Dance and Media Technologies Author(s): Johannes Birringer Source: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol.

24, No. 1, Intelligent Stages: Digital Art and Performance (Jan., 2002), pp. 84-93 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3246461 . Accessed: 02/04/2011 17:34
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DANCE AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

Edited, with an Introduction, by Johannes Birringer

The articles by Ann Dils, Scott deLahunta, and Timothy Murray that follow the introduction were assembledfor this specialsection by PA] contributingeditorJohannes Birringer.

BEYOND THE STAGE uring the last decade a small but burgeoning group of people in the international community of choreographers,performers, and media artists began to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. A mail list was put in place (http://art.net/-dtz/), and a growing network of collaborative media projects triggered contentious internet debates about emerging definitions of "virtual" or "digital" dance. The strong interest among dancemakers in new media hardly came as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had attracted considerable attention in the 80s, especially as choreographers, companies, researchers,and teachers began to use video as a vital means of documenting/promoting work or analyzing existing choreographies. Furthermore, some scholars and software programmers had published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservationas well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities. In the mid-90s, I had begun to direct workshops on performance technologies, incorporating new compositional ideas and instruments such as cameras, videoprojectors, sensors, or computer software. By the turn of the new century, many interests in related fields (film, digital arts, science and technology, design, of engineering, medicine, telecommunications, etc.) furthered our understanding and complementary thinking processes that drive new interdisciplinary research conceptual models influenced by the computer's information processing capabilities and the internet's global reach. Working in the expanded tradition of site-specific works, conceptual art, and performance, we embraced the sense that performance is or process, that it is collaborative, and that it does not rely on one specific technique include vocabulary. Dance was organically extending its reach: choreography could
? 2002 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.

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space, sculpture, light, video projection, and live electronic music just as easily as film editors mix their tracks or as installation artists construct complex scenarios of experience for the audience who enter the space of media. We realized that nothing would be the same again, as we gradually left the proscenium stage and found conventional production processes inadequate. New dance, involving technologies and interactive designs from the conceptual starting point, needed a different environment for its evolution.

AND INTERFACES NAVIGATIONS

Technology has decisively challenged bodily boundaries and spatial realities, profoundly affecting the relationsbetween humans and machines. The new convergences between dance and technology reflect back on the nature of dance, its physicalsensory relationship to space and the world, its immediate, phenomenological embodiedness, its lived experience in one place. Whether we are in a rehearsal studio, on the stage, or in the street or a discotheque, we are still in one place among other moving bodies when we dance, or "dance around," as William Forsythe calls it. But dance has taken the lead, among the theatrical arts, in absorbing technology as a creative tool, affording dancers and technologists the opportunity to explore interactive environments, virtual places, and integrated methods that have shifted artistic process. We no longer learn new steps or combinations; we do not solve movement problems. First, the shift has implied the relocation of the compositional process into a laboratory-like environment. The directors of the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University refer to the "intelligent stage," where dancing takes place with computer-assisted design and MIDI interfaces in interactive environments which allow for a different "programming"of physical motion and motion sensing. At ISA the stage is wired for internet access and telematic transmission of streaming video and MIDI (Musical Instrument Data Interface) signals, while also featuring the "VeryNervous System"(VNS) design developed by sound artist David Rokeby. VNS is a system combining video cameras, an artificial perception system, computer, and synthesizer to create a space in which body movements are translated into sound, music, or video projections in real time. As with other tracking systems such as BigEye or Eyecon, the sensing in the interface is done by cameras and motion detection devices. But the dancers also become "sensors,"adapting to a new spatial awareness of digitally-enhanced space or of an "operating system" which triggers responses and feedback. Dancers appear to be touching invisible partners; they become ghostcatchers.' Second, the engineering of interface designs moves to the foreground in such labs, and the term "sensing"gains a dimension reaching beyond the physical and organic understanding of bodily anatomy, musculature, and proprioceptive spatial awareness of moving-within-the-kinesphere that dancers trained in modern traditions (after Laban) bring to the studio. The convergence of interface design and

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Dumb Type, OR, installation, ICC, Japan, 1997. Still courtesy of NTT Intercommunication Center.

Dumb Type, Memorandum, multimediadance,Tanzzentrum NRW, Diisseldorf,2000. Videostill:CourtesyJohannesBirringer.

