e-Dance project

An abstract has been submitted to the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting “Crossing Boundaries” conference to be held this September at the National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh University.  The title is ‘Dancing on the Grid: the use of e-Science tools to extend choreographic knowledge and develop new practice-led research methodologies’.

Simon and I were in Edinburgh on 6-7 May at the Arts & Humanities e-Science Projects meeting.  The event was co-hosted by AHeSSC www.ahessc.ac.uk the three Research Councils and NESC www.nesc.ac.uk.  The two-day event brought together the representatives from the seven funded projects.  We gave a presentation on the first day.  You can see the powerpoint attached below.  We also did a poster session in the evening and had a chance to catch-up in a less formal context with some of the other project teams.  The second day was led by Tobias, Stuart and Torsten from AHeSSC and provided a really useful context for discussion.  We also had a quite detailed tour of the www.arts-humanities.net site which is really interesting.  Torsten is going to link the e-Dance website in to it, which will hopefully generate more interest in and dialogue around the project.  Simon and I had a really good chat about the interdisciplinary concepts driving the project.  In the powerpoint you’ll see some slides towards the end that begin to articulate some of the thinking.  Simon might add some further throughts on that.

edinburgh.pdf

This is a draft of the paper that will be presented at ISEA2008 in Singapore this July.   

isea-paper-draft.pdf

We have submitted a proposal for a talk at the Access Grid Retreat 2008 in  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Please have a look at our paper

edance_agr2008 

and comments are welcome.

The software requirements for the first research intensive were local recording and playback plus any developments from the ‘wish list’ which we would manage till than.  That is what we provided:

• audio transmission; previous code just supported the receiving of audio
• local recorder and playback; recording of all local and received video and audio streams
• support of fire-wire camcorders
• option to remove window frames from video windows
• transparency of windows; current method does not work with video windows on top of video windows
• Soft- edged windows; same restriction as above, but nice without the window frame on a background
• for playback a time line set  in minutes from the beginning – can be used to jump around in a recording

In the end we were traveling with all required equipment to Bedford and had to put in a number of last minute bug fixes during our time there. The final recordings on the last day we managed without a single software crash – we learnt what not to do 🙂

In March Helen was invited to give a guest lecture at King’s College London.  The lecture was a joint venture with Tobias Blanke from AHeSSC on The Creative Potential of e-Science. 

kclecture20081.ppt

A paper proposed by the project team has been accepted for presentation at ISEA2008, the International Symposium of Electronic Arts.  The title of the paper is – e-Dance: Relocating Choreographic Practice a New Modality for Performance and Documentation.  It will then be published via Leonardo in the conference proceedings. 

http://isea2008.org/page/1/

Participants: Helen Bailey, Catherine Bennett, James Hewison, Anja le Blanc, Mary McDerby, Sita Popat, Andrew Rowley, Martin Turner

The aim of this week-long intensive was to explore the use of AG as a performance environment and in particular in terms of the range of levels of engagement with space both compositionally and performatively.  This built on and consolidated the previous shorter workshops and provided the context for testing the software developments that have already been made.

I thought for the purposes of the ISEA paper and as a means of framing the research I’d think about the activities and outcomes in terms of different categories of, and engagements with, the concept of space –

Space 1: Compositional Space

In order to push further in terms of consolidating previous work, it seemed necessary to create a more considered choreographic fragment of material to form the basis of the experimentation. 

1.      Tasks

So I began with a series of choreographic/improvisatory tasks that took various notions of space as a starting point –

• Generative compositional tasks focused on proxemic relations i.e., the nexus of proximity and orientation within the duet form.
• Fragmented approach to the body through an exploration of ‘fixing’ parts of the body in space as an anchor point.  The rest of the body motionally relative to this fixed point.
• Scale – the shift from whole body vocabulary to gestural material.  The use of focus as a means of framing these shifts.
• Dialogic structure (movement between/across/and in relation to two embodied positions) emphasizing the communicative aspect of the material and the context.
• Textual improvisations exploring different experiential perspectives of ‘space’- (1) journey to work from a first person perspective, (2) experiential commentary on the movement from first person perspective, (3) commentary on proxemic relationship to the other performer whilst performing the material, (4) verbal account of first person perspective of moving through the choreographed duet material whilst not performing.

2.      Choreographic Structure

From the task above material was generated and then structured into four phases –

·        Phase 1: Duet material distributed spatially within the performance space in such a way as to provide the sense from both the performer and spectator postions of non-co-located but synchronous solos

·        Phase 2: Solo (one half of the duet material) performed whilst non-co-located, but synchronously the other dancer performed text based on Textual Improvisation (4).

·        Phase 3: Duet material co-located and including sychronous verbal monologues that intercut descriptions of journey to work with verbal commentary on the movement.

·        Phase 4: Duet material co-located.

 

Space 2: Physical Space

We used a series of white flats to construct a wall that created a ‘z’-shaped space as a performance environment.  This allowed for multiple projection surfaces and for the live performers to have a sense of being in either co-located or non-co-located relationships with one another – both in and out of visual contact with one another. The data projectors were both set-up down stage and parallel with one another .  One was at middle level and the other was rigged at a high level.  The parameters of the performance space were delineated by the camera orientation and proximity.

Space 3: Camera Space

A clock face system similar to that used in NVC theory, developed by E.T. Hall to document the proximal aspects of social interaction, for the documentation of the camera positions was developed. (It was interesting because this was identified on the fly in a discussion I was having with Mary about meta-data. I will provide  a diagram of what I’m imagining later) We used four cameras in live relay mode, however the streams were later multiplied as they were being run through two networked computers.  Therefore providing eight separate windows, projected through two projectors for distribution in the physical space.

Generally,  the cameras were positioned radially in terms of orientation, in the horizontal plane in order for the field of vision to overlap, thus giving the opportunity for multiple synchronous images from different orientations.  Proximity was radically different ranging from XCU to wide-shot.  One camera was placed overhead oriented on the vertical plane and in wide-shot. In terms of level, two cameras were in the middle-level, one low at floor level and one in high-level overhead.

Space 4: Video Space

This category is concerned with the spatial aspects and properties of the projected material only.  In terms of software developments this is where really significant progress has been made from a choreographic perspective.  We are now able to change the boarders on the individual windows that present the streamed material.  The traditional Microsoft ‘Windows’ boarders can now be removed which has a radical aesthetic and semiotic impact on the material.  There is also now the capacity to assign different degrees of transparency to individual windows.  We didn’t really explore this new development – as the really significant aspect of this will be the ability to then layer multiple windows and play different streams simultaneously in order to create a sense of a ‘shared’ virtual space.  This will be ready to be explored at the next intensive.

We documented the position and size and foreground/background relationship of the windows and created a repeatable set of spatial structures in relationship to the live compositional structure of the four phases outlined above.  Again a diagram of the spatial relationship of the windows in each phase will follow – I’m reliant on Mary’s metadata documentation for this.

In Phase 4 of the material we configured the windows to use ‘to scale’ projections of the dancers. In particular we used this with the overhead shot of the space.  This created an enhanced sense of the ‘liveness’ of the mediated material.  The whole concept of scale became significant in terms of its relationship to notions of distance and intimacy in the framing of the body.

As a result of the multi-perspectival images projected there was a fragmentation of the body within the individual frames as a result of the partial views generated from the selected camera positions.

Composite and multiple representations of the dancing bodies were generated through the interrelationship of the different configuration of windows being projected.  This articulated an ever shifting proximal relationship, playing with distance and intimacy in a way that highlighted the live (virtual) presence within a mediated rather than live (actual) context. 

‘Disappearance’ of the virtual performers from the projected material was a really interesting moment – at one point in the performance of the material the live performers accidentally ‘found’ a non-mediatised space within the performance space – so the live/actual material was the only performance visible and the windows remained empty.  This was interesting in that it marked an absence, which through into question the ‘legitimacy’ of what they were doing, in performative terms.  Both literally and philosophically there was a spatial ‘reduction’ in the material.

Space 5: Performative Space

By this I’m referring to the generative capacity of the performers to construct space(s).  So these ideas/thoughts are not limited to a particular category of space, but are perhaps more concerned with defining the principles or concepts that are articulated through the conduit of  ‘the doing’ of performance and in the interrelatedness or in-between-ness of these spatial contexts –

• Embodying space – being in the present
• Marking absent space, the trace of disappeared presence, both in motional pathways  and in the verbal commentaries
• Emphasis on liveness and ephemerality

• Dialogic relationship – oscillation between the live and the mediated, the actual and the virtual

[Simon / Open U writes…] — We’ve just completed a 2-day practicum in Manchester, continuing our experiments to understand the potential of Memetic’s replayable Access Grid functionality for choreographic rehearsal and performance.

