Immeasurable? The Dance in Dance Science
Saturday 23 July
'Immeasurable? The Dance in Dance Science' will aim to promote debate surrounding the interface between art and science.The cornerstone of this debate will question what can and cannot be measured in dance, from both scientific and somatic perspectives. Keynote speaker Sylvie Fortin, professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, will present Measurable? Immeasurable? What are we really looking for?
Other topics of discussion will include:
- How Does What is Measurable Affect the Learning and Teaching of Dance? (Francis Lavington-Evans)
- Dancing from the centre: Where is it? How do we find it? Does it matter? (April Nunes - movement session)
- Can movement quality and dance performance be measured through anatomical assessment and improved through the knowledge gained? (Tricia Liggett)
- Research methods and African dance forms: Issues concerning theatrical dance practice. (Funmi Adeuole)
- Assessing creative processes (Pamela Newell)
- How Science Aids the Aesthetic of Dance (Matt Wyon)
- Alexander Technique: What are the Measurable Effects on Dancers' Alignment, Performance and Confidence? (Sarah Irvine)
- Splines in space; quantifying esoteric dance (Matthew Gough)
- information and application form [144kb pdf].
Next on [ Cunningham's ] list of projects is a series of events to be staged at the Barbican, London, for which six British artists have been invited to contribute designs. [...] What makes this project unnerving is that Cunningham and his dancers will not see any of these designs, however bulky or complicated, until the morning of each show.
interesting article by Judith Mackrell in the Guardian on Merce Cunningham and some of the famous artits that have worked with him. i have to admit i'm still a Cunningham fan, in his 'youth' he was well ahead of his time and now, aged 86 he is still 'current'; thats quite a feat. the quintessential postmodernist producing modernist danceworks he still offers alot for others to learn from about being an artist.
you can read the article, 'the joy of sets' online.
well, the events of the day overtook me and i spent more time talking than blogging, so here is a collection of thoughts and observations from the day;
hugh macleod
the concept of viewing movement (gestures) as points in space rather was suggested as a means of moving from direct mapping to dynamic systems in sensor based performance systems. whilst i welcome the move away from linear topology (direct mapping) I'm not sure that arbitrary feature extraction of coarse movement traces will lead to more 'open' systems. i also think that the labels used needed looking at;
- dynamic systems / complex adaptive systems
- traces / maps
- gesture / movement
- chaos / emergence
there was also a need to recognise that feature extraction of points in space without a reference model is not gesture recognition but gesture perception (or imposition). the segmentation movement without context or recognising the feature range of discreet and compound gestures will generate quantitative not qualitative data.
there was intermittent discussion of "how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume..." (video and pdf , NYT review, village voice WNYC radio interview [real audio]). issues included a desire for the work to have been shown live and the reported $1.27 million spent on developing the motione technology. with troika ranch using EyesWeb and Isadora to achieve similar goals (generative visuals from qualitative data) the differences in cost and portability were interesting. if we want to extend and develop the use of performance technologies we must make them more assessable and portable, what ever happened to the e-merge software that was supposed to be made available?
the afternoon opened with a short performance of a work in progress by Heine Røsdal Avdal, who then went onto discuss his working process and aesthetic. glitch art and tecnologia povera (see arte povera) were the order of the day. it was good to hear heine place technology and 'flesh' on an equal level and to express (re-present) the failure of both systems within his work. issues uncovered included the location, size and shape of the projection plane, how far do we / can we engage the audience in the performance making process (whilst they are spectators).
Ed Burton from soda (interview from 2002) explained the development of sodaconstructor and the emergence of a sodaconstructor user group that took the tool beyond his expectations. apart from playing with sodaconstructor you should also look at the sodazoo and other soda projects. if you like sodaconstructor check out moovol.
igloo spoke about their experience of using motion capture over the last 10 years and hinted at a current project to develop an artwork using a game engine (the unreal engine). I'm really excited to see how this works out, not only to play the game but also mod the work to make choreographic machinima.
