Choreographing the extended agent : performance graphics for dance theater

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 448-458).The marriage of dance and interactive image has been a persistent dream over the past decades, but reality has fallen far short of potential for both technical and conceptual reasons. This thesis proposes a new approach to the problem and lays out the theoretical, technical and aesthetic framework for the innovative art form of digitally augmented human movement. I will use as example works a series of installations, digital projections and compositions each of which contains a choreographic component - either through collaboration with a choreographer directly or by the creation of artworks that automatically organize and understand purely virtual movement. These works lead up to two unprecedented collaborations with two of the greatest choreographers working today; new pieces that combine dance and interactive projected light using real-time motion capture live on stage. The existing field of"dance technology" is one with many problems. This is a domain with many practitioners, few techniques and almost no theory; a field that is generating "experimental" productions with every passing week, has literally hundreds of citable pieces and no canonical works; a field that is oddly disconnected from modern dance's history, pulled between the practical realities of the body and those of computer art, and has no influence on the prevailing digital art paradigms that it consumes.(cont.) This thesis will seek to address each of these problems: by providing techniques and a basis for "practical theory"; by building artworks with resources and people that have never previously been brought together, in theaters and in front of audiences previously inaccessible to the field; and by proving through demonstration that a profitable and important dialogue between digital art and the pioneers of modern dance can in fact occur. The methodological perspective of this thesis is that of biologically inspired, agent-based artificial intelligence, taken to a high degree of technical depth. The representations, algorithms and techniques behind such agent architectures are extended and pushed into new territory for both interactive art and artificial intelligence. In particular, this thesis ill focus on the control structures and the rendering of the extended agents' bodies, the tools for creating complex agent-based artworks in intense collaborative situations, and the creation of agent structures that can span live image and interactive sound production. Each of these parts becomes an element of what it means to "choreograph" an extended agent for live performance.Marc Downie.Ph.D

Immersive Participation:Futuring, Training Simulation and Dance and Virtual Reality

Dance knowledge can inform the development of scenario design in immersive digital simulation environments by strengthening a participant’s capacity to learn through the body. This study engages with processes of participatory practice that question how the transmission and transfer of dance knowledge/embodied knowledge in immersive digital environments is activated and applied in new contexts. These questions are relevant in both arts and industry and have the potential to add value and knowledge through crossdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. This thesis consists of three different research projects all focused on observation, participation, and interviews with experts on embodiment in digital simulation. The projects were chosen to provide a range of perspectives across dance, industry and futures studies. Theories of embodied cognition, in particular the notions of the extended body, distributed cognition, enactment and mindfulness, offer critical lenses through which to explore the relationship of embodied integration and participation within immersive digital environments. These areas of inquiry lead to the consideration of how language from the field of computer science can assist in describing somatic experience in digital worlds through a discussion of the emerging concepts of mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. These terms serve as an example of how the mutability of language became part of the process as terms applied in disparate disciplines were understood within varying contexts. The analytic tools focus on applying a posthuman view, speculation through a futures ethnography, and a cognitive ethnographical approach to my research project. These approaches allowed me to examine an ecology of practices in order to identify methods and processes that can facilitate the transmission and transfer of embodied knowledge within a community of practice. The ecological components include dance, healthcare, transport, education and human/computer interaction. These fields drove the data collection from a range of sources including academic papers, texts, specialists’ reports, scientific papers, interviews and conversations with experts and artists.The aim of my research is to contribute both a theoretical and a speculative understanding of processes, as well as tools applicable in the transmission of embodied knowledge in virtual dance and arts environments as well as digital simulation across industry. Processes were understood theoretically through established studies in embodied cognition applied to workbased training, reinterpreted through my own movement study. Futures methodologies paved the way for speculative processes and analysis. Tools to choreograph scenario design in immersive digital environments were identified through the recognition of cross purpose language such as mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. Put together, the major contribution of this research is a greater understanding of the value of dance knowledge applied to simulation developed through theoretical and transformational processes and creative tools

3D Information Technologies in Cultural Heritage Preservation and Popularisation

This Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences presents recent advances and developments in the use of digital 3D technologies to protect and preserve cultural heritage. While most of the articles focus on aspects of 3D scanning, modeling, and presenting in VR of cultural heritage objects from buildings to small artifacts and clothing, part of the issue is devoted to 3D sound utilization in the cultural heritage field

Modeling of Performance Creative Evaluation Driven by Multimodal Affective Data

Performance creative evaluation can be achieved through affective data, and the use of affective featuresto evaluate performance creative is a new research trend. This paper proposes a “Performance Creative—Multimodal Affective (PC-MulAff)” model based on the multimodal affective features for performance creative evaluation. The multimedia data acquisition equipment is used to collect the physiological data of the audience, including the multimodal affective data such as the facial expression, heart rate and eye movement. Calculate affective features of multimodal data combined with director annotation, and defined “Performance Creative—Affective Acceptance (PC-Acc)” based on multimodal affective features to evaluate the quality of performance creative. This paper verifies the PC-MulAff model on different performance data sets. The experimental results show that the PC-MulAff model shows high evaluation quality in different performance forms. In the creative evaluation of dance performance, the accuracy of the model is 7.44% and 13.95% higher than that of the single textual and single video evaluation

