CUL-DE-SAC: SOCIAL CONVERSATION THROUGH RESEARCH AND PERFORMANCE

Cul-De-Sac: Social Conversation Through the Lens of Jazz Dance, discusses the rise of the suburbs following the Second World War, the homophobic society of the 1950s forcing homosexual men to hide in the closet, and the role of women within the suburban community, and how the research into these social issues evolved into an evenings length piece of dance theatre told through the language of jazz dance. Jazz dance is a distinctly American art form, often overlooked on the concert stage. In this dissertation, I endeavor to prove that jazz is a style of dance capable of carrying social messages to audiences. I will investigate the lives and roles of gay men and domestic women in 1950s America, identifying the gaps of knowledge that house potential for future research. Finally, I will discuss these roles and subsequently describe my choreographic process in reinterpreting these roles on the concert stage for my MFA concert, cul-de-sac

Shifting Interfaces: art research at the intersections of live performance and technology

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/809 on 08.20.2017 by CS (TIS)This collection of published works is an outcome of my practice-led inter-disciplinary collaborative artistic research into deepening understanding of creative process in the field of contemporary dance. It comprises thirty written works published from 1999 to 2007 in various formats and platforms. This collection is framed by a methodological discussion that provides insight into how this research has intersected over time with diverse fields of practice including contemporary dance, digital and new media arts and non-art domains such as cognitive and social science. Fields are understood in the context of this research to be largely constituted out of the expert practices of individual collaborators. This research starts from an interest in the Impact of new media technologies on dance making/ choreography. The collection of works show evidence, established in the first two publications, of an evolving engagement with two concepts related to this interest: (1) the 'algorithm' as a process-level connection or bridge between dance composition and computation; (2) the empirical study of movement embedded as a 'knowledge base' in the practices of both computer animation and dance and thus forming a special correspondence between them. This collection provides evidence of this research through a period of community-building amongst artists using new media technologies in performance, and culminates in the identification of an emerging 'community of practice' coming together around the formation of a unique body of knowledge pertaining to dance. The late 1990s New Media Art movement provided a supportive context for Important peer-to-peer encounters with creators and users of software tools and platforms in the context of inter-disciplinary art-making. A growing interest in software programming as a creative practice opened up fresh perspectives on possible connections with dance making. It became clear that software's utility alone, including artistic uses of software, was a limited conception. This was the background thinking that informed the first major shift in the research towards the design of software that might augment the creative process of expert choreographers and dancers. This shift from software use to its design, framed by a focus on the development of tools to support dance creation, also provided strong rationale to deepen the research into dance making processes. In the second major phase of the research presented here, scientific study is brought collaboratively to bear on questions related to choreographic practice. This lead to a better understanding of ways in which dancers and choreographers, as 'thinking bodies', interact with their design tools and each other in the context of creation work. In addition to this collection, outcomes of this research are traceable to other published papers and art works it has given rise to. Less easily measureable, but just as valuable, are the sustained relations between individuals and groups behind the 'community of practice' now recognised for its development of unique formats for bringing choreographic ideas and processes into contact, now and in the future, with both general audiences and other specialist practices

Dance performance in cyberspace - transfer and transformation

The aim of this research undertaking is to understand the potential development of dance performance in the context of cyberculture, by examining the way practitioners use new media to create artworks that include audience participation, and by endeavouring in their theorization. With specific reference to cyberspace as a concept of electronic, networked and navigable space, the enquiry traces the connections such practices have with conventions of the medium of dance, which operate in its widely known condition as a live performing art. But acknowledgement that new media and new contexts of production and reception inform the characteristics of these artworks and their discursive articulation, in terms of the way people and digital technologies interact in contemporary culture, is a major principle to their analysis and evaluation. This qualitative research is based on case-study design as a means of finding pragmatic evidence in particulars, to illustrate abstract concepts, technological processes and aesthetic values that are underway in a new area of knowledge. The field where this research operates within is located by a mapping of published literature that informs a theoretical interdisciplinary framework, which contextualizes the interpretation of artworks. The selected case studies have been subject to a process of systematic and detailed analysis, entailed with a model devised for the purpose of this enquiry. From this undertaking it can be claimed that while an extensive array of technologies, media and interactive models is available in this field, the artists pursue a commitment to demonstrate their worth for specifically developing (new media) dance performance, and for dance performance to articulate technological and critical issues for cyberculture studies. The results of this enquiry also contribute to conceptual understanding of what dance can be, today, in the light of technological changes