Johannes Birringer bemoaned the state of the art seeking hot interaction rather than the cold interaction we a currently presented with. He wanted more cultural engagement with technology and more expressive, full length works rather than 'works in progress' and 'technical sketches'. whilst i agreed with much he had to say i believe that some of the issues related to general arts practice rather than methods for developing arts uses for existing and emerging technologies
the need for new tools made by artists for artists (or arts based programmers) was clear. i hope that soon our reliance on tools made by people insensitive to arts needs will pass.
i finally got to meet Elizabeth MacKinnon who was attending with doncaster peers including Kate Sicchio, which made me wonder if Lucy Field and Article19 will work out a way for lucy to post video of her working process. Kate did such a good job documenting Playing Grounds it's a shame more dance artists don't follow her example. a greeting to everyone i met and i look forward to speaking with you again.
all in all a great day... thanks to all involved. hopefully next time i'm at an event and can blog i will deal with it a little better and get sort updates out on a regular basis (any idea of wi-fi at laban?)
it's a little odd meeting people whom you spend most of you time reading about, or viewing / reading their work. i'm also thinking that i should have brought my camera but, if i had done there would be less time to blog. there are about 30 people attending and quite buzz, lots of socialising. i'm student spotting and i think there are at least 6 of us. but there my be more.
it's interesting to hear the conversations on dynamic systems, chaos, emergence, traces and gesture. there seems to still be much goundwork to cover in dance technology practice.
it occurs to me that wilst developing the models for my research i must allways remember to look at the alternative uses and how a differing mode of perception can facilitate new avenues of expression
i received the details for Immeasurable? The Dance in Dance Science over the weekend. there is much work to do before then, a recent sharing of my work revealed complexities i had not observed. whilst the 'dance' audience understood the somatic context of the work they found it difficult to understand the technology. more than anything they showed a desire for a more extended explanation if the terminology, rather than failing to understand the links i was making. what's interesting (for me) is that my technical paper was under discussion, rather than a text targeted for the dance audience. so now, i look to see what changes i can make when presenting my work in the dance setting.
the problem of transferring my work for easy consumption by dance scientists, academics and artists is compounded by some rather dubious computer science (CS) movement theories. There is a common belief in CS that a global movement language exists which can be identified to describe al human motion. They hope to identify this language through pattern recognition and the statistical decomposition of human motion to discover the basic motor primitives or 'movemes'.
Yet human movement has no embedded meaning other than that imposed by the spectator or performer. Because the range of potential movement is so large (limited only by the constrains of the human body), movement techniques reduce the number of possible solutions to provide a usable classification. these classifications are not so much languages but dialects whilst their construction is systematic but subjective and essentially arbitrary.
a gesture recognition system trained to recognise features that match a particular dialect is not performing global recognition but probabilistic assessment of feature minima. each of these minima, when considered within another dialect or sub dialect could represent different, incomplete or invalid movemes. with many movement domains (eg. ballet, t'ai chi ch'uan, figure skating) being pluricentric the problem of identifying the feature minima of a gesture becomes more difficult. diglossia in a movement domain (variations between the technical and applied form) adds additional layers of complexity.
further more gestures are not always mutually intelligible, whilst a ballet dancer may recognise aspects of the salchow, lutz and axel (figure skating) their method of execution may not be technically understood (effect / affect divergence).
if CS is going to borrow from linguistics to classify movement it needs to pay more attention to the theories and practice of each domain rather than looking inwardly to speech and language processing or natural language processing. there is a clear difference between physical phenomena and their structuralist abstractions, it is this difference that most CS papers on gesture recognition fail to acknowledge alongside confusing effect and affect.
so whilst these basic concepts are nothing new to dancers the language and parallels drawn are unusual. what i hope to show is that we, as dancers hold valuable phenomenological knowledge about our practice that can be applied to a wide range of contexts.
science can learn from the arts, but only if it takes the time to listen
with (most) avatar movement mark-up languages being stenographic rather than notational there is little relevant work for evaluative comparisons with Æma. the issues of developing a computer based movement notation are also different from implementing and existing (human based) movement notation. thus, i have been working in a turbulent void.
as i near the first completed draft of my technical report i have stripped more and more conceptual developments to reveal my basic position with greater clarity. due to the lack of relevant texts i have eschewed the usual literature review, i expect this will cause problems
i had imagined that here, for the first time, i would not 'rock the boat' during my studies. oh well ...
the last four months have been a motive meditation; only now do i feel that i have somewhere to begin.
bastish.net
i have been considering a boustrophedic draft script for a document i am working on and to assist my day to day mark making. i hope to improve both the speed and legibility of my markmaking whilst creating a distinctive visual impression.
summer approaches, and the office is too dark, cool and quiet. it would be nice to have somewhere warm and bright to work, where the chatter is reassuring rather than disturbing. perhaps i should charge up my batteries and sit out on the grass.
preparing for the next stage.
kobayashi issa
listening to Tilopa; Kyotaku Live [buy]
Without looking towards other fields with significant rigour (and creativity) computer science risks reinventing existing solutions. Of course this is true for all discipline but in CS the problem is compounded by a multiplicity of languages and computational approaches.
Furthermore the communication skills of students was somewhat lacking. Problems included running overtime, poor delivery, bad slide design and a poor conceptual theory.
