October 31, 2004

John Crawford's Active Space

John Crawford, a video artist and software designer, has an excellent description of his Active Space interactive dance environment. In a nutshell, this set-up gives a dancer instantaneous control over a dance environment so that specified motions and gestures during a performance activate video, audio and other outputs in real-time.

On the Active Space page, Crawford describes the technologies used and includes a detailed diagram showing a typical set-up.

I'll soon add links to video clips so that you can see interactive dance performances in action.

Posted by dougfox at 08:44 AM - Permalink | Comments (0)

iPod Dance Parties

iPod music players are giving everybody a chance to be an mp3 dj (called MP3Jing or iPoding) at their next dance party. Any one can bring an iPod loaded with their favorite tunes and when their number is called, they plug their iPod into a mixer and play their selections for a few minutes.

-- Here's a good how-to piece, "The iPod DJ Revolution."

-- iParties are taking place in New York - iParty with Andrew:

-- Here's a typical set-up of two iPods and a mixer from the DJ Zone:

-- Washington, DC has its own iPod parties - next one on November 10th at Cafe Saint-Ex.

--- And now "iPods in da house" in Melbourne:

Posted by dougfox at 07:47 AM - Permalink | Comments (0)

October 30, 2004

Open Dance Notation Systems

A number of efforts are underway to create new and enhanced dance notation systems for the purpose of capturing, documenting, archiving and sharing dance steps, movements and other elements of dance performances:

-- "Notation Reloaded: eXtensible Dance Scripting Notation," by Matthew Gough in Body, Space & Technology Journal. Gough offers detailed description of his eXtensible Dance Scripting Notation (xdsn).

-- A report (PDF format) is available from the International Conference Exploring Research and Programming Potential for Labanotation, which focused on how to improve Labanotation software. The conference took place in April 2004. This program was jointly sponsored by the Dance Notation Bureau Extension for Education and Research at Ohio State University and the Dance Notation Bureau, New York.

-- And John E. Simpson has an article, "The Dance of Markup," in O'Reilly xml.com that covers XML initiatives to create open standards for the notation of country dances. Simpson discusses two markup languages: The Scottish Country Dance Markup Language (SCDML) and the Country Dance Animation Open Source Project.

Once I learn more about these notation projects, I'll write more about this topic.

Posted by dougfox at 11:22 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Online Dancing Games for Kids

Children can enjoy interactive dance games online:

-- Boohbah offers the enjoyable Boohbah Zone, a text-free environment where users can create music and watch the colorful dancing characters.

-- And Lilo's Dance Mania, from Disney Online, is a multi-level computer game, where the goal is to keep Lilo dancing and earn points.

Posted by dougfox at 10:57 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Merce Cunningham on Computers

In an article, "One More Roll of the Dice," in last Sunday's Scotsman.com News, Jackie McGlone interviews Merce Cunningham who shares his thoughts about computers and movement:

No longer able to demonstrate complicated moves and manoeuvres, Cunningham uses a computer to devise movement on a 3-D droid, Dance Forms. This is now part of his creative process and he has used it to take his style in fresh, exciting directions, creating sequences of movement that a living body would not create for itself.

"With a computer, the possibilities of playing with chance are infinite," he says. "I place a multiplicity of movement in the computer program, then chance will say the dancer has a given position at this point in time, then at 20 seconds the dancer is in a different position - that having been figured out by chance means also.

"With dancers you rehearse a while and then they want to rest; with the computer the figures just repeat and repeat. The technology just jumps. The computer figure can revolve its head three or four times, or put an arm way out there. A nice trick, but it doesn’t interest me, although in the course of these happenings I often see something else that the dancer might do.

"The human body may be defined by a head, two arms, two legs and a torso but within that the varieties of movement are endless - and I keep hoping to find a few more new ones."

Posted by dougfox at 10:19 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 28, 2004

Welcome!

Welcome to the Dance and Technology Weblog. My name is Doug Fox. Since this is the first post, I'll provide some background.

This weblog is devoted to the world of dance and technology. I'll be covering a wide range of topics including interactive dance performances and installations, cutting-edge choreographers, videodance, multi-site dance performances, virtual dances, iPod dance parties, Dance Dance Revolution computer games and much more. Essentially, I'll write about any story or development that relates to the convergence of dance and technology.

Please email story ideas and pictures.

You'll notice in the left-side column that you can access a directory of dance and technology links. If you have suggestions for new additions or better ways to categorize the links, please let me know.

I hope you enjoy this weblog and I'd be delighted to get your thoughts and feedback.

Posted by dougfox at 09:28 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)