highlike

HUANG YI & KUKA

The work fulfills Huang’s childhood dream of having a robot dance partner and required development from scratch.  After learning the mechanics of the industrial KUKA robot, he conceptualized the movements and programmed the machine to create the partner he wanted.   He says of the experience, “Dancing face to face with a robot is like looking at my own face in a mirror… I think I have found the key to spin human emotions into robots.” It was developed into a full-length piece with two additional dancers as part of 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center‘s Artist Residency program and their 3LD/3D+ program.

Dragan Ilic

Re)Evolution

With the machine programed to draw, the robot becomes a medium for interaction and for “symbiosis” with the artist, creating a kind of “hybrid body” of man and machine, whose nervous system and brain waves administer “software commands” to the robot during the drawing performance. A key actor in the exhibition will be the new model of the KUKA KR 210 robot, that has a multi-functioning performative role: from drawing, experimental dance, music – through the production of industrial sound, and a six channel video projection that documents Ilić’s projects.

OSKAR SCHLEMMER

أوسكار شليمر
奥斯卡·施莱默
אוסקר שלמר
オスカー·シュレンマー
오스카 슐 렘머
Оскар Шлеммер
Triadic Ballet
1-Margarete Hastings, Franz Schömbs, Georg Verden
1970
2-Super 16mm colour film, directed by Helmut Ammann.
Oskar Schlemmer saw the human body as a new artistic medium. He saw ballet and pantomimes as being free from the historical baggage of theater and opera and, therefore, capable of presenting his ideas of choreographed geometry, the man as a dancer, transformed by his costumes, moving in space. He saw the puppet and puppet movement as superior to that of the human, as this emphasized that the average of all art is artificial. This device could be expressed through stylized movements and the abstraction of the human body. Schlemmer saw the modern world being guided by two main currents, the mechanized (man as a machine and body as a mechanism) and the primordial impulse (the depths of creative urgency). He claimed that choreographed geometry offered a synthesis; the Dionysian and emotional origins of dance become rigid and Apollonian in its final form.
3-Bayerisches Junior Ballet München

ALWIN NIKOLAIS

Noumenon

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.” Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control. Also in 1963, Nikolais met analog synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York. He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer. It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975. The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

KRIS VERDONCK

I / II / III / IIII

In I/II/III/IIII, choreographer and visual artist Kris Verdonck transforms the stage into a life-size dollhouse. Four female ICK-dancers – not unlike marionettes – are floating in mid-air, suspended from a huge machine. A solo, a duet, a trio and a quartet follow one another in this choreography of identical movements. A game of surrendering to the machine and at the same time, searching for control. The images evoked by I/II/III/IIII are confusing and ambiguous: the dancers almost look like graceful, fragile swans … but they also remind us of animal carcasses being dragged along, floating angels, falling human bodies and everything in between.

Klaus Obermaier

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Rhizomatiks Research ELEVENPLAY Kyle McDonald

discrete figures 2019

Human performers meet computer-generated bodies, calculated visualisations of movement meet flitting drones! Artificial intelligence and self-learning machines make this previously unseen palette of movement designs appear, designs that far transcend the boundaries of human articulateness, allowing for a deep glimpse into the abstract world of data processing. The Rhizomatiks Research team, led by Japanese artist, programmer, interaction designer and DJ Daito Manabe, gathers collective power with a number of experts, among them the five ELEVENPLAY dancers of choreographer MIKIKO as well as from coding artist Kyle McDonald. The result is a breathtaking, implemented beautifully, in short: visually stunning.

YURI ANCARANI

DA VINCI

“Da Vinci”: a name evocative of masterpieces in the history of art, but also a remotely manipulated medical robot allowing surgeons to perform operations. Yuri Ancarani, filmmaker and artist, with this film gives us access to the interior of a human body, in shades of blue evoking the “grotta azzura”, a mythical maritime cave in Capri. Here is observed the dance of the machines, a sign not of a dehumanized environment, but on the contrary of a human intelligence at work.

Jeremy Shaw

towards universal recognition

“Shaw  presents Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, a series of archival photographs framed under custom-machined prismatic acrylic. The works, which he calls optical sculptures, depict people in transcendent states accessed through prayer, dance, yoga and the like. They act as a preview to the videos, which are projected in meticulously constructed spaces, each with eight office chairs facing a single screen.” Diana Hiebert

Kris Verdonck

A Two Dogs Company
Duet

A man and woman are in a situation of absolute mutual dependence. As opposed to the situation in HEART man and woman are visible for each other. They execute their dance movements in a live loop. These movements will be deconstructed and mechanically manipulated. The machine pushes them to repeat perfectly; for which they inevitably have to trust each other. They are left to each other.
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ELEVENPLAY x RZM

Discrete Figures
‘Discrete Figures’ unites the performing arts and mathematics in a dramatic exploration of the relationship between the human body and computer generated movement (simulated bodies) born from mathematical analysis. As an additional layer of complexity, the performance piece utilizes drones, A.I., and machine learning in the quest for a new palette of movement to foster undiscovered modes of expressive dance that transcend the limits of conventional human subjectivity and emotional expression.

XAVIER LE ROY

Self Unfinished

French choreographer Xavier Le Roy defies categorisation as a dance-maker, drawing on diverse influences from the worlds of science, performance art and contemporary dance.
In Self Unfinished (1998), Le Roy takes the audience on a journey of metamorphosis as he transforms into an extraordinary hybrid creature part machine, part alien, part human.
Employing all manner of physical devices, Le Roy creates a world of illusion that is as unsettling as it is transfixing.

Nirma Madhoo

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

Cod.Act

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.