Technical solutions should not be isolated from their contextual application. Without understanding how the solution 'may' be used (rather than only considering primary function) any resultant tools are of limited use.
The audience was exclusively CMP (afaik) it would have been interesting to have feedback from differing perspectives. I think that the lack of interdisciplinary actively in UEA limits both the quality of research and students educational experience.
CMP UEA has some very articulate staff (and students) it is important that activity within the school is integrated to promote development of novel work and ensure a high standard of general research. It was interesting to note staff comments on students from different groups.
One thing was very clear from the day, UEA needs a physics department again.
So what's next for me? Well the key tasks are implementing the notation, constructing test cases and making sure I remain creative. I also have my year review to undertake in the next few weeks.
linguistic models do not apply to movement in general terms but, it may be possible to apply such models to distinct domains, or individual dance work. Parsing the syntactic features of a dancework could provide rapid feature extraction for dance analysis.
Syntactic parsing of Labanotation would be particularly useful when examining the dance archives. The application of suitably modified linguistic models might facilitate the deep visualisation of a choreographic corpus.
The visualisation of Labanotation beyond movement animation will be significant importance once Labanotation interlingua and a digital archive have been established.
I feel that the UK has yet to make a significant contribution to dance technology beyond performance applications. The development of deep visualisation technologies for dance would extend not only to dance tech and dance analysis but also dance science.
Will the dance community wait until it's too late to develop a fully integrated system, or rely on Computer Science to define the framework? Given recent history I expect so, but there is another way,but what UK institution has the vision to undertake such an unusual development?
As i noted in my pervious post, technical solutions should not be isolated from their contextual application. Deep dance visualisation (DDV) should be developed in a dance context with computational expertise. I would argue that outside of this context significantly novel and applicable research will be elusive.
so where and how to develop DDV, my first suggestion would be to align the research with dance science, performance, theory and notation. There a few institutions with such a mix, so perhaps a specific multidisciplinary group should be formed as an inter university project. Indeed, a collaborative approach would improve the profile and adoption of the finished product.
So, in the absence of a school of 'dance studies, science and mediation' i can only imagine the "DDV group" developing such technology. The remit of the group should be to produce a a tools for ddv that can be used by dance experts and novices, from secondary education to univertsity and professional practice.
i will return to this soon ...
sometimes it can take all day to get ready ... and now, early evening, i seem more mindful of the thoughts morning revealed.
i would have liked (very much) to have attended (me)dia but am unable to, a prior engagement impedes travelling so far. if you attend i would like to know how it was.
on weds we have our postgraduate research day, as i was not selected to give a paper, i will be presenting a poster Affective – Esoteric, Motive Attribution: Æma [200kb pdf]. I'm not overly keen on posters, and this one is a little to wordy perhaps ... [update; fixed poster error]
it seems hard to explain why a movement notation requires more development time and theory than an abstracted movement shorthand. i stand by my convictions; radical change is therefore possible.
doug fox is back! so roll on over to the Great Dance Weblog [feeds: atom , audio , rss2] nice to see you back on-line doug. a shift in focus (or a nudge?) to dance in general rather than dance tech but it looks good so far. i hope that doug can secure some international artists for interview as the site progresses
kô ikite iru mo fushigi zo hana no kagethis year (at least for me) hanami has come late, there are many things that have escaped my attention; now i have to go back.
at times, there are too many thoughts in my head. it is simpler to pass solutions onto others, rather than deal with them myself. often months and years will pass before they are communicated, but this is no matter; good ideas have longevity.
summer is on it's way, more sitting outside in the sun working, playing and resting. a chance to explore the campus grounds extensively. i used to walk the campus a lot when studying at UL along the banks of the shannon and the surrounding land. great memories.
i recieve mails from the labantalk list, it's been rather busy of late and very interesting. if Labanotation and Motif notation are your thing you can subscribe by sending an email to listserver [at] lists.acs.ohio-state.edu the text of the message should read " subscribe LabanTalk YourFirstname YourLastname "
much time hs been spent refactoring my technical report. i'm not sure that technical report is the right discripton anymore but that's what it's called. i was asked if it could be made into a paper, it's a paper in itself, and reasonably detailed. i must put together my uni web page to serve it from when done. i will upload my other work there too.
i'm wondering if Laban have wireless acess and if it is an open network, i will have to find out. it would be kinda neat to blog live from some of the events i am attending / presenting at.
how long is the journey, does it start with the destination, what happens after?
i think yde are considering using one of my images, that would be good, exposure for my work is so limited.
i'm lost in thoughts ...
