Moving by numbers :: October 16 -18; 5:00 - 8:00 pm (every 10 minutes) :: VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival, Palazzo dei Pio, Cortile d’Onore, Corso Canalgrande, 103, Carpi.

Moving by numbers is an opportunity to experience reciprocal body reactions between a spectator and a dancer. The performance takes place in an enclosed original architecture, where the spectator and the dancer inhabit two distinct spaces. They are invited to communicate through a two-way mirror, onto which a graphic display reflecting the dancer’s movements is projected. Communication is enhanced for the spectator through this vision and sound interface, and for the dancer through a luminous costume and a motion-capture system. Continue reading

Before I leave the room, tired and ready to go home, I look back in after Ihave turned the lights off. The 8 cameras positioned all around the room, on the walls and in the ceiling grid splay their red light across the floor, the computers, the chairs, staying on, always capturing, always seeing.

I am working on a project that I call Becoming Dragon. The aim of the project is to do a 365 hour immersive performance in Second Life, using a Head Mounted Display so I will only see Second Life and a Vicon motion capture system to map my physical movements back into Second Life. The project is a collaboration between myself, Chris Head who’s writing the mocap code, Kael Greco who’s working on the stereoscopic code for the HMD, Anna Storelli, our modeler and Ben Lotan, our documentarian. Continue reading

At Dislocate06, Hamilton, Southern, and St. Amand will present Running Stitch a project which explores how a track made with a GPS device changes our awareness and experience of place through the new vantage points and perspectives afforded by the use of satellite navigation. Visitors to the exhibition are given a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks result in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that are then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city.

Each individual route is sewn, as it is taking place, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that reveals a sense of place and interconnection. The walker, who is aware of the line they are producing and of the audience at a distance, also becomes a performer of their relationship to a local place. It is only through being live and participatory that the audience perceives the push and pull of the relationship between themselves, the stitcher who sews the route onto the canvas, and the viewer at a distance and sees the city emerge from the canvas.

S[t]imulation: an interactive painting by Marc Tuters: In completion of the class of 2008 USC SCA IMD MFA, S[t]imulation is a 12×8 foot interactive painting in which the texture of the actual painting was virtually processed in Derivative’s Touch Designer and then projected back onto itself to scale. (It remains temporarily on display at the thesis space just north of campus, please contact me via the comments section for a viewing.)

The piece was designed to privileged calmness in the viewer, using motion sensing to disrupt the image. However, unlike a game, interactivity here was not intended to be indexical. Continue reading

Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology by Susan Kozel — In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers–as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching.

Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. Continue reading

Mexican artist Lilia Perez Romero presents her work Frontera v.2 concluding her stay in the Netherlands Media Art Institute. With Frontera v.2 visitors can play with their own portraits. This interactive installation consists of two main components: a video booth and a playback screen. The video booth serves as a tool with which spectators can create interactive self-portraits that are shown on the playback screen and react on movement as if they were dissociated mirror images.

The Portrait - A randomly chosen character observes the spectator from a glass screen. From his pose and the framing of the shot, he seems to be waiting to be portrayed. The character will carry on like this, breathing and blinking, until the spectator touches the screen. Then, he will come out of his immobility responding with the same gesture, placing his hand and gaze on the user’s hand, following any route it follows. Continue reading

RECORDERS, the first solo show in Germany of work by the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invites visitors to participate. These are works that only come alive through interaction with viewers. The Edith Russ Site for Media Art is presenting three very recently developed interactive installations (until August 17, 2008) which make it possible to experience physical, acoustic and visual traces left by visitors in the Exhibition by means of digital technologies. Experiential and recollection rooms are created that relate past and present to each other.

In Pulse Room, exhibition visitors’ heartbeats are transmitted to 100 lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. The interface, a simple metal handle, transmits a visitor’s pulse to a lightbulb after ten seconds. Continue reading

Amalgus Cycle by Laura Zajac is an environment made up of parasitic processes triggered by organic inputs, which permeate and interconnect with organics and non-organics entities, through digital encoding, in a self-sufficient and finite mode. Process 1 is actually the first step towards such environment. The interactive installation tracks the audience movements and maps them out in a multi-cellular colonies form. Human movements are a further input for an organic interaction. Infrared sensors detect the human presence and activate accordingly a set of heating elements. Those elements heat up a container of wax which melts down and start to flow over a slide made out of muslin and paper. Continue reading

SwanQuake is a unique project involving the ongoing making of an interactive artwork comprising 3-D computer graphic environments and motion-capture driven characters created from a variety of materials and methods by an interdisciplinary team gathered together and led by Igloo.

In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments. The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces. Continue reading

The International Dance Party, an installation by Niklas Roy and Adad Hannah, is a complete plug ‘n’ play party in a box. Equipped with radar sensing technology, the system can sense activity nearby and quickly transform from an idle box into a psychedelic light and laser dance machine with a 600W sound system that will make the room bounce with excitement. The machine even taunts its audience with ambience with a built-in smoke machine that spews fog onto the dance floor. When everyone has left the room, the machine quickly transforms back to its static state and waits quietly for the next party to start. Watch the video. [blogged by Jonah Brucker-Cohen on Coin-Operated]