Matt Gough Blog [closed]: aesthetics , composition & computation
Friday, Sep 24 2004, 01:09
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones" [John Cage]
the road to integrating new / emergent technologies with dance (to extend existing cannons and develop new forms) is long challenging, with many blind corners. Dancers have traditionally been resistant to anything they perceive as restricting the freedom and purity of the body, mind and spirit.
I consider the last two technologies to make a significant impact on dance practice (extending the form and requiring new technique) to be the pointe shoe and the tap shoe. as yet no other technologies have been developed and 'embodied' by dancers as an extension of their craft.
considering technlogy and choreography, video and pre visualisation tools (such as danceforms) have had 'some' impact on the choreographic process. However they have mostly been adapted to aid existing methods rather than intergrated into them. clearly in terms of the finished product dance for / on camera and web / virtual dance have enabled new approaches to presenting dance, but the process of 'creating' these works is not overly dependant or integral to the technologies.
i'm not talking about 'interactive' technologies for composition, or methods by which the choreographer seeds a program to 'assist' the process, but potentially a system in which the application and the 'choreographer' create these work in synthesis.
I would like to move beyond 'vocabulary incubators' and layering of thoughts, no more monolithic, igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary structures molded by algorithmic means. I want more than procedural techniques and isolated exploration, a real 'dialogue' between two creative 'entities', a partnership in which concepts of authorship are negated by the act of creation. we should not forget the 'Essence of Computation' as a factor in this process, it's as important, and equal the 'sparks' that constitute our thoughts. but nor am i suggesting a chat bot menatality, using a subset of AIML to generate kinematic reponses.
Can we add to chance procedures, generative dance, found chorography, improvisation etc 'computational composition' ? and begin to apprciate the aesthetics of computation.
Filed by Article19 at 1:09 PM | 
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