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Body, Movement, Language is a collection of interactive web based experiments that resulted from a two-way residency between award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones and the Google Creative Lab. Inspired by Jones