Johannes Birringer is a German-born performance and media choreographer. He currently resides in Houston (Texas) and London, where he has been working in theatre, dance, performance art and multimedia collaborations. Johannes Birringer is artistic director of AlienNation Co., a Houston-based multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993.
After directing international workshops on dance and technology in England, Germany, and the US., he was appointed head of the new dance and technology program at The Ohio State University (1999-2003). Since then, Johannes Birringer has worked as curator, conference organiser workshop director and consultant. He has published and edited several journals and his books include Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1991), Media and Performance: along the border (1998); Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (2000 and 2005), and Performance, Technology, and Science (forthcoming, 2008).
In 2005 he co-edited Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition, an anthology of new research in dance and science; he is now writing, with Angeles Romero, a critical manual on video and theatre, and a new book on interactive dreaming. He is currently director of the DAP-Lab and Acting Director of the newly created Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, where he is a lecturer.
The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process. The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective.
The body – constant and indefinite at the same time – “bursts†the space already with its mere physicality, creating a first distinction between the self and its environment. Only the body movements create a reference to the otherwise invisible space, much like the dots bounce on the ground to give it a physical dimension. Thus, the sound-dance constellation in the video does not only simulate a purely virtual space. The complex dynamics of the body movements is also strongly self-referential. With the complex quasi-static, inconsistent forms the body is “paintingâ€, a new reality space emerges whose simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes.