Dance Loops, Golden Master @ NCUR

The National Conference on Undergraduate Education (NCUR) is, as its name suggests, the country’s premiere outlet for scholarly and creative work by undergraduates. UVU dance student Molly Buonforte, who participated at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research (UCUR), and I were able to make the trip to the University of Kentucky to present a reworked version of Dance Loops. Following the nomenclature from software releases, this version was the “Golden Master],” which refers to the production-ready version of software. This was our largest audience by far, as well as the first performance on an actual theatre stage (yay!). It was also the first performance with original music, as I created two pieces in GarageBand for the performance.

Despite the “Golden Master” nomenclature, there was a string of technical difficulties that nearly prevented the performance: the extension cable for the Kinect didn’t work, then the extension cable for the USB web cam didn’t work, then I couldn’t set up the Mira app with wi-fi to control the effects, then I couldn’t set it up over a private connection. Eventually we moved the entire performance about six feet downstage so I could sit at the edge and control the laptop manually. Sub-optimal, but it worked. Always nice to know that if Plans A, B, C, and D don’t work, there is still a Plan E.

The video for this performance, while still amateurish, is better than the others. Enjoy!

Dance Loops, Open Beta @ SoTE

After learning a little more about what to do and what NOT to do with your first rendition of Dance Loops (i.e., the “alpha release” @ UCUR), we had a chance to do a few things over for our “open beta” (AKA the “nearly there” version). This time, we were at the Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement Conference (SoTE) at my home school, Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah. Superstar UVU dancer Hannah Braegger McKeachnie reprised her role from Dance Loops and performed the first section, to the music of Julia Kent (with an edited version of “Gardermoen”). We still performed in a sub-optimal environment – a partitioned meeting room, in this case – and we still have abominable video but, otherwise, things went beautifully. We also got to meet some wondeful people from other schools who were interested in the piece and may be able to contribute in some way in the future. Very exciting! But, for now, here is our monkeywrench video:

Dance Loops Accepted at ISEA2014!

Wonder of Wonder, Miracle of Miracles! Dance Loops was accepted for ISEA2014! That is, the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art, which meets in Dubai in November of 2014.

In fact, it was accepted THREE TIMES. The first was the faculty piece, which we are calling “Debauched Kinesthesia: The Proprioceptive Remix.” As I mentioned before, “debauched kinesthesia” has nothing to do with debauchery. Rather, it’s a term from the Alexander Technique, which my wife Jacque Bell teaches, that refers to the disconnect that many people have between what they think their body is doing and what it actually is doing. And “proprioceptive” because that refers to the sense of where your own body is and what it’s doing, and “remix” because the dancers will be able to rearrange and replay videos of their own dancing while they themselves are dancing.

We also had two student proposals accepted. The first, which will have Mindy Houston, is called “The Triple Fool + 2: A Performance for Poetry, Dance, and Data Visualization” and is based on John Donne’s poem “The Triple Fool.” The second is “The Dance and the Meta-Dance: Live Performance and Live Visualization,” and were finding a dancer for that piece right now.

The tricky part, of course, is that now we have to find money to get there. I’ve submitted a grant application that would pay for most of it, but we’ll see what happens. Maybe it’s time to go on Kickstarter!

Dance Loops, Alpha Release @ UCUR

In the software world, the “alpha release” is the “not-quite-ready-for-primetime” version. It is usually circulated internally so the bugs can be worked out, although there are occasionally public alpha releases by very daring (or foolish) companies. I’m not totally sure which of the two camps we fall into, but here is an extremely non-professional video – we like to call it the “bootleg version” – of our first public performance of Dance Loops.

The full name of this particular piece is “Dance Loops, Alpha Release: Trio with Live, Interactive Video Looping.” It was performed at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The dancers, in order of appearance, are Hannah Braegger McKeachnie, Izzy Arrieta-Silva, and Molly Buonforte, all of whom are undergraduate dance majors at Utah Valley University, where I teach. I designed the visuals and did the programming in Max/MSP/Jitter, while Jacque Lynn Bell (my wife and professional choreographer) and Nichole Ortega (chair of the UVU Department of Dance) provided choreographic input. The music is by Julia Kent (with an edited version of “Gardermoen” in the first piece and the complete version of “A Spire” in the last) and Zoë Keating (with an edited version of “Legions (War)” in the middle piece). By the way, those are live links to their websites where you can buy each piece of music, along with everything else they make! (I have all of their music and you should, too.)

Now, a few alpha release issues with this performance.

1. The video is shot way off to the side and aimed wrong. The primary video camera didn’t work and, well, this is what we have. Better than nothing (but maybe not by much).

2. It’s in a classroom auditorium with a very shallow stage and no theatre lighting, but that’s the nature of this event.

