July 26, 2004
Intermedia Performance
Joanna Berzowska, XS Labs, will chair this SIGGRAPH session on Intermedia Performance in LA, 12 August. Projects range from dance-based, eye controlled imagery to cinema editing as live performance.
Conceiving Embodiment: The Dance Architecture of Spawn
Spawn is an interactive dance architecture developed by Carol Brown Dances, choreographer, and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, architect, that aims to conceive an embodied space by investigating presence and being in environments that merge physical and virtual dimensions (mixed realities).
Application of the research is described in the production The Changing Room, choreographed for three performers and a virtual other, which takes place within the framework of an interactive architectural environment. Embedded within the furniture of the room are a series of screens through which a virtual presence is rendered, mirroring, extending and distorting their behaviour. The Changing Room explores the complexity of lives lived in the mediated conditions of the technological and at the edge of the real.
NightDriving: Videodance in Performance
NightDriving, developed by John Crawford, electricFX Media, and Lisa Naugle,University of California, Irvine, is a hybrid media work, combines live performance of contemporary dance with digital video animations derived from the movement of the dancers.
Illusory Interactive Performance by Self-Eye Movement
Junji Watanabe and Susumu Tachi, University of Toky, use saccade-based display, so the audience can perceive different images from what physically exists on the stage. The display enables illusory interactive performance based on audiences eye movements. The project is developed with Tetsutoshi Tavata and Mariana A. Verdaasdonk, Queensland University of Technology, of cell/66b, and Hideyuki Ando and Taro Maeda, NTT Corporation.
Live Cinema: An Instrument for Cinema Editing as a Live Performance
Michael Lew, Media Lab Europe, presents the Live Cinema research project, aimed at building an expressive tangible instrument for cinema editing and improvisation as a live performance.
Described as: Live improvisational video performance transforms the editor into a performer while it requires just-in-time selection and manipulation of video shots and sequences in anticipation of streaming the video images to a large display. This project prototypes an expressive tangible and gestural instrument for two hands allowing performer to play video by using two finger-pointing devices, one on each hand, and two "scratch" turntables for precision mark up of in/out points. The control screen, designed such that it can become a visual element in the performance, features video thumbnails which group themselves using behaviors defined and determined by the performer.
He writes about the instrument in this paper. Abstract: The Live Cinema instrument is a cross between a musical instrument and a film editing tool, tailored for improvisational control as well as performance presence. Design specifications for the instrument evolved based on several types of observations including: our own performances in which we used a prototype based on available tools; an analysis of performative aspects of contemporary DJ equipment; and an evaluation of organizational aspects of several generations of film editing tools. Our instrument presents the performer with a large canvas where projected images can be grabbed and moved around with both hands simultaneously; the performer also has access to two video drums featuring haptic display to manipulate the shots and cut between streams.
The paper ends with a discussion of issues related to the tensions between narrative structure and hands-on control, live and recorded arts and the scoring of improvised films.
Posted by michelle at July 26, 2004 05:48 PM
