sketching the futurescapes ///// a research blog by Sebastian Gonzalez Dixon

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.

unnamed soundsculpture from Daniel Franke on Vimeo.

Project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer

produced by:
www.onformative.com
www.chopchop.cc

Documentation:
http://vimeo.com/38505448

Music: Machinefabriek "Kreukeltape"
http://www.machinefabriek.nu/

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 “painting”, a new reality space emerges whose
simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes.

Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the
more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete
the image seems. The more perfect and complex the “alternative worlds” we
project (Vilém Flusser) and the closer together their point elements, the more
tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems
so real that it comes to life again.
text: Sandra Moskova

nominated for the for the MuVi Award:
http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/competitions/muvi-award/selection.html

see video in full quallity:
www.daniel-franke.com/unnamed_soundsculpture.mov

HQ Stills
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37752604@N05/sets/72157629203600952/