Do the things we imagine, make and put out in the world have tendency to reshape how we perceive, what we see, how we feel, the way we think, who we are, what we become…
‘Bodies in displacement’ is a body driven multi-disciplinary project integrating live performance and digital creation. It is an improvisation based collaboration involving dancers, a sound artist, a digital artist and AI researchers working with movement, sound and interactive visuals.
It is a research-creation project exploring feedback loop between human movement and digital mediated or AI-generated sound and visual environments. The work investigates how the dancing body can act simultaneously as sensor, signal, and subject within generative systems - creating dialogue between inner states and external digital responses.
Drawing from improvisation and somatic practice the project develops real-time interactions between body, sound, and image. Software applications or AI algorithms transform motion data into evolving sonic and visual compositions, while the performer responds to these transformations - forming a cyclical process of perception, influence, and adaptation.
• can digital systems or AI construct be choreographically perceived as partner, rather than tool?
• what forms of embodiment emerge when digital systems become responsive environments?
• can feedback - as a structural and aesthetic principle - reconfigure relations between human and machine?
• what forms of embodiment emerge when digital systems become responsive environments?
• can feedback - as a structural and aesthetic principle - reconfigure relations between human and machine?
The performance dispositif consists of a dance space, interactive sound, video projection, stage lighting, motion tracking and generative AI system. Using movement, sound and image the work explores and interrogates relationships and connections between us and our immediate and extended environments.
The performer(s) dance in a pool of light alongside immersive live sound environment and video projection. Along their vertebral columns, like spinal protheses, are motion tracking markers. The motion data is introduced into the AI system and used in the image generation process. Working from the vertebral column as both sensor and conduit the dancers negotiate space; generating states of body, ways of being and relating to time, space, sound and image; creating resonance between inner and outside worlds.
A video camera films both the performer(s) and the projected image. The camera feed is captured and run through a network of pixel displacement and feedback loop processes then reprojected.
The performer(s) navigate space and interact with the real-time generated visual texture that is derived from their (performers) own image and movement. The visual evolves through different states ranging from raw camera feed to minimal traces of body, light, shadow, colour, geometric form, abstract texture and AI generated content.
‘Bodies in displacement’ is a ritual of body, space, image and sound; a metaphor on how we relate to each other and to the world around us. It uses body, image and sound to explore relations between our inner and outside worlds and how they connect and influence each other.
The work deploys multiple channels of interaction and feedback loop between the performers, the digital media systems and the space. The dancers initiate the action - navigating space, engaging audience; leaving traces of body in both physical space and projection surface - but they are neither master nor slave to the image. They must constantly adapt & find in themselves ways to engage space so as to achieve resonance between moving body and projected visual texture. Image becomes extension of body, dance partner - deriving from while also providing impulse to body and movement.