Flexible modeling and execution of choreographies

Approaches to address domain specific problems often share overlapping requirements but typically satisfy them in a unique manner for example using service-oriented concepts. The notion of Collaborative, Dynamic & Complex (CDC) systems has been proposed in literature to address the requirements of application domains such as eScience and Collective Adaptive Systems in a unified, generic manner. CDC systems are characterized by dealing with potentially large amounts of data and/or participating applications which engage in complex interactions specified by some collaboration protocol. Furthermore, the need for adaptation mechanisms is a common requirement and users from these application domains are typically no IT experts. The choreography concept originally known from collaborations in the business domain captures the interaction between independent parties from a global perspective. Each party is denoted as a choreography participant, which is implemented by a workflow or a service. This concept provides a way to model and execute for example complex eScience experiments involving multiple scientific fields, scientific methods, and time and/or length scales as a set of coupled workflows. However, typical choreography concepts as described in literature do not provide the desired level of flexibility and ease of use in both modeling and execution to address the requirements of users in CDC system application domains such as eScience. Thus, existing choreography concepts have to be considerably extended by introducing the Model-as-you-go for Choreographies approach in this thesis as a central notion providing capabilities for the flexible modeling and execution of choreographies. In the context of this approach, we provide a concept for fostering reuse in choreography modeling in the form of so-called choreography fragments. Such fragments can be extracted from existing and inserted into new choreography models in order to save time as well as reuse established and approved logic by inexperienced modelers in a less error-prone manner. Furthermore, we provide support for the user-driven control of the complete choreography life cycle. This effectively allows users to automatically deploy the workflow models implementing a choreography as well as starting, pausing, resuming, and terminating a choreography instance, which is formed through the collective execution of workflow instances. Most importantly, the underlying complexity of managing a set of coupled workflow instances is completely hidden from the users. Additional flexibility is given by a concept that allows to re-run already executed choreography logic in order to enforce the convergence of a calculation towards a particular result or to react to errors with parameter changes. The proposed concepts are implemented in a message-based system, the ChorSystem, which is able to handle the challenges of choreography life cycle management from deployment, to run time control and the re-run of logic. Furthermore, the modeling and run time monitoring are integrated into one graphical tool supporting the seamless transition from modeling to execution of choreographies. The concepts, their supporting algorithms, and the prototypical ChorSystem are validated by a set of case studies from different CDC system application domains and evaluated by performance measurements showing the practical applicability

Management of Data and Collaboration for Business Processes

A business process (BP) is a collection of activities and services assembled together to accomplish a business goal. Business process management (BPM) refers to the man- agement and support for a collection of inter-related business processes, which has been playing an essential role in all enterprises. Business practitioners today face enormous difficulties in managing data for BPs due to the fact that the data for BP execution is scattered across databases for enterprise, auxiliary data stores managed by the BPM sys- tems, and even file systems (e.g., definition of BP models). Moreover, current data and business process modeling approaches leave associations of persistent data in databases and data in BPs to the implementation level with little abstraction. Implementing busi- ness logic involves data access from and to database often demands high development efforts.In the current study, we conceptualize the data used in BPs by capturing all needed information for a BP throughout its execution into a “universal artifact”. The concep- tualization provides a foundation for the separation of BP execution and BP data. With the new framework, the data analysis can be carried out without knowing the logic of BPs and the modification of the BP logics can be directly applied without understanding the data structure.Even though universal artifacts provide convenient data access for processes, the data is yet stored in the underlying database and the relationship between data in artifacts and the one in database is still undefined. In general, a way to link the data of these two data sources is needed. we propose a data mapping language aiming to bridge BP data and enterprise database, so that the BP designers only need to focus on business data instead of how to manipulate data by accessing the database. We formulate syntactic conditions upon specified mapping in order that updates upon database or BP data can be properly propagated.In database area, mapping database to a view has been widely studied In recently years, data exchange method extends the notion of database views to a target database (i.e., multiple views) by using a set of conjunctive queries called “tuple generating de- pendency” (tgd). Tgd is a language that is easy to understand/specify, expressive, and decidable for a wide range of properties, which is ideal as a mapping language. Naturally, if both enterprise database and artifacts are represented as relational database, we can take advantage of data exchange technology to bridge enterprise database and artifacts by using tgd as well. Therefore, we re-visit the mapping and update propagation problem under the relational setting.In addition to the data management for a single BP, it is equivalently essential to un- derstand how messages and data should be exchanged among multiple collaborative BPs. With the introduction of artifacts, data is explicitly modeled that can be used in a collab- orative setting. Unfortunately, today’s BP collaboration languages (either orchestration or choreography) do not emphasize on how data is evolved during execution. More- over, the existing languages always assume each participant type has a single participant instance. Therefore, a declarative language is introduced to specify the collaboration among BPs with data and multiple instances concerned. The language adopts a subset of linear temporal logics (LTL) as constraints to restrict the behavior of the collaborative BPs.As a follow-up study, we focus on the satisfiability problem of the declarative BP collaboration language, i.e., whether a given specification as a set of constraints allows at least one finite execution. Naturally, if a specification excludes every possible execution, it should be considered as an undesirable design. Therefore, we consider different combi- nation of the constraint types and for each combination, syntactic conditions are provided to decide whether the given constraints are satisfiable. The syntactic conditions automat- ically lead to polynomial testing methods (comparing to PSPACE-complete complexity of general LTL satisfiability testing)