Dance-making on the internet: can on-line choreographic projects foster creativity in the user-participant?

Interactive Internet artworks invite viewers to become involved as user-participants as the creative process unfolds. Through analysis of selected Internet projects, the authors discuss the potential for facilitating an interactive, creative experience for participants in the process of making dance. This study was carried out in 1998 and 1999, but the findings remain relevant, as there have been few subsequent developments in the field

Chapter Gesture and Movement

Three players bring their avatars to the same in-game location to start a quest together. As they arrive, the gnome bounces on the spot and waves. The elf throws back her head in laughter before dancing with a provocative hip sway. The human salutes smartly and bows. Each of these gestures communicates information about the avatars themselves and about the interaction choices of the players controlling them. An avatar’s movement includes a range of motions, from programmed gaits and postures to the ways in which the avatar moves in and through virtual space as guided by the player. Gestures are a subset of this movement -- a specific kind of motion that encodes personal, social, and cultural information. Gestures can be decoded by others who share an understanding of the relevant codes, communicating information about intentions, emotions, and responses to events and to other people. Gesture and movement can play a key role in avatar-mediated relationships—both in interactions with other players and in information exchanges between players and their own avatars. The importance of these conveyances may be intensified in immersive gaming as an avatar’s digital body becomes more closely aligned with a player’s physical body, with the potential for influences on the player’s embodied experience

Building artificial personalities: expressive communication channels based on an interlingua for a human-robot dance

The development of artificial personalities requires that we develop a further understanding of how personality is communicated. This can be done through developing humanrobot interaction (HRI). In this paper we report on the development of the SpiderCrab robot. This uses an interlingua based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to intermediate a human-robot dance. Specifically, we developed measurements to analyse data in real time from a simple vision system and implemented a simple stochastic dancing algorithm on a custom built robot. This shows how, through some simple rules, a personality can emerge by biasing random behaviour. The system was tested with professional dancers and members of the public and the results (formal and anecdotal) are presented herein

Dancing in the Streets - a design case study

How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark? This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it. People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the street

Embodied conversations: Performance and the design of a robotic dancing partner

This paper reports insights gained from an exploration of performance-based techniques to improve the design of relationships between people and responsive machines. It draws on the Emergent Objects project and specifically addresses notions of embodiment as employed in the field of performance as a means to prototype and develop a robotic agent, SpiderCrab, designed to promote expressive interaction of device and human dancer, in order to achieve ‘performative merging’. The significance of the work is to bring further knowledge of embodiment to bear on the development of human-technological interaction in general. In doing so, it draws on discursive and interpretive methods of research widely used in the field of performance but not yet obviously aligned with some orthodox paradigms and practices within design research. It also posits the design outcome as an ‘objectile’ in the sense that a continuous and potentially divergent iteration of prototypes is envisaged, rather than a singular final product. The focus on performative merging draws in notions of complexity and user experience. Keywords: Embodiment; Performance; Tacit Knowledge; Practice-As-Research; Habitus.</p

Chapter Gesture and Movement

Three players bring their avatars to the same in-game location to start a quest together. As they arrive, the gnome bounces on the spot and waves. The elf throws back her head in laughter before dancing with a provocative hip sway. The human salutes smartly and bows. Each of these gestures communicates information about the avatars themselves and about the interaction choices of the players controlling them. An avatar’s movement includes a range of motions, from programmed gaits and postures to the ways in which the avatar moves in and through virtual space as guided by the player. Gestures are a subset of this movement -- a specific kind of motion that encodes personal, social, and cultural information. Gestures can be decoded by others who share an understanding of the relevant codes, communicating information about intentions, emotions, and responses to events and to other people. Gesture and movement can play a key role in avatar-mediated relationships—both in interactions with other players and in information exchanges between players and their own avatars. The importance of these conveyances may be intensified in immersive gaming as an avatar’s digital body becomes more closely aligned with a player’s physical body, with the potential for influences on the player’s embodied experience

Creating common ground: dialogues between performance and digital technologies

This article addresses the challenge of collaborative research between performance and digital technologies, seeking a model by which synthesis between the two aspects can be achieved. It draws upon the authors? experiences of projects where creative laboratory situations were used to support open-ended processes of exploration. The Performance Robotics project demonstrates how a cycle of iterative knowledge exchange was achieved through an embodiment exercise that developed unexpectedly. The Interactive Performance Telematics Project saw technical operators performing duets with dancers via animated sprites. Playful interaction in these projects enabled artists and technologists to find common ground on which to establish a rich dialogue for further research

Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science tools to extend choreographic research

This paper considers the role and impact of new and emerging e-Science tools on practice-led research in dance. Specifically it draws on the findings from the e-Dance project. This two-year project brings together an interdisciplinary team combining research aspects of choreography, next generation of video conferencing, and Human-Computer Interaction analysis incorporating hypermedia and non-linear annotations for recording and documentation

Embodied interfaces: dancing with digital sprites

This paper focuses on the research project, Projecting Performance, in which off-stage technical operators take on the role of performer through the live manipulation of digital ‘sprites’ in a theatrical environment. The sprites are projected onto gauzes in the stage space and operators control them with graphics tablets and pens to perform with on-stage dancers. Operators have frequently described experiences of dislocation or translocation during the experience of operating and this paper investigates the reasons for such reports. It presents the tripartite models of Zich and Castronova from the fields of theatre studies and human-computer interaction respectively, cross-referencing them to analyse the relationship between performer-operator and sprite. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theories are then employed through the writings of Crowther and Fraleigh to explore the experience of the performer-operator. The paper proposes an understanding of the digital interface in Projecting Performance as embodied and experienced both visually and kinaesthetically by the performer-operator