CYBERDANCE

This net art by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto offers us a split, fragmented, impossible dance, in a divided, multiplied space. Cyberdance consists of the combination and recombination of elements that represent the different parts of the human body. A mannequin was photographed as a model in different positions. These images were later converted to the animated form, allowing users to combine them in different ways, as well as link them to different dance terms, to the names of postures and positions of classical ballet. On a page divided into frames containing fragments of the mannequin, we can see his head, legs, torso and arms rotating, while allowing us to subdivide each frame by clicking on it, each frame composing an aberrant doll whose fragments dance, silently, independent one from the other. There is no music, no rhythm, no space. It is a digital dance, a dance in which time and space have become a platform.

简宁汉
מרס קנינגהם
マース·カニングハム
머시 디스 커닝햄
dance
Мерс Каннингем
Paul Kaiser
Shelley Eshkar

Dancer Matthieu Chayrigues

Compagnie Centre National de Danse Contemporaine-Angers.

Photo: Charlotte Audureau.
BIPED

“Ever the experimentalist, Cunningham collaborated with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar using motion capture technology to create BIPED. As the name suggests it’s in its most basic sense an exploration of the biped, the ambulatory two-legged body.
Eshkar and Kaiser place a scrim in front of the dancers on which they project a moving décor of lines and patterns.” Lisa Traiger

Cyberia

Performance & live computer generated simulation

A postmodern fairytale, Cyberia takes place somewhere in a cold distant East, stretching between and endless imaginary realm and a vast physical space. It is a westwards journey towards a promised future with no arrival and no return. There is no here or there, only a twilight zone between a departure point and a simulated destination. Between digital video projections and a physical setting, using the mechanics of a video-game engine with a motion capture suit, Cyberia is the simulation of an endless pre-climax state where a performer and a CG avatar dance as one to the rhythms of an imaginary West. In a world oversaturated by digital data –mysticism and paranormal are as popular as ever. Emerging technologies are increasingly incorporated in a form of postmodern spiritualism, as Arthur C. Clarke points out: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

digital sculptures

Motion sculptures for CCTV Documentary Channel is a digital metaphor of phenomenal blinks and moments that life consists of. A visual performance of organic and vital substance, animated using data of actors movements. Dents visualize four different themes. Motion sculpture of steel reflects old Chinese adage that true power is mastering yourself. Youthful energy of dancers evolve into beautiful organic sculpture.

Synchrometrics

Can we design future memories for the body?
Is the body itself the apparatus for remembering cultural processes?Prospectus For a Future Body proposes new perspectives on how the body remembers and invents technological narratives. Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures?Eternal Summer Storm explores the concept of muscle memory transfer as an alternative form of interactive cultural continuities. This concept prototype speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions. Eternal Summer Storm attempts to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance choreography and experience in ‘A Summer Storm’ (1973) from archival footages.Bionic Movement Research is a collection of experiments on the process of designing digital muscle memory for the body. Inspired by Luigi Galvani discovery (1780) of animal electricity in the human body, these experiments appropriate the techniques of electrical nerve stimulation to choreograph artificial muscle contraction and body movement.

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.

Eggs Are Good For Your Hair
Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

Me, My Selfie and I
Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?

White Water and Dust
Set to the piano scores by Erik Satie and other composers, White Water is a lyrical dance of pure movement that flows beautifully as its title suggests. The curtain opens to a projected colour image of a flowing river; it slowly transforms into black and white. In serenity and in turbulence, whiteness of waves and ripples streams out of the blackness. Green netting and girds used for digital design interrupt the flow of water, thus revealing the process of creating virtual images and illusion of light, providing a pleasant surprise to the dance.
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer Lin Hwai-min adopted this classical name for the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community.

“Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?”

休克雷奇默尔
ХЬЮ КРЕЧМЕР
Hugh Kretschmer is a professional digital artist and photographer from Los Angeles. He started photography at the age of 13 under the guidance of his father. His imagination and conceptual thinking is showcased beautifully through surreal photo manipulations. Hugh is specialized in advertising, photo illustration, editorial photography and design.

Transient Materialization
Created by Shih-Yuan Wang, Yu-Ting Sheng, Dr. Alex Barchiesi and Vyacheslav Kryvosheya with guidance from Prof. Jeffrey Huang at the Media and Design Laboratory LDM, EPFL / SINLAB, Transient Materialization explores the relationship between digital and material-based digital fabrication through n-hedron structure composed mainly of soap foam that is blown, through a mixture of air and helium, into a foam structure.The project questions structure’s materiality and examines its physical performance and ephemeral characteristics. In the first phase of the project the team achieved a programmable foam structure and presented various configurations of dynamic and transformable foam structures. The fabrication interacts with the algorithm, which involves a mixture of air and helium (controlled by pneumatic valves) and additive chemical substances and thickening agents.The aim of the project is to take architecture beyond the creation of static forms and into the design of dynamic, transformable and ephemeral material experimental processes.

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.

Morphs
MORPHs, short for Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra, are motive architectural structures which can crawl and self-assemble in order to encourage social interaction through play. These playful robotic creatures encourage the public to choreograph them into dance routines, assemble them into complex sculptural geometries or else play music at them, which they will play back over time. Groups of people can interact at any one time and eventually develop a dialogue amongst participants, through the use of contemporary digital technology.

Suaveciclo
File Festival
Vjsuave is Ygor Marotta and Cecilia Soloaga, a new media art duo, based in São Paulo, Brazil. As specialists in animation, moving projection and digital graffiti, they have realesed 4 short films, “Run”, “Homeless”, “La Cena” and “Trip” Their main performances are: “suaveciclo” – a tricycle adapted to project in the streets, live painting and animation with ipad, live audiovisual performance, video mapping and site-specific a/v installations. They want to comunicate love through light. Their performances are poignant, warm, and personal, crafted from hand-drawn and hand-painted media, transformed into digital animation, then projection-mapped in a way that seems to bring São Paulo’s streets alive. Characters dance and run across the urban landscape, with a convincing blend of simulated movement and real moving projection.

Glow
Glow is an illuminating 30-minute choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states. Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.