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movement analysis extends earlier Laban-derived structural explorations of the body's repertoirefor movement. In more than one sense, it involves the entire sphere of movement as interaction, encompassing perceptive and receptive processes. If movement is a "continuous current" (Laban), a new understanding of "interspaces" in networked performance (telematics) is now evolving. The "interactivity" of sensitive environments is one crucial aspect of it. The notion of real-time flow changes, as the environment also functions as a video studio or soundstage, and cameras, sensors, and appropriate lighting need to be continuously calibrated. If the environment is networked, there will be delays in the uplink/downlink tele-operation; and such delays might affect kinesthetic perception; interactive art also challenges the separation of work and audience. In interactive art there is no audience but, strictly speaking, only users and interface participants. From a compositional viewpoint, the most significant intervention into movement today is the dis-location, and subsequent re-distribution, of movement as captured and processed data; sampled files become the ghosts for the new technopoiesis of dance. Movement, as it is used in interactive and networked performance-installations, continuously crosses between real space, projected space (video/animation), or other virtual contexts (Virtual Reality, remote sites). Space is dematerialized. Movement is captured, commuted, transferred, and reconfigured/ rematerialized elsewhere. We interact with sensory information such as video which projects different three-dimensional kinesthetic perceptions of movement energy, position, and velocity (cf. slow motion, close-ups, different scale, etc). To program interfaces between dancers and the computer implies the creation of an unstable system. "Choreography" more closely resembles the "live mix" experienced in techno culture when DJs create a situation, a combinatory sound continuum, and use filter devices to modify the parameters in response to energy that is transferredbetween dancers and musical stream. The intensities of the event develop a kind of autopoiesis. In current dance experiments with interface designs based on feedback/triggersin real time, the composition process is like an "emergent system," symbiotic improvisation with invisible sensor "lines"or dynamic fields in space. Dance, closely associated with visual forms and rhythms, is fundamentally a multimedia system. Since the beginning of photography and motion studies, performances were staged exclusively for the camera. Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of the human figure in motion, originally intended as a scientific study, were first published in 1887, and they became a famous source book for artists, animators, and filmmakers. Ethnographic filmmakers and choreographers later discovered that dance-on-film or videodance is a composite medium in its own right; that choreography is editing of frames. Making dances for the camera has become not only a cinematographic alternative to live dance, but motivated choreographers to reconceive the aesthetics of dance for the theatre. The impact is evident in the cinematic quality of many contemporary works. The Japanese

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companies Dumb Type (Memorandum) and OM2 (The Convulsions of Mr. K) literally used no less than six simultaneous screen projections in their recent performances. Video effected a transition in two directions, opening up a new screen space for movement images (cf. music television), and bringing new ideas of nonlinear editing to the practice of composition and interactive design. At the 1999 International Dance and Technology Conference (IDAT) at Arizona State University, I witnessed many of the artists currently working with computer technologies: Troika Ranch, Company in Space, half/angel, Isabelle Choiniere, Yacov Sharir, Ellen Bromberg, Sher Doruff, John McCormick, Susan Kozel, Sarah Rubidgc, Lisa Naugle, Sophia Lycouris, Michael Cole, Ralph Lemon, Li ChiaoPing, Koala Yip, Jean-Marc Matos, Gretchen Schiller, John D. Mitchell, Douglas Rosenberg, Robert Wechsler, Thecla Schiphorst, and others. Sometimes the artistdeveloped technological systems obscured the meaning and the aesthetic informing a work, at other times the non-human interventions all but disappeared to let us focus on the quality of the performance inside intelligent systems operated by the computer, on the manner in which movement information and gestural expression of content emerged. I want to mention an example. The Secret Project, presented by half/angel (dancer/writer Jools Gilson-Ellis and composer Richard Povall), used motion sensing and sound/MIDI software to explore the interaction of choreographic improvisation, original text/vocals, and soundscapes. Rather than attempting to control a virtual stage space, half/angel sought to extend the actual motion of the performer into sonic and poetic rhythms. With the software collaborating with the body in physical space, Gilson-Ellis challenged us to experience movement as live musical composition and vocalization of the poetry she had written. She literally danced with her arms and voice as extended musical instruments that can layer and caress the textscapes/soundscapes (programmed by Povall) she triggered in space through her interaction with the camera-sensor. The SecretProjectwas subtle and moving in its astonishing distribution of the voices and her recorded or amplified breathing in the interactive live dance. Navigating expanded spheres of movement requiresa radical reorderingof the senses due to an increase in telematic or virtual interaction. While doing so, dancers become conscious of the deep structure of computer interfaces and are engaged in a new form of motion studies and space-making. Currently, there are four types of environments evolving in dance: (1) interactive environments (based on sensors and motion tracking); (2) immersive environments (virtual reality-based, such as the CAVE, or panoramic installations that integrate body and vision into the polysensual illusion of moving through space); (3) networked environments (telepresence, video-conferencing, and telerobotics, allowing users to experience a dispersed body and to interact with traces of other remote bodies, avatars,and prostheses); and, (4) derived environments (motion-capture-based reanimations of bodily movement or liquid architecture, which can also be networked and reintroduced into live

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betweenremotesites). or telepresence teleroboticoperationsand communications of The parameters all of these environmenttypescan be mixed;we can then speak of mixed-reality environments. VIRTUALDANCING Questions arise, for example,as to how dance improvisation might evolve across distancesto createmeaning. How might we dance with remote partnersin "real time"? if we want to use imagesas live projections, how do we bringthe digital Or, The of the futurewill not be a theatrebut backinto "real space"? "intelligent stage" the network itself. Yet in order to transmit movement images, a dance has to thus harbors at performance "happen" some point in realtime/realspace.Telematic as data have to be producedand processedin beautifulparadoxes, transmittable betweendifferentlocationswhich may involvedifferentenvironments. synchrony dance work Geography, Ralph Lemon, who recentlycompleted his collaborative the experiences his travelsin Africaand Asia, has been working of encompassing A since 1996 on Mirrors Smoke: Non-Linear in In Performance Virtual Space. his &e online diaryhe writesthat he is not sureyet wherethisworkwill "live" a "product as that is almost impossibleto define in context to what has gone before."2 Paul Kaiserand Shelley Eshkar'sRiverbedDesign Company brought dance to softwaredesign experiments,collaborating with Merce Cunninghamand Bill T on the creationof computer-animated dance in virtualspace.As it is utilized Jones in Riverbed's Hand-drawn and Bipedprojects(with Cunningham)and the Spaces virtualdanceinstallationGhostcatching Jones),opticalmotion captureenables (with of 3-D representation recording digital movingbodies.The animator-choreographer is able to draw out and reconfigure abstracted the motions and trajectories the of dance preserved data.The manipulated as data become the ghost of the dance. In the Bipedperformances, decided to have his dancersperformalong Cunningham with the projected whereasGhostcatchingwas exhibitedas a stand-alone animations, virtualdanceinstallation. actualbody of Joneswas not, or no longer,there.The The animatedlinesof his transparent fadedin figure,in this digitalformof preservation, and out: a magnificentdance of traces evoking the fluidity of motion. In the languageof contemporaryarchitects(e.g., BernardTschumi, Daniel Libeskind, that GregLynn)who exploremodelsof organization arenot inertbut mutable,one could also describethis virtualdance as "animate form."Design technologiesallow the (re)drawing movementin a virtualenvironment forceand motion, but in of of this case the model for the interacting vectorsis the human body of the dancer. Dancersnow learnto createin suchenvironments trajectories. a teleperformance of In createdat IDAT, the Australian in SpaceperformedEscapeVelocity a as Company duet betweentwo dancers, cameras, two projectors two and linkedby a directonline connection betweenthe Web Cafe at ArizonaState Universityand a performance spacein Melbourne.The live mix effectivelymergedthe two dancers,layeringthe

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live teleperformance, IDAT99, Company in Space, Escape Velocity, 1999. Videostill: Courtesy Johannes Birringer. Tempe/Melbourne, Riverbed/Merce Cunningham, Biped, virtual dance, New York, 1999. Photo: Courtesy Riverbed.

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movement of the bodies in a spellbinding, transparentsymmetry across a vast spatial and temporal gap. It was transparentinsofar as we knew that the teleconference had been set up between Arizona and Australia.We could see the audience Down Under, and when Hellen Sky started her dance in front of our eyes, we could see the projected image of her sister dancing the same choreography in Melbourne. The two camera artists on either end of the performance began to interact with the performers and send their video signals through the line. At various points during the performance we could imagine the dancers being at-one, the sisters becoming a composite dancer floating in a third space created by the overlaid projections which included film footage of several outdoor locations (a forest, a desert). More hauntingly, the apparent symmetry of the dance of course was not precise. Tiny delays in the transmission became part of the choreography and entered into the dialogue between present physical body and technologically mediated body. In a sense, both dancers were simultaneously mediated and transprojected. At the moment when these dispersions become possible, all safe parameters of the body's relationship to space, time, and place have shifted. We witnessed a dialogue between ghosts mixed onto the pixilated, filtered, and manipulated surface of the filmic space created by the projectors, the dance a traveling across time, the body morphing and aging right in front of us. A healthy skepticism remains. In some of the performance-installations I saw in Europe or the U.S., much of the movement was sketchily improvised or severely reduced in its expressive content. Moreover, classical attributes of choreography, composition, and execution traditionally associated with the stage cannot be applied to digital works. Clearly,computer-assisted dance must engage principles intrinsic to the new media: nonlinear process, transformation, interaction, and emergence. The notion of self-organizing or "emergent"systems is owed to the sciences, even though artistic concepts of participation/interaction can be traced back to earlier avantgardes of the twentieth century and, especially, to the behavioral, situationist, and process-based performances, Happenings, and Fluxus events of the 1960s which signaled the dissolution of the art object. Digital dancing and telematic performance are non-objects, hybrid forms existing in a virtual space contextualized by the medium and method of recording. An example of digital dancing is Richard Lord's work created entirely for the Web (http:// www.webdances.com/) which does not exist in real space. It is activated through "browsing" and the visitor's point-and click interaction with the site and its QuickTime movies that open up and assemble the motion of the dance images 2, according to the speed of your modem. In one of his webdances, Progressive he created nine short sequences. Each sequence is the same duration, but each compresses more information into the time span. As new information is added, some of the previous information is lost, and the context for what remains is altered. This work was created in 1996 and has remained unaltered since, although Lord notes that the web site that contains it has changed several times. Telematic

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movement necessarily transforms our former consciousness of dance in one place. Dancers will not move through space, but connectivity and its inputs will move (through) the dance. This, if you will, could be a spiritual concept that we don't ordinarily associate with technology unless we accept the interactive digital system'sintelligence, its capability to extend, through its telematic pathways, to molecules and matter at the most elementary level of our movement system, and to an "expanded"consciousness of our entire sense of being. As with Stelarc'sprosthetic performances, the question is not whether human bodies are obsolete, but how they can be redesigned, and how such incorporations of technologies change the stories we tell and dance about "being human" in the twenty-first century. What is it to have mind and body distributed through the internet? In the future, we may have to become the software designers for telematic movement interaction, so that the weight of contact can be shared across distance and emotional resonance affected. Most importantly, we are discovering new processes of composition that are cognizant of new coordinates of "placedness." Technique classes will include "virtual techniques" (in telematically-linked studios) and movement-with-camera and movement-with-sensors. Composition or choreography will adapt to the intelligent environments I described. Performance becomes a multimedia process of design, interactive architecture, capturing, editing, transposition, and conversion of movement possibilities and structures, some of which may not even be anticipated by us in the rehearsal.This process will be conducted by teams of artists and engineers from different disciplines. In the future we will probably see a growing number of dance works not originated in dance academies or dance companies, but arising from project collaborations in alternative venues and spaces. Dancing across distances may become part of the alternatives.

NOTES
convenedthe "CrossFair" Centerat Essen,Germany, 1. The Choreographic colloquium media artists,designers,and choreograin November 2000, bringingtogether numerous showedthe PaulKaiser of (Riverbed) Stage." phersto debatethe implications the "Intelligent installation, Steina Vasulka, Michael Saup, and Louis-PhilippeDemers Ghostcatching addressed independent,intelligentsystems.JeffreyShaw (ZKM) presentedan overviewof createdat the Zentrumfur Kunstund Medientechinstallations the innovativeinteractive of immersiveand interactiveinterfaceenvironmentsand nologie (ZKM.) Shaw spoke with MASSIVE, Mixed RealityLabwhereexperiments to referred NottinghamUniversity's virtualrealitysystem,helped the BritishensembleBlastTheory to a multi-userdistributed at developtheir new projectDesertRain.The projectwas completedduringtheir residency William Forsythewent to the ZKM to createa CDZKM in Karlsruhe. Choreographer extensivefacilitiesfor digital video that ROM project(Improvisation Technologies) requires studio and computer processing.With interface design by Volker Kuchelmeisterand of of a features hypertext over60 video chapters ChristianZiegler,Improvisation Technologies in which Forsythe shows the essential principles of his improvisation demonstrations
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and A Ballet,can be calledup by techniques. solo by Forsythe, dancesequences the Frankfurt As as furtherillustrations. Zieglerpointed out at CrossFair,the "intelligent stage"need not be understoodas a physicallocation; it could as well refer to the specific natureof an interface designor platformon a CD-ROM or the Internet.ForZiegler,the CD-ROM is a system." "knowledge-reference & 2. RalphLemon,"Mirrors Smoke,"online essay,see: http://www.dancemagazine.com /sterns/bodytech_frame.html

JOHANNES BIRRINGER is an independent choreographer/filmmaker and artistic director of AlienNation Co. (http://www.aliennationcompany .com), an international multimedia ensemble based in Houston and in Europe. He is the author of several books, including Media and Performance: Along the Border and Performanceon the Edge: Transformations of Culture. He currently heads the Dance & Technology Program at Ohio State University and conducts the "Environments Laboratory."

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