Sita Popat

Dancing on the Grid: using e-Science tools to extend choreographic research

This paper considers the role and impact of new and emerging e-Science tools on practice-led research in dance. Specifically, it draws on findings from the e-Dance project. This 2-year project brings together an interdisciplinary team combining research aspects of choreography, next generation of videoconferencing and human–computer interaction analysis incorporating hypermedia and nonlinear annotations for recording and documentation.

Interactive dance-making: online creative collaborations

This article presents the authors interactive dance composition projects, the Hands-On Dance Project and the TRIAD Project. It examines the potential for computer technology to enhance the interactive art-making process, enabling participation in choreography via Internet communications. By facilitating human-to-human communication, interactive creative environments can be created for participants with a variety of levels of previous dance experience. Participation in these projects is shown to have the capacity to provide a learning environment for all participants.

Dancing in the Streets: The sensuous manifold as a concept for designing experience

Abstract This article builds on the binary rhythms of transparency and reflectivity described by Bolter and Gromala (2003) as being central to the design of interfaces in digital artifacts. It starts from the concept of experience design and suggests that the experience of the interface might better be considered in terms of the ‘sensuous manifold’. The authors present the interactive kinetic light installation, Dancing in the Streets, as an example of how this sensuous manifold could be seen to work in practice. Many participants described this work as being ‘transparent’ and ‘magical’. The article analyses elements of the installation in relation to transparency/reflectivity to assess the reasons behind these descriptions, and to explore how the sensuous manifold experience was achieved for participants. The location of the installation is defined as a ‘non-place’ whose uncanniness contributed to the potential for ambiguity and liminality. The use of light as a medium for urban scenography was also a critical factor in the design of the interface. The images and their behaviour in relation to the participants created the final element of the artwork. The installation was successful in getting the people of York dancing in the streets. In doing so, it foregrounds the concept of the sensuous manifold as a useful concept for experience designers.

Embodied interfaces: dancing with digital sprites

Abstract This paper focuses on the research project, Projecting Performance, in which off-stage technical operators take on the role of performer through the live manipulation of digital ‘sprites’ in a theatrical environment. The sprites are projected onto gauzes in the stage space and operators control them with graphics tablets and pens to perform with on-stage dancers. Operators have frequently described experiences of dislocation or translocation during the experience of operating and this paper investigates the reasons for such reports. It presents the tripartite models of Zich and Castronova from the fields of theatre studies and human-computer interaction respectively, cross-referencing them to analyse the relationship between performer-operator and sprite. Merleau-Pontys phenomenological theories are then employed through the writings of Crowther and Fraleigh to explore the experience of the performer-operator. The paper proposes an understanding of the digital interface in Projecting Performance as embodied and experienced both visually and kinaesthetically by the performer-operator.

Emergent objects: Designing through performance

Abstract This paper presents Emergent Objects 2, a portfolio of sub-projects funded by the EPSRC/AHRC ‘Designing for the Twenty-first Century’ (D4C21) initiative. Our focus is on the way interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration allows fluidity and responsiveness in uncertain design contexts. Resisting the Modernist, instrumental conception of design, Emergent Objects 2 does not propose an alternative model for direct emulation. Rather, the aim is to defamiliarise the design process; and to play with its nature and possibilities. The notion of a singular designer is displaced by the notion of a collaborative design process, whereby any participant is an active design agent, partaking in design functions. The paper explores how key performance concepts of play and embodied knowing are employed within our design practices, with illustrations from the three subprojects: Snake, SpiderCrab and Hoverflies.

FEATURE Dancing in the streets

M. The Practice of Everyday Life. 135-136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark? This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it. People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the streets!

Dance-Making on the Internet: Can On-Line Choreographic Projects Foster Creativity in the User-Participant?

Interactive Internet artworks invite viewers to become involved as user-participants as the creative process unfolds. Through analysis of selected Internet projects, the authors discuss the potential for facilitating an interactive, creative experience for participants in the process of making dance. This study was carried out in 1998 and 1999, but the findings remain relevant, as there have been few subsequent develop-ments in the field.

Bodily extensions and performance

In contemporary technological society, bodily extension has become a regular occurrence for many people. Extensions can attach to or connect with human bodies to adjust, change or augment them in physical or virtual spaces, including artificial limbs, contact lenses and digital avatars. They can be as hi-tech as a surgeon manipulating a device to operate remotely on a patient in another country, as media-present as a Paralympic athlete with running blades, or as everyday as a blind person using a stick. We might use extensions ourselves or witness others using them in workplaces, social environments, at home, and in the media. They may be perceived as enabling tools by some, replacing or augmenting body parts, capacities or abilities, perhaps leading to superhuman feats (Thompson 2012). However, others may see them as disabling restrictions, with their use enforced by social or cultural expectations about what a body should be (Betcher 2001). Inevitably, extensions are incorporated into body images and implicated in social identities (Serlin 2004). This Special Issue on ‘Bodily Extensions and Performance’ raises critical questions about the nature of extended bodies and body-technology practices. The six essays are concerned with the lived experiences of such bodies, highlighting processes of incorporation and hybridity (Donnarumma), influence and exchange (O’Brien), blurring and entanglement (Wilson), shifting identities (Riszko), destabilisation and metamorphosis (Stępień) and defamiliarisation of the everyday (Sobchack). The increasingly complex blending of bodies and technologies has corresponded with a rise in the intellectual popularity of the cultural theories of posthumanism and new materialism. These philosophies offer direct monist challenges to the dualist tendencies of humanist perspectives, denying priority of mind over matter, and of flesh over other forms of material (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Braidotti 2013). ‘Bodily Extensions and Performance’ was an intentionally provocative choice of title for this issue, given that ‘bodily extension’ implies the centrality of a body to be extended, and at least one of our authors has responded by rejecting this conceptualisation. Yet we argue that neither monist nor dualist perspectives are able to appreciate experiences of bodily extension. In theories and practices of performance, bodies are well recognised as sites of knowledge. The importance of sensory perception, including the internal senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia, is understood in relation to the specific communication of affect and empathy (Massumi 2002; Reynolds and Reason 2012). If we are to understand what it means to live as flesh-technology entities, and to grasp the sensory and ethical implications thereof, performance is an important disciplinary arena in which to debate questions of bodily experience. The articles in this Special Issue address the coming together of flesh and other materials, acknowledging processes of assembly and the influence of interfaces in the fluid becoming of embodied extended beings. Bodies are accustomed to extending their internal sensory fields to include other materials, with the blind person’s stick as a prime example. Kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses can be pushed out into those extensions with surprising alacrity

Keeping it Real: Encountering Mixed Reality in igloo’s SwanQuake: House

This article employs the writings of early 20th-century phenomenologists to examine physical/virtual dualism a century later. It considers the nature of embodied experience in mixed reality environments through an analysis of the author’s encounter with an art installation. The article reflects on post-Cartesian approaches to the body and new media, noting the resistance of the language of philosophy to the articulation of mixed reality as a concept. If the language of the field constructs dualism, and the cyborgian unitization of human/technology invokes responses of horror or pity, are we prepared socially or culturally to inhabit mixed reality environments as embodied beings?

‘Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing’: Review of the second international conference for digital technologies and performance arts

The Second International Conference for Digital Technologies and Performance Arts1 took place in the beautiful countryside location of University Centre Doncaster, Yorkshire, on three typically English summer days in June 2006. Delegates assembled to enjoy a full and exciting programme of performances, presentations and discussions in the studios and theatre at the School of Intermedia and Performance Arts. David Collins (Conference Director) welcomed us all, describing the conference as a forum to ‘meet as practitioners, researchers and educators to have meaningful and productive dialogues’. He explained that to promote this ethos there would be a single strand to the programme, with no parallel sessions or ‘channel-hopping between papers’, a decision that was warmly applauded by delegates. The conference was strongly characterized by what Nick Hunt (Rose Bruford College) described as ‘ways of thinking, ways of doing’. The flavour was set by the Programming Committee’s decision to frame the proceedings with performances as the first and last programmed events, and further performances scheduled on each evening. ‘Ways of thinking, ways of doing’ were strongly evident in the rich foundation of embodied knowledge present in these high-quality performances. Equally, modes of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ were clearly articulated in the presentations and discussions; some of which were philosophical papers, some presented completed projects and some opened a window on current work. The connections between theoretical perspectives and concrete practices permeated the entire programme, demonstrating a maturity in the field that was a pleasure to experience. The relatively small number of delegates led to an informal atmosphere that bred generosity and willingness to share and discuss ideas and practices still in the process of development. It is difficult to capture in one short review the richness and diversity of the work presented at the conference, which focused on many different aspects of the interfaces and interrelationships between performance arts and digital technologies. In the plenary, I tried to draw together some of the key themes that emerged across the three days, and I will attempt to do the same again here. These themes included play, transparency, interactivity, liminality, but a little surprisingly one of the most obvious was the 1 The Second International Conference for Digital Technologies and Performance Arts was held from 26 to 28 June 2006 at University Centre Doncaster, United Kingdom.