3. The projections are way too fuzzy for this situation; we wanted them a little fuzzy but on this shiny surface it was really exaggerated.

4. The videos are projected too high; we wanted to avoid the wood rail but learned that the videos need to be on the same level as the dancer and the same size to work best, wood rail be damned.

5. We though that there was too much synchronization in the projections during the last rehearsal, so I removed a bunch of unity from the programming for this. Big mistake; it just looked jumbled. Never change things without rehearsing first!

6. We also told the dancers that they didn’t need to follow their phrases so closely and to just play around with. They did exactly what we told them to but, again, it looked to mushy. Again, never change things without rehearsing!

So, we learned some important lessons. Nevertheless, it was a good experience. Hannah will get to her part again in a few weeks and Molly will do a variation on hers (and another) a week after that. We’re learning!

MMJ4M 16: Working with Live Video

Chapter 16 of VJ Manzo's book Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, "Working with Live Video," is the first chapter to deal with Jitter, which is the video component of Max/MSP. This also makes it the first official chapter for my independent studies course with Lien Fan Shen of the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah. I'm excited because this part connects more directly with the work that I have done in Processing and with the Dance Loops project that I'm working on at Utah Valley University.

The exercises in this chapter all involved grabbing a live video stream from my computer's camera and then performing a series of color transformations on it, culminating with the use of a MIDI keyboard to do so. Fascinating!

Completed:

• Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Ch. 16: Working with Live Video (11 exercises)
• Patches can be downloaded from http://db.tt/GBYLb0vY (Dead Link)
• UPDATED LINK: Patches can now be downloaded from http://j.mp/1iy19Xl

Live Looping Is Live!

Woo hoo! It’s a tiny step but an important one, as this is our first successful experiment with live video looping, which will be central to our Dance Loops project at Utah Valley University. This video is based on motion sensitive recording and processing in Max/MSP/Jitter via my Mac’s iSight camera. You’ll notice that the movement from the first half persists during the second half, in which additional movement is layered. The looped videos for Dance Loops will be filmed with a Kinect video/depth camera and will probably be played back in a very different way, but this represents the first step in that direction.

Exposing My (Intellectual) Self

[The above is not me. Rather, it is Trisha Brown performing her 1966 dance "Homemade" with a projector strapped to her back. Way ahead of her time.]

In an experiment with intellectual and creative transparency, I’m going to make public the starting-from-nothing draft of a collaborative art/research project that I will do at Utah Valley University this fall with Nichole Ortega, Jacque Bell, and a large group of students from across campus. (Actually, I have been planning and working on my part for a while; it’s the active collaboration part that won’t start until fall.)

The project is tentatively titled “Dance Loops.” In the shortest possible explanation, it’s an attempt to do with modern dance what Zoë Keating does with the cello. (See zoekeating.com or search on YouTube for more info.)

More specifically, what we’re trying to do is allow a pair of dancers to capture, modify, and project looped videos of their movement during a live performance. To do this, the two dancers use onstage controllers (perhaps Novation Launchpads) to trigger motion capture with their respective Microsoft Kinect depth cameras. Using both their controllers and bodily motion (i.e., gestural control through the Kinects, which will run through Ableton Live and/or Max/MSP/Jitter), the dancers can control the playback of both the music and video projections of their dancing. The dancers will accompanied by an offstage visualist who will program the controllers, load audio clips, and control a central projector.

Well, that’s the idea, anyhow.

This past Tuesday (01 May 2012) I submitted a grant application for this project to the UVU Scholarly Council. If you’re interested, you can see the application letter here. It’s a quick turnaround so I should know by the 15th if the grant gets funded. If yes, fabulous! If no, I’ll see how much of it I can get done without all of the hardware and software.

And so, this brings us back to the transparency issue. I have a few reasons to start the manuscript now and to make it public:

• To help me focus my thoughts on this project (which is generally a hard thing for me to do)
• To avoid having to hastily recreate the process at a later date (which has happened to me more than once)
• To make sure I explore my technical and artistic alternatives and make justifiable choices for the final decisions
• To get feedback on early ideas
• And, if nothing else, to get some outside help on proofreading and MLA style, which, as an experimental psychologist, is still new and confusing to me

[Note: The paper currently does not use MLA style headings because I want to use the formatting shortcuts in Google Docs. However, help with citations is welcome at any time.]

And, perhaps for comic effect,

• To let people see how often a tenured research professor copies and pastes from Wikipedia. (The answer is “constantly” when I’m just starting the project, although it may all be replaced by other resources at the end.)

So, I invite anyone and everyone to check on the project’s progress. Please feel free to comment on the document by selecting the relevant text and then going to “Insert > Comment” in the Google Docs menu. Any insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Just click on j.mp/dance-loops-manuscript

Thanks!