the forsythe company

source: motionbankorg

MOTION BANK IST EIN AUF VIER JAHRE ANGELEGTES PROJEKT DER FORSYTHE COMPANY, IN DEM DIE CHOREOGRAPHISCHE PRAXIS IN EINEM BREITEN KONTEXT ERFORSCHT WIRD.
DER SCHWERPUNKT LIEGT DABEI AUF DER ERSTELLUNG DIGITALER ONLINE-PARTITUREN VON CHOREOGRAPHIEN
in Zusammenarbeit mit ausgewählten Gastchoreographen. Die Choreographien werden anschließend auf dieser Website zugänglich gemacht.
Die Gastchoreographen der Jahre 2010-2013 sind Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion sowie Bebe Miller und Thomas Hauert. Aus den Motion Bank Partnern im Bereich Partituren zusammengesetzte Teams arbeiten mit den genannten Künstlern, um deren unterschiedliche choreographische Handschriften auf neuartige Weise durch das digitale Medium zugänglich zu machen.
Die Motion Bank Partner im Bereich Ausbildung und eine Internationale Arbeitsgruppe Ausbildung erforschen, wie sich die neuartigen digitalen Online-Partituren und verwandte, von anderen Künstlern produzierte choreographische Ressourcen in ihre akademischen Programme integrieren lassen.
Zu den öffentlichen, im Frankfurt LAB angebotenen Veranstaltungen im Rahmen von Motion Bank gehört neben Aufführungen und Gesprächen mit den Gastchoreographen auch eine Reihe von Motion Bank Workshops mit international renommierten Künstlern aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen.
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source: motionbankorg

MOTION BANK IS A FOUR-YEAR PROJECT OF THE FORSYTHE COMPANY PROVIDING A BROAD CONTEXT FOR RESEARCH INTO CHOREOGRAPHIC PRACTICE.
THE MAIN FOCUS IS ON THE CREATION OF ON-LINE DIGITAL SCORES
in collaboration with guest choreographers to be made publicly available via this website.
In 2010-2013, the guest choreographers are Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert. Teams from the Motion Bank Score Partners work with these artists to make their diverse choreographic approaches accessible in new ways through the digital medium.
Motion Bank Education Partners and an International Education Workgroup research ways to integrate the new on-line digital scores and related choreographic resources produced by other artists into their academic programs.
Accompanying the Motion Bank education research is an interdisciplinary initiative titled Dance Engaging Science aiming to stimulate new forms of collaborative research involving dance practice.
Motion Bank public events offered at The Frankfurt Lab include performances and talks with the guest choreographers as well as a series of Motion Bank Workshops with internationally recognized practitioners from different fields.
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source: thecreatorsprojectvice

Data is the future. Whoever controls the data has the power. But in the case of choreographer William Forsythe, he doesn’t want power. He wants a library. A library of movement. And he wants to share it with everyone to benefit the future of the art of dance. And art, in general.

The Motion Bank is a four-year data collection project based in Frankfurt, Germany that captures dancers’ movements with video cameras and Microsoft Kinnect. The data is then analyzed and visualized through animation. Forsythe hopes to document the dances as data point sets and transmute them into another “language.”

The aren’t the first to do so. Digital artists like Universal Everything, FIELD, and Memo Akten & Quayola have set a high bar when it comes to translating human movement from dancers and athletes into gorgeous abstract forms using motion tracking technology. But the process of motion capture is expensive and complicated, even when it comes to using more conventional commercial tools like the Microsoft Kinect, so the initiative to create and open source a repository of motion capture data, like The Motion Bank is doing, is a pretty empowering one for many in the dance and digital arts communities.

To capture these dances, The Motion Bank partnered with four choreographers from around the world: Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert. Teams from the Score Partners of Motion Bank from research institutions such as Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Department of Dance at The Ohio State University and Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD.The partners capture the data and process the choreography into innovative digital forms. Each choreographer was chosen for her or his style and unique ways of working.

For instance, Deborah Hays has a solo project in which she choreographed a piece called “No Time to Fly,” taught it to 20 different dancers, had them rehearse it for three months, and then asked the dancers to perform it. It was part of a 14 year project in which she taught a new dance annually to a new group of dancers. It was a way to share or spread her work throughout the world. A sort of movement meme.

“I was clear that it wasn’t an interpretation,” Hays said in an interview at Tanzkongress 2013. “It was an adaptation. Which, just in terms of language, an adaptation is something that moves something forward. It’s a kind of evolution of something. They weren’t interpreting my material. They were practicing using my tools and through that noticing the feedback of their bodies, their teachers.”

Now, The Motion Bank is documenting her solos, and the evolution of her work is going digital. During the research process, the artists capturing the data were inspired to create their own works of art, using digital information about the dances.

One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of adaptation is by German artist Amin Weber. Fittingly, Weber took Hays’ “No Time to Fly,” which was originally performed by Ros Warby, Juliette Mapp and Jeanine Durning. The digital piece is haunting and often funny. Weber gilds the lily of the dancers’ motions with his animations to create a new and lovely piece of art.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects to the project is how the project is influencing how digital artists make new work.

“In artistic work I try to enlarge my field of perception,” says Weber. “But working with Deborah Hay and the performers showed me how incredibly large that field can be when someone leads you in a direction you didn’t know existed. Deborah Hays advice to ‘Turn your fucking head!’ seems to apply to more art disciplines than just dance.”

The project ends this December with public presentations, and the bank is beginning its online archives with an interactive website, starting with Hays work. The ultimate goal of The Motion Bank is to use the research for choreographers and dancers to learn from each other. That gives power to the people. It enables artists to discover new ways to evolve and spread the beauty of dance.
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source: creatorsprojectcn

我们的未来将充满着数据。因此掌控了数据的人将手握大权。而对于舞蹈动作设计师William Forsythe来说，他要的不是这种权力。他想要一座宝库，一座动作宝库。他想把它和所有人分享，以此促进舞蹈艺术，以及所有艺术形式未来的发展。

Motion Bank是一项为期四年的数据采集项目，总部设在德国的法兰克福。在这个项目中，舞者的动作被普通摄像机和微软开发的Kinect 3D体感摄影机记录下来，经过分析之后再制作成动画效果。Forsythe 希望能以点集的方式记录这些舞蹈动作，再把它们转化成另一种“语言”。

他们不是第一个做出这样尝试的人。在用动作跟踪技术把舞蹈家和运动员的动作转化为唯美抽象艺术方面，像Universal Everything, FIELD和Memo Akten & Quayola这样的数字艺术家已经设下了极高的门槛。但即使使用像微软Kinect这样更传统的商业工具，动作拍摄过程仍然是非常昂贵且复杂的。所以创建动作捕捉数据库并公开给大众，也就是Motion Bank正在做的，将得到舞蹈界和数字艺术界大部分人的拥护。

为了捕捉到这些舞蹈动作，Motion Bank与来自全世界四位舞蹈动作设计师合作，他们分别是Deborah Hay，Jonathan Burrows&Matteo Fargion，Bebe Miller和Thomas Hauert。Motion Bank的音乐合作团队来自一些研究所，例如高级艺术设计计算中心，俄亥俄州立大学舞蹈系和夫琅和费电脑图像研究所总监署。这些合作伙伴负责捕捉数据，然后把舞蹈表演制作成创新的数字形式。每个舞蹈动作设计师都是以他们的风格和独树一帜的工作方式而被精挑细选出来。以Deborah Hays为例，在一个个人项目中，她设计了一套舞蹈动作取名为“没时间去飞”，并把它教给了20位不同的舞蹈家，给他们三个月的时间进行排练，然后让他们表演。这只是一个14年项目的一部分，在这个项目中，她每年都要教不同的一群舞者一套全新的舞蹈。通过这种形式她把自己的作品传播到全世界，与所有人分享，就像一种舞蹈文化一样。

“我确信这不是单纯的表演，”在2013年舞蹈家大会的访谈上Hays如是说，“它是改编，是全新的演绎，在语言方面，改写可以促进事物向前发展，就像某样事物的演变一样。这些舞蹈家不是在表演着我的动作，他们借助我设计的动作来展示自己，并注意着自己身体的反馈，他们的身体就是他们的老师。”

目前，Motion Bank在记录着她设计的个人舞蹈动作，她的作品的演变发展也被数字化了。在研究过程中，采集数据的艺术家们被鼓励用这些舞蹈的电子信息来创作自己的艺术作品。

最经典的改编范例当属德国艺术家Amin Weber的作品。实际上，Weber正是借用了Hays的“没时间去飞”，最初是由Ros Warby, Juliette Mapp and Jeanine Durning表演的。她制作出的数字作品令人难忘，有时还让人忍俊不禁。Weber为舞者的动作添加了动画效果，创作出了全新而又可爱的艺术作品。

这个项目最非凡的一面在于它影响了数字艺术家们创作新作品的方式。

“在创作艺术作品时我努力扩大我的感知面”，Weber说，“但是在与Deborah Hay和其他表演者合作时，我发现，当有人引领你走向一个完全未知的方向时，感知面竟然可以变得如此之大。 Deborah Hays建议‘朝周围多看看’，这个建议似乎可以更多地运用于艺术形式中，而不仅仅是舞蹈。”

这个项目即将在今年十二月，在一系列的公众展示中落下帷幕。Motion Bank将通过一个互动网站来开放它的在线档案库。Hays的作品将被最先公开。Motion Bank的最终理想是让舞蹈动作设计师和舞蹈家们利用自己的研究来互相学习。