Capturing dance: the art of documentation (An exploration of distilling the body in motion)

This research paper is an exploration of documenting and capturing live dance performance in regards to three artistic mediums, Notation, Photography and Film. This piece of writing discusses practitioners who have contributed to the development of these processes such as: Ann Hutchinson Guest, Rudolf von Laban, Eadweard Muybridge, Lois Greenfield, Ted Shawn, Norman McLaren and Sue Healey. In conjunction with historical and current day research the secondary document provided alongside this thesis describes the practical investigation undertaken. The reflections included define first-hand discoveries of how these three mediums of documenting interconnect to describe a contemporary dance solo. Thoughts, findings and results from the studio are provided and discussed to gain further understanding. The aim of this research is to distil and capture the body in motion, to see if it’s possible to produce a document capable of communicating dance when a live body is absent

Musicians in Space

Musicians in space (MiS) is a practice-based research project investigating the impact of spatialization on the performance of free improvised music (FiM). It draws heavily on Christopher Small’s idea of musicking to contextualize the argument that in the fifty year history of FiM, improvisers have failed to fully explore possible alternatives to the formal separation and static positioning of the audience and performer. While the conventional performance situation is seen as being integral to the pageantry of the performative experience, I argue that the fixity of the spatial and social arrangement has done little to support the allencompassing and heterarchical aspirations that had once been a noted rallying cry of the free improviser. The thesis traces a journey through a series of live performances involving experienced free improvisers, on the UK and European improvised music scene, and incorporates the voices of over 70 participants. The thesis establishes a separation between hierarchical and heterarchical forms of musicking, where the former emphasizes the convergence of more unifying and fixed ideals associated with the construction and organisation of a musical process, while the later celebrates a more decentralized, polysemic, and self-organizing musicking practice. This categorization is used throughout this research to support a greater degree of understanding of the particular characteristics of FiM within the broader context of music-making. MiS, in essence, simply invites all the participants the option to modify their spatial relationship to the musicking process in order to expand their listening and playing experiences. It was found that this single change, in the approach to performance, greatly influenced many aspects of the FiM process, providing new insights into ways of engaging and listening for both the improviser and the listener. It afforded the improviser new opportunities to connect musically with the ensemble, while elevating the profile of the audience member from a focused listener to a visible participant and active collaborator in the process. This document attempts to establish a clear impression of what was uncovered by this research, while also celebrating the impossibility of capturing in words the complexity of an improvisation experience. It does this by incorporating a range of different forms of writing and a collection of personal depictions of a number of performances and improvising participants. This document also includes links to multi-perspective audio and visual footage of all the performances. This can be found at: http://www.dafmusic.com/Musicians_in_Space/mis_projectbrief.html

Choreographing collaboration: A multilayered approach to somatic and site-oriented art practices

Choreographing collaboration: A multilayered approach to somatic and site-oriented art practices is a research-creation thesis project that focuses on multiple sites of collaboration between bodies and spaces (both physical and digital) and how collaboration informs and shapes a creative process in dance and choreographic practices. The creative period of this research project was informed by somatic explorations between my body, a vacant storefront located on Saint Denis Street in Montreal, and Zoom, which was used to communicate with an artist located in São Paulo, Brazil. The creative research period took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted me to critically reflect upon notions of time, my creative process, and my routines as a performer and choreographer in the field of dance for 20 years. As such, one of the goals of undertaking a creative process over a period of 30 consecutive days was to set up conditions for a different creative routine to emerge. Four main themes — intimacy, publicness, transparency, and opacity — arose in this process, and each is examined and described in relation to my analysis of the methods used to expand my approach to both collaboration and choreography

Creating the Carrot

O’Leary, Ronald, M.A., Summer 2010: Integrated Arts and Education Introducing Media Arts as a Motivational and Educational Tool Chairperson: Richard Hughes Drawing from a wide swath of fine arts disciplines, this project effectively deals with pulling music, movement, creative writing, video and collaborative learning experiences together. Leading other teachers in the direction of media arts is the additional goal, which continues to be a monumental challenge in the face of working with very difficult students at the Yellowstone Academy. The Yellowstone Academy is a K-12 school, which serves the Yellowstone Boys and Girl’s Ranch (a treatment center for emotionally disturbed youth). Creating sound tracks and video projects has proven to be an effective motivator for many of the students in my music classes. Students engage in the subject matter, think creatively and produce culturally relevant artistic projects. Reaching out to the other teachers has run parallel to my own pursuits, as I see so many possibilities for affecting change through media arts. My pursuit of bringing media arts to the Yellowstone Academy has become a reality, in spite of the odds. The overall involvement and growth of individual students and the overall tone and culture of my music classes as a media arts component develops will be addressed within the scope of this paper. This project culminates many facets of the arts and brings my own development as an educator and artist into the technological realm. My greatest ambition is that over time, the motivational quality of integrating video technology to other areas of the Yellowstone Academy will create a positive influence on the culture of the student body

Recognition and Understanding of Meetings Overview of the European AMI and AMIDA Projects

The AMI and AMIDA projects are concerned with the recognition and interpretation of multiparty (face-to-face and remote) meetings. Within these projects we have developed the following: (1) an infrastructure for recording meetings using multiple microphones and cameras; (2) a one hundred hour, manually annotated meeting corpus; (3) a number of techniques for indexing, and summarizing of meeting videos using automatic speech recognition and computer vision, and (4) a extensible framework for browsing, and searching of meeting videos. We give an overview of the various techniques developed in AMI (mainly involving face-to-face meetings), their integration into our meeting browser framework, and future plans for AMIDA (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distant Access), the follow-up project to AMI. Technical and business information related to these two projects can be found at www.amiproject.org, respectively on the Scientific and Business portals