Two AG Nodes (i.e. rooms wired for sound and large format video) were rearranged for dance, clearing the usual tables and chairs. With the Nodes connected, a dancer in each Node, and Helen as choreographic researcher co-located with each in turn, we could then explore the impact of different window configurations on the dancers’ self image, as well as their projected images to the other Node, and mixing recorded and live performance.

Helen will add some more on the choreographic research dimensions she was exploring. My interest was in trying to move towards articulating the “design space” we are constructing, so that we can have a clearer idea of how to position our work along different dimensions. (Reflecting on how our roles are playing out as we figure out how to work with each other is of course a central part of the project…)

To start with, we can identify a number of design dimensions:

• synchronous — asynchronous
• recorded — live (noting that ‘live’ is a problematic term now: Liveness: Performance in an Mediatized Culture by Philip Auslander)
• virtual — physical
• modality of annotation: spoken dialogue/written/mapped
• AG as performance environment vs. as rehearsal documentation context
• AG as performance environment enabling traditional co-present choreographic practices — or as a means of generating/enabling new choreographic practices
• documenting process in the AG — ‘vs’ the non-AG communication ecology that emerges around the e-dance tools (what would a template for an edance–based project website look like, in order to support this more ‘invisible’ work?)
• deictic annotation: gesture, sketching, highlighting windows
• in-between-ness: emergent structures/patterns are what make a moment potentially interesting and worth annotating, e.g. the relationships between specific video windows
• continuous — discontinuous space: moving beyond geometrical/Euclidean space
• continuous — discontinuous time: moving beyond a single, linear time
• framing: aesthetic decisions/generation of meaning – around the revealing of process. Framing as in ‘window’ versus visual arts sense

Bringing to bear an HCI orientation, an initial analysis of the user groups who could potentially use the e-Dance tools, and the activities they might perform with them, yielded the following matrix:

We will not be working with all of these user communities of course, but the in-depth work we do can now be positioned in relation to the use cases we do not cover.

Today and yesterday Anja, Helen, Sita and myself have been getting into the nitty-gritty of the eDance project software requirements in Manchester.  Helen and Sita arrived (after what sounded a monumental train journey for Helen!) and we got straight into discussing their experience of using the mish-mash of software we have given them so far!  Of course, this software hadn’t been working 100% smoothly (as it was being used in a context it had not been conceived for – namely all running on one machine without a network).  However, they had managed to get some useful recordings which we had they had sent to us, and we had already imported them onto our local recording server before they arrived.

We started by discussing what Helen and Sita found was missing from the existing recordings.  This included things like the fact that the windows all looked like windows (i.e. had hard frames) which made it hard to forget that there was a computer doing the work.  This was expanded with further windowing requirements, like window transparency and windows with different shapes, which would help allow more free layouts of the videos.  We quickly realised that this could also help in a meeting context, as it would help AG users forget that they are using computers and just get on with the communication. 

 We also discussed having a single window capable of displaying different videos; this could make it look better in a performance context, where you wouldn’t want to see the movement of the windows, but want to change between videos.  It was also desirable to split up the recorded video into separate streams that could be controlled independantly.  This would allow different parts of different recordings to be integrated.  This would also require the ability to jump between recordings, something that the current software does not allow.

 We moved on to talk about drawing on videos.  This would allow a level of visual communication between the dancers and choreographers, which can be essential to the process; it was mentioned earlier that much of the communication is visual (e.g. “do this” rather than “move from position A to position B”).  Drawings on the videos would enable this type of communication – although for effective communication, the lines would need to be reproduced as they are drawn, rather than just the line (i.e. the movement of the drawing, not just the result).  We realised that there was a need to have tools for the lines, as you may want lines that stay for the duration of the video and lines that disappear after some predetermined interval (and of course a clear function to remove lines).

 We finally discussed how all this would be recorded, so that it could be replayed either during a live event or during another recording, including the movement of windows and drawings on the screen.  We realised that this would need a user interface.  This is where we hit problems, as we found that it would be complicated to represent the flow through the videos.  We realised that this may be related to the work on Compendium – this is where we left this part as Simon was not present to help out with this!