetooth SPP link to three axes of accelerometer data. The accelerometers are sampled by a PIC microcontroller (onboard ADC) at roughly 100Hz (rate can be changed via firmware)…)

But since then, I talked to Phil and Liam, and it seems that all the bits I need are sitting inside a wiimote, so I’ve just bought one off ebay… waiting for it to arrive now! I don’t really want to strap a wiimote to my shoe, but I’m hoping its not all that difficult to take it apart and get the bits I need. I have had a quick look online, and found a couple of places that might come in handy when I crack the thing open…

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/12/wiimote_guts.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anescient/sets/72157594391962597/detail/

and some more sites that might help me make sense of the data…

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3362586

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php?t=msg&

The beauty of using this system, if I can get it to work, is that the accelerometer can measure the force on my foot in three directions and send the data wirelessly to my computer. I should get all kinds of numbers to play with!… then I just have to figure out what to do with them…

Web Elective

Just to keep it all together, this is a link to my new website, a site I created to submit as work for the elective unit…

thevirtualgarden.co.uk

Nothing to do with tango for a change!

The brief I gave myself was to design and build a web site to sell my pattern designs and at the same time showcase my skills as a flash content and website designer and illustrator.

I wanted the three gardens to be based on the patterns I had previously designed, but to also have quite distinct feels to them. Like a real garden might have different rooms, I wanted each page of the virtual garden to give you a sense of wandering through a changing environment. I tried to achieve this by giving each garden it’s own colour palette and slightly varying the illustrative style to be in keeping with the theme. For example, the Japanese garden uses brush strokes in the pattern evoking a Japanese style of painting, it also uses a traditional Japanese pattern to indicate the movement in the water. The colours are cool and clean. The only element that is out of style is the lily pad, which uses rich warm greens and browns, a palette more in keeping with the tropical garden, the garden that you will find if you interact with the lily pad… It’s supposed to be a small clue that it is the doorway into the next garden.

inspiration for patterns

I was looking at some rhythmnic gymnastics videos on youtube the other day (some are posted on my dance film page), and it got me thinking about the motion path of my feet, I thought about trying to get hold of a ribbon and attaching it to my feet to see if it would produce any results as beautiful as the gymnasts… but it seemed unlikely, with two people dancing it would just get tangled up. Instead, I attatched lights to my feet and put my camera on a tripod set to a slow shutter speed… I was quite pleased with the pictures, but I’m not sure yet how the patterns can be incorporated into my project. Perhaps it will be possible to mathematically recreate some of the parabolic shapes for projection.