Numerical simulations of three black holes

In dieser Arbeit wurde ein numerischer, elliptischer Löser, Olliptic, pr¨asentiert. Als erste Anwendung wurde die Hamiltonsche Zwangsbedingung gelöst, um numerische Anfangsdaten für Simulationen mit mehreren Schwarzen Löchern zu erhalten. Olliptic implementiert eine ”Multigrid”-Methode hoher Ordnung, die parallelisiert ist und Boxen-basierte Gitterverfeinerung verwendet. Die Tests und ersten Anwendungen des Codes zeigen, dass der neue Code für unsere Zwecke genau genug zu sein scheint. Allerdings fanden wir das Nahe an der Punktur die Konvergenz-Rate geringer ist als gewünscht, was man für Punktur Daten (siehe Anhang C) erwartet. Der Abfall der Konvergenz nahe der Punkturen spiegelt sich nicht in der Konvergenz der Zeitentwicklung wieder. Wir haben Entwicklungen von drei Schwarzen Löchern gezeigt, für deren Anfangsdaten die Lösungen der Hamiltonschen Zwangsbedingung, wie sie durch den neuen ellptischen Löser generiert wurden, verwendet wurden. Wir haben unsere Anfangsdaten mit denen einer bestimmten analytischen Näherung für Anfangsdaten verglichen. Im Falle dreier Schwarzer Löcher ist die aus den genäherten Anfangsdaten resultierende Dynamik von der in Zeitentwicklungen, die die Hamiltonsche Zwangsbedingung numerisch erfüllen, verschieden. Wie zu vermuten, sind die Trajektorien der Punkturen sensitiv auf kleine Änderungen in den Anfangsdaten. Besonders, für drei und mehr Schwarze Löcher kann eine Änderung der Anfangsdaten, z.B. durch das Lösen der Zwangsbedingungen statt eine analytische Näherung zu verwenden, zu qualitativ und quantitativ sehr unterschiedlichen Verschmelzungssequenzen führen. Dennoch haben wir die Resultate von [42, 94] bestätigt, wie erwartet, dass sich die Punktur Methode auf natürliche Weise für die Simulation mehrerer Schwarzer Löcher eignet. Simulationen dreier, vierer oder gar mehrerer Schwarzer Löcher führt zur der folgenden Frage ¨uber allgemeinere Verschmelzungs Situationen: Wie kann man die Anzahl der in einer Verschmelzung beteiligten Schwarzen Löchern aus der Beobachtung ihrer Gravitationswellen bestimmen? Eine erste Analyse dieses Themas wurde zuvor im Newtonschen Fall gegeben [9, 127]. Unter Verwendung Post-Newtonscher Techniken und voll relativistischer, numerischer Simulationen haben wir mit der Erforschung eines einfachen Falles begonnen, in dem wir Evidenz aufzeigen, die die anfängliche Vermutung von [127] unterstützt, welche wir hier umformulieren

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Danc

Identity, knowledge and ownership: contemporary theatre dance artists in the UK’s creative economy

This thesis examines contemporary theatre dance artists’ economic conduct to fill a gap in knowledge in current dance scholarship. It seeks to identify economic competencies and behaviours which dance artists employ in their work lives. Furthermore, it explores to what extent the theatre dance field’s senior representatives are influential in shaping these competencies and behaviours. It also investigates the relationship between dance artists’ economic conduct and their artistic and financial status, in and outside of theatre dance. The thesis’s central hypothesis is that dance artists approach their artistic practice(s) and related economic circumstances and behaviours as interrelated value spheres, despite publicly upholding their separateness. An empirical ethnographic investigation, which has involved twenty-two research participants, underpins the thesis’s argument. By utilising interviews, community reviews and the embodied presence of the researcher in the field, the study’s methodology has aimed to create a more level playing field between the researcher and participants. In addition, it draws on commissioned governmental and independent reports which document and debate New Labour’s cultural policies between 1997 and 2010. This study’s economic perspective on its research field has been absent in previous key studies. It calls into question idealised perceptions held by many about dance artists as labourers and theatre dance as a work field. To achieve its goals, the study, firstly, provides insights about dance artists’ livelihood systems which emphasise that they employ distinct economic strategies and engage expertly with multiple value economies. Secondly, it reveals that New Labour’s cultural policies inadvertently disrupted the theatre dance sector’s central value-generating mechanisms. In doing so, they destabilised the secondary dance-related labour market and affected dance artists’ ability to self-fund their practice. Thirdly, the thesis underlines that cultural policymakers by disregarding dance artists’ livelihood systems delivered unexpected outcomes which contradicted their expressed goals

Performativities, Virtualities, Abstractions, and Cunningham's BIPED

This thesis explores the complex relations between subjective perception and dance movements, mainly exemplified by drawing on two short extracts from Merce Cunningham's choreography BIPED (1999). The central aim of the study is to formulate a performative phenomenological inquiry, which moves beyond an identification of essences, and towards an understanding of the lived experience of a dance performance as being grounded on iterations of the "abstract". The concept of the abstract primarily signifies an alternative mode of understanding Henry Bergson's notion of duration. Considering Gilles Deleuze's reading of Bergson's intuition as a method to divide the experience of a lived present into a temporal difference in kind between the virtual and the actual, this thesis suggests a complementary division of duration into virtual and actual kinds of abstraction. In addition to Bergson's method of intuition, the discussion is phenomenologically rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body image and Gaston Bachelards idea of non-causal reverberation. As with the case of intuition, those phenomenological concepts are applied unconventionally. Rather than serving as a pre-objective ontological basis for an analytical and scientific understanding of subjective embodiment, the notion of a reverberating body image is here treated as a form of mimesis, performatively constituted through symbolic and representational practices. Hence, in phenomenological terms, the rationale of the thesis is predominantly sustained by the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, arguing that reality cannot be approached directly, but only through the concept of the symbol. The viewpoint from where I speak has performative cybernetic characteristics, continuously and dynamically transgressing boundaries and reconstituting itself through iterative and citational practices. Additionally, as I move between the analytical and the intuitive, as well as between the virtual and the actual, the formal structure of the thesis corresponds to a liminal transformation of the speaking subjectivity