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Dance and Technology: A Pas de Deux for Post-humans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Kent De Spain
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Extract

Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces: I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an “other.” (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized—Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this “dancer.” Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer. Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection—my body to your body, your moving to my moving—that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Summer 2000 , pp. 2 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2000

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References

Notes

1. Production credits for these pieces are as follows: Hand-drawn Spaces, SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater, Orlando, Florida, July 20, 1998; Choreography—Cunningham, Merce; Digital designs—Kaiser, Paul and Eshkar, Shelley; Sound design—Kuivila, Ron; Software design—Girard, Michael and Amkraut, Susan of Unreal Pictures; Installation and projection design—Steinberg, Marco; Motion-captured dancers—Steele, Jeannie and Phillips, JaredGoogle Scholar.

Ghostcatching, Houghton Gallery, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, New York, January 4, 1999; Choreography, movement and voice—Jones, Bill T.; Visual and sound design—Kaiser, Paul and Eshkar, Shelley; Additional design and motion correction—Amkraut, Susan and Girard, Michael. Biped, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, California, April 23, 1999; Choreography—Cunningham, Merce; Projections and visual decor—Kaiser, Paul and Eshkar, Shelley; Music composition—Bryars, Gavin; Software design—Girard, Michael and Amkraut, Susan of Unreal Pictures; Live dancers—the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Motion-captured dancers—Steele, Jeannie, Swinston, Robert, and Phillips, Jared. Lighting design—Copp, Aaron; Costume design—Gallo, Suzanne; Projection—Young, JackGoogle Scholar.

2. A few dance/tech artists have written about this new work, producing articles and manifestos and how-to instructions and links to online performances, attempting to share their efforts and stimulate discourse. But these writings are often only found in technology-dependent sources such as online magazines or postings on listservs, logical places to reach the growing membership of a techno-savvy subculture, but not yet on the radar screen for many dance scholars.

3. I use the passive “are moved” because, at least in the works I am familiar with, Kaiser and Eshkar make, or collaborate with others on, all of the decisions about how and when movement occurs and what the viewer will see of it—not unlike most Western film, theater, or concert dance.

4. When “virtual” dances are primarily accessible via the internet they can also be called “web dance,” but the accuracy and/or acceptance of these terms is still being hotly debated by the creators and viewers of such works.

5. At the 1999 International Dance and Technology conference the term “screen-dance” was proposed to encompass dance work involving computers, film, or video because all are experienced on some kind of screen: television, computer monitor, or projection.

6. All quotations from Bill T. Jones are taken from a personal interview I conducted with him at Aaron Davis Hall in New York on July 15, 1999.

7. Archives for the discussion topics from this listserv are available on the Dance and Technology Zone website: http://www.art.net/~dtz/index.html.

8. I would like to credit dance scholar Ann Dils for seeing motion-capture as an identification technology.

9. These questions clearly already apply to film and video documentations of dances.

10. The manipulation of light and dark, of color and shape and motion, is the essence of video and film and computer graphics, and the experience of them is time-dependent as in dance. Space is a primary differentiating factor since, at least at present, screen-based media are seen in two-dimensional formats. Three-dimensionality can only be represented.

11. The affiliations are as follows: at Ohio State, the dance department shares some personnel and resources with ACCAD (the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design); at Arizona State, the dance department is associated with ISA (the Institute for Studies in the Arts); and at Wisconsin-Madison, the dance program plays a role in IATECH (the Interarts and Technology Program).

12. All quotations from Merce Cunningham are taken from a personal interview I conducted with him in New York City on October 12, 1999.

13. Note the masculinist hunter/killer references already built into the lexicon of technology. You “capture” the motion. You “shoot” the film or video.

14. In painting and sculpture, the human artistic activity is transferred into other media. In music, the human performative process is focused through a variety of instruments. Singing and theater, like dance, reside in the body, but in recent centuries have become textually separable from it.

15. In many ways, mirrors were the first imaging technology (as opposed to a cultural imperative) to pull us out of our own somatic experience, toward seeing aspects of the dancing as separate from ourselves.

16. Take blue-screen video as an example. By shooting a dancer in front of a consistent blue background, an editor can use an effect called “chroma-keying” to then place that figure against any background desired, thus spatially re-contexting the dance.

17. To keep from going too far back, I am intentionally overlooking the symbolic representation of natural objects (art) which, like writing, existed beyond the boundaries of the originator, and probably also facilitated the development of written language.

18. I suspect that it is possible that some experts can experience a degree of kinesthesia from reading a notated score, but I think there are severe limits on such experiences.

19. Clearly, to choose to create such beings marks them as the offspring of a very specific kind of artist within a technologically privileged culture, but the figures do not have any outward signs of race or sex or sociocultural status.

20. Algorithms are predetermined step-by-step procedures used by computers to accomplish complex tasks.

21. There is a sense that when we have “captured” a dance through technology we have saved it for all time. Technological documents do age and die, but they do so differently than humans. Or perhaps not so differently because they tend to die in two ways: the image deteriorates over time until it no longer satisfactorily recalls the original; or the media break down suddenly from misuse or accident.