PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Thomsen: Mette Ramsgard | UK

Workshop Presentation

Re-conceiving embodiment: the dance-architecture of Spawn

CAROL BROWN AND METTE RAMSGARD THOMSEN

In a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication, ‘being here’ is not the taken for granted ‘thereness’ of the grounded and earthed flesh, it is a superabundance of becomings experienced as hyper-realities and pluri-formed presences.  In this context, the ‘being in’ of corporeality and embodiment can be as much virtual as actual. Choreographers and Architects face the challenge of creating spaces through which moving bodies experience the merge of dimensions which are both grounded in history and responsive to the accelerated culture of new media and its spatialio-temporal dimensions.

Spawn is an ongoing performance research project which aims to design and realise the staging of real and virtual presences through embodied interfaces or mixed reality environments. The practices of dance, architecture and computer science combine in Spawn to question the limits of the body and its virtual representation, fusing the thinking of embodiment and space with the design of new technologies for the interfacing and display of digital environments.

Through Spawn,a camera tracking system identifies the shifting outlines of the participants’ bodies becoming input for a virtual other, a digital morphology shaped by their presence and movement. The virtual other is a complex geometry comprising four circles stretching a spline-based membrane between them. As the participants move they affect the virtual other deforming and reforming, contracting and expanding, folding and unfolding its digital skin. The visualisation of this kinetically modelled virtual other is projected back into the physical space of performance in real time, generating new forms of interaction and creating a blended environment of real and virtual spaces.

Through the incorporation of inorganic forms into the repertoire of gestures for contemporary dancers movement invention and syntax is challenged and new ways of moving discovered.  The complex geometries of the avatar are processed through the dancer’s movements whose changing states of energy shift performance identity/ies.

As an embodied interface, Spawn requires dancers to come to know and understand the spatial condition of the virtual through practice.  Through an open relationship between corporeality and virtuality, two spatial narratives are brought together; the one, somatically informed embodiment and the other, spline-based geometry of a digital architecture. A dance-architecture emerges as a fluid, mutable entity through which embodied narratives are created. Participants will have an opportunity to experience the interface by moving in the tracked space and getting a feeling for the system through embodied practice.