The Courier, Volume 5, Issue 20, March 9, 1972

Stories: 30% of District’s Seniors Plan To Enroll Here Alpha College Head, Jim Gulden, Resigns Channel 3 Offers an Alternative to ‘That Girl’ Woman Missionary Tells of Ecuador Life College-Bound Seniors (Statistics) Skaters Advance to Nationals People: Jim Gulden Astrid Pearso

Coordinating over time: The micro-processes of integrating creativity and control in a dramatic television production

The pressures of continuous innovation in response to shorter product lifecycles and changing customer tastes or requirements create a constant challenge for firms expected to deliver predictable growth. Yet, the creativity needed for new product development projects often emerges in unpredictable and non-linear ways. Projects such as software development, new drug exploration, and filmmaking are knowledge-intensive undertakings where creativity is not confined to the conceptual stage of the project, but required for its duration. Different groups are often involved at different stages of the project and their creative contributions need to be conjunctive. Consequently, formal controls are required to coordinate their creative inputs. My research explores how the competing tensions of creativity and control are balanced through coordinating mechanisms over time in large-scale creative collaborations (LSCCs). Given the long implicit function of the budget as a coordinating mechanism, it became the focal point of this exploration. My dissertation is focused on answering two related research questions. First, how are budgets used to accomplished coordination over time? Second, how are budgets used to mediate the tensions between creativity and control? In this study, I used a qualitative approach to build new theory. My enquiry is situated in the film and television industry where creative aspirations must be continually balanced within the parameters of time and money. Using an in-depth, single case study design, I studied the coordinating practices of the crew of a dramatic television series production in ‘real time’ as they created and produced each script of the season. In the film and television industry, each product is a new creation that comes to fruition through the collaborative efforts of teams of artists, designers and specialized crafts people

A Creative Journey In Higher Education: The Story Of Personal And Organizational Change

This project explores my personal and professional journey as a teacher in higher education and how it parallels the unique journey of the institution where I teach, Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. This is a story about the pursuit of creativity in education and the transformation as a result of creativity. Drawing on current theories of creativity, in particular the 4 P’s (person, process, product and press), it examines what factors played a role in initiating and managing change. Presented as a narrative, this project documents the various aspects of personal and organizational change. The questions asked include: “What sparked the personal and organizational pursuit of creativity in education at Sheridan?” and “What elements fostered creativity to grow and build a community for the purpose of teaching and learning for creativity?

Towards a framework for socially interactive robots

250 p.En las últimas décadas, la investigación en el campo de la robótica social ha crecido considerablemente. El desarrollo de diferentes tipos de robots y sus roles dentro de la sociedad se están expandiendo poco a poco. Los robots dotados de habilidades sociales pretenden ser utilizados para diferentes aplicaciones; por ejemplo, como profesores interactivos y asistentes educativos, para apoyar el manejo de la diabetes en niños, para ayudar a personas mayores con necesidades especiales, como actores interactivos en el teatro o incluso como asistentes en hoteles y centros comerciales.El equipo de investigación RSAIT ha estado trabajando en varias áreas de la robótica, en particular,en arquitecturas de control, exploración y navegación de robots, aprendizaje automático y visión por computador. El trabajo presentado en este trabajo de investigación tiene como objetivo añadir una nueva capa al desarrollo anterior, la capa de interacción humano-robot que se centra en las capacidades sociales que un robot debe mostrar al interactuar con personas, como expresar y percibir emociones, mostrar un alto nivel de diálogo, aprender modelos de otros agentes, establecer y mantener relaciones sociales, usar medios naturales de comunicación (mirada, gestos, etc.),mostrar personalidad y carácter distintivos y aprender competencias sociales.En esta tesis doctoral, tratamos de aportar nuestro grano de arena a las preguntas básicas que surgen cuando pensamos en robots sociales: (1) ¿Cómo nos comunicamos (u operamos) los humanos con los robots sociales?; y (2) ¿Cómo actúan los robots sociales con nosotros? En esa línea, el trabajo se ha desarrollado en dos fases: en la primera, nos hemos centrado en explorar desde un punto de vista práctico varias formas que los humanos utilizan para comunicarse con los robots de una maneranatural. En la segunda además, hemos investigado cómo los robots sociales deben actuar con el usuario.Con respecto a la primera fase, hemos desarrollado tres interfaces de usuario naturales que pretenden hacer que la interacción con los robots sociales sea más natural. Para probar tales interfaces se han desarrollado dos aplicaciones de diferente uso: robots guía y un sistema de controlde robot humanoides con fines de entretenimiento. Trabajar en esas aplicaciones nos ha permitido dotar a nuestros robots con algunas habilidades básicas, como la navegación, la comunicación entre robots y el reconocimiento de voz y las capacidades de comprensión.Por otro lado, en la segunda fase nos hemos centrado en la identificación y el desarrollo de los módulos básicos de comportamiento que este tipo de robots necesitan para ser socialmente creíbles y confiables mientras actúan como agentes sociales. Se ha desarrollado una arquitectura(framework) para robots socialmente interactivos que permite a los robots expresar diferentes tipos de emociones y mostrar un lenguaje corporal natural similar al humano según la tarea a realizar y lascondiciones ambientales.La validación de los diferentes estados de desarrollo de nuestros robots sociales se ha realizado mediante representaciones públicas. La exposición de nuestros robots al público en esas actuaciones se ha convertido en una herramienta esencial para medir cualitativamente la aceptación social de los prototipos que estamos desarrollando. De la misma manera que los robots necesitan un cuerpo físico para interactuar con el entorno y convertirse en inteligentes, los robots sociales necesitan participar socialmente en tareas reales para las que han sido desarrollados, para así poder mejorar su sociabilida