Helen Bailey gave the opening keynote at UK e-Science All Hands Meeting: “Assessing the impact of e-Science technologies on practice-led research in dance through the e-Dance project”
I don’t need to do any more than point to other blogs 
http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/2009/12/e-thereal-dancing.html
We finaly made it ‘Open Source’!
The part of e-Dance which was developed to help create performances is now on Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/scene-editor/
There is a binary package for people to try out and developers are welcome to help completing the features and fixing the bugs. A user documentation is on the wiki. Comments welcome!
“Mapping Information with and without Geography: Approaches to Data Visualization and Structure in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences” EScience 2 day workshop: 30th sep – 1st oct 2009.
There were a series of informal discussions on camparing and debating the use of geospatially locating data (glyphs). Stuart Dunn gave a short presentation of imagery ideas that included eDance items.
The transposition of geography to be mapped or not is a recurring theme to the eDance project and fundamental to the Access Grid (video conferencing) ideology beneth it. An outcome was the issue of network graphs and related associated links – especially the interactive approach and use of large displays to gain a global perspective.
Wrap-up wiki: http://wiki.esi.ac.uk/Mapping_information_wrap_up
This series of movies brings together Choreography researcher Sita Popat and e-Science researcher Simon Buckingham Shum, who demonstrate and discuss the adaptation of one of the project’s e-Science tools for Choreography, the Open University’s Compendium tool for mapping ideas and annotating media. Acknowledgements to Michelle Bachler (Open U.) and Andrew Rowley (U. Manchester) for expert software development, and webcast wizard Ben Hawkridge (Open U.) for helping us migrate the footage to Web. High-resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the relevant tracks.
The video-enabled version of Compendium will be going into alpha release this month with invited testers, for full release within a couple of months.
The academic context for this work is set out in a recent article:
Bailey, H., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Le Blanc, A., Popat, S., Rowley, A. and Turner, M. (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science Tools to Extend Choreographic Research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 13 July 2009, Vol. 367, No. 1898, pp. 2793-2806. [PDF]
The movie summaries are listed below… high resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the web versions for detailed viewing.
They are finally catching up to CSAGE work (Remote recording, annotation and live interraction with stereoscopic video conferencing) from four years ago. Then the key performance was StereoBodies.
Inition, using better quality equipment admittedly but similar principle “Inition and Can Communicate worked with Orange Labs to simulcast the first ever live opera performance in 3D. The performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni took place at Rennes Opera House in Brittany last month and was viewed by a combination of paying and VIP audiences at cinemas in Paris, Avignon and Brest.”
A quick pointer to the “Another Language” newsletter from our friends in Utah: Volume 6 Issue 3 is just out. The next INTERPLAY: EVENT HORIZONS is due in March 26 – April 4, 2010
A series of test were carried out in the recent long intensive. The following shows both screen views of the eDance Scene Editor.
The left hand side is controlled by one console terminal, incorporating all the controls te user sees, and the right hand side (cropped in the image) is the projected view.
I was reminded of a paper from a few years ago visualizing Benesh notation for ballet, via VR (avatar 3D geometry models) the following image is a “pose annotating using Benesh notation of an arabesque posed by a real dancer and virtual ballet dancer”
Reference “Neagle, R. J., Ng, K., & Ruddle, R. A. (2004). Developing a virtual ballet dancer to visualise choreography. Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Symposium on Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters, 86-97. Leeds, UK: Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. ISBN 1 902956 39 0.”
Since 2000 there has been analysis of a piece by William Forsythe “One Flat Thing:Reproduced”. This has been, as well as a large piece of content, a labour of love and extreme hard work – lots appears to be hand created (segmentation, registration etc) and then specific areas selected for specific contect/story.
This was running at the Aesthetics Area of SIGGRAPH in 2009 without anyone present to explain. Check out the SynchronousObjects site that describes effectively 16 different ways to look at the work.
Thursday and Friday at Bedford with most issues over quality with transmitting multiple video streams. Proposed for closed sites to have as many localised nodes as possible. A few initial images from the early rehersals and descriptions follow. There are about a dozen pieces in this forming this structural piece.
Exploring imagery of close, with high contrast movable camera mount.
Multiple distorted and transparent views of the same image, also controlled remotely.
Structure now integrated a vertical camera pointing down to the stage with Google Earth to explore context and zoom interaction.
Final looping-piece involved hand held control of the cameras.
