Interactive dance choreography assistance

Creative support for the performing arts is prevalent in many fields, however, for the art of dance, automated tools supporting creativity have been scarce. In this research, we describe ongoing research into (semi)automatic automated creative choreography support. Based on state-of-the-art and a survey among 54 choreographers we establish functionalities and requirements for a choreography assistance tool, including the semantic levels at which it should operate and communicate with the end-users. We describe a user study with a prototype tool which presents choreography alternatives using various simple strategies in three dance styles. The results show that the needs for such a tool vary based on the dance discipline. In a second user study, we investigate various methods of presenting choreography variations. Here, we evaluate four presentation methods: textual descriptions, 2D animations, 3D animations and auditory instructions in two different dance styles. The outcome of the expert survey shows that the tool is effective in communicating the variations to the experts and that they express a preference for 3D animations. Based on these results, we propose a design for an interactive dance choreography assistant tool

Pathway to Future Symbiotic Creativity

This report presents a comprehensive view of our vision on the development path of the human-machine symbiotic art creation. We propose a classification of the creative system with a hierarchy of 5 classes, showing the pathway of creativity evolving from a mimic-human artist (Turing Artists) to a Machine artist in its own right. We begin with an overview of the limitations of the Turing Artists then focus on the top two-level systems, Machine Artists, emphasizing machine-human communication in art creation. In art creation, it is necessary for machines to understand humans' mental states, including desires, appreciation, and emotions, humans also need to understand machines' creative capabilities and limitations. The rapid development of immersive environment and further evolution into the new concept of metaverse enable symbiotic art creation through unprecedented flexibility of bi-directional communication between artists and art manifestation environments. By examining the latest sensor and XR technologies, we illustrate the novel way for art data collection to constitute the base of a new form of human-machine bidirectional communication and understanding in art creation. Based on such communication and understanding mechanisms, we propose a novel framework for building future Machine artists, which comes with the philosophy that a human-compatible AI system should be based on the "human-in-the-loop" principle rather than the traditional "end-to-end" dogma. By proposing a new form of inverse reinforcement learning model, we outline the platform design of machine artists, demonstrate its functions and showcase some examples of technologies we have developed. We also provide a systematic exposition of the ecosystem for AI-based symbiotic art form and community with an economic model built on NFT technology. Ethical issues for the development of machine artists are also discussed

A Motion Control Scheme for Animating Expressive Arm Movements

Current methods for figure animation involve a tradeoff between the level of realism captured in the movements and the ease of generating the animations. We introduce a motion control paradigm that circumvents this tradeoff-it provides the ability to generate a wide range of natural-looking movements with minimal user labor. Effort, which is one part of Rudolf Laban\u27s system for observing and analyzing movement, describes the qualitative aspects of movement. Our motion control paradigm simplifies the generation of expressive movements by proceduralizing these qualitative aspects to hide the non-intuitive, quantitative aspects of movement. We build a model of Effort using a set of kinematic movement parameters that defines how a figure moves between goal keypoints. Our motion control scheme provides control through Effort\u27s four dimensional system of textual descriptors, providing a level of control thus far missing from behavioral animation systems and offering novel specification and editing capabilities on top of traditional keyframing and inverse kinematics methods. Since our Effort model is inexpensive computationally, Effort-based motion control systems can work in real-time. We demonstrate our motion control scheme by implementing EMOTE (Expressive MOTion Engine), a character animation module for expressive arm movements. EMOTE works with inverse kinematics to control the qualitative aspects of end-effector specified movements. The user specifies general movements by entering a sequence of goal positions for each hand. The user then expresses the essence of the movement by adjusting sliders for the Effort motion factors: Space, Weight, Time, and Flow. EMOTE produces a wide range of expressive movements, provides an easy-to-use interface (that is more intuitive than joint angle interpolation curves or physical parameters), features interactive editing, and real-time motion generation

Reconstructing the Present Through Kinesthetic History: An Investigation into Modes of Preserving, Transmitting, and Restaging Contemporary Dance

Methods of dance preservation have evolved alongside conceptual themes that have framed dance’s historical narrative. The tradition of written dance notation developed in accordance with notions that prioritized logocentricity, and placed historical legitimacy on tangible artifacts and irrefutable archives; whereas the technical revolution of the late twentieth century saw dance preservation practices shift to embrace film and video documentation because they provided more accessible, and more convenient records. Since the 1970s video recordings have generally been considered to provide authentic visual representations of dance works, and the tradition of score writing has begun to wane. However, scholarly criticism has unveiled both philosophical and practical challenges posed by these two modes of documentation, thus illuminating a gap between theories of embodiment and the practice of dance preservation. In alignment with contemporary discourse, which legitimizes the body as a site of generating and storing knowledge, this dissertation suggests ‘kinesthetic history’ as a valid mode of dance preservation. Operating as a counterpart to oral history, and borrowing theoretical concepts from contemporary historiography, existential phenomenology and ethnography, the term ‘kinesthetic history’ suggests a mode of corporeal inscription and transmission that relies on the reciprocal interaction of bodies in space. The use of ‘kinesthetic history’ as a methodological approach to the preservation, translation, and reconstruction of movement material reflects the elements of fluidity, plurality and subjectivity that are often characteristic of contemporary choreographic practices. This theory is interrogated through a case study, which explores the ways in which both a written and digitized score, video recordings, and the ‘kinesthetic history’ of an original cast member operated as modes of transmission in a 2013 restaging of William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) at The Juilliard School. Conclusions drawn from the case study challenge the traditional notions of reconstruction and restaging and suggest ‘regeneration’ as an alternative term to describe the process of preserving and transmitting contemporary dance works

The Choreography of Everday Life: Rudolf Laban and the Making of Modern Movement

“The Choreography of Everyday Life: Rudolf Laban and the Making of Modern Movement,” explores how an inscription technology developed in German expressionist dance found unlikely application in some of the key institutions of twentieth-century modernity. Called “Labanotation,” it used a complicated symbology to record human bodily movement on paper. Initially used to coordinate mass-dance spectacles in Weimar Germany, the system was quickly adopted in the United States and the United Kingdom in fields ranging from management theory to psychiatry to anthropology. My research analyzes the widespread appeal of this seemingly quixotic tool and to situates it within broader literatures on modern technology, art, media, and politics. Ultimately, I argue that Labanotation succeeded so spectacularly because it promised to reconcile the invented and the authentic, the individual and the group, and the body and the machine at moments threatened by massive social upheaval. Laban’s work thus not only served to preserve a fading past, but opened up new possibilities for the literal choreographing of modern life

Switching Partners: Dancing with the Ontological Engineers

Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on our ability to preserve the data that already exists. Here we explore recent technological developments that are designed to counteract such problems by allowing information to be retrieved across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic and technological boundaries. Software applications such as the ones envisaged here will enable speedier recovery of data and facilitate its analysis in ways that will assist both archiving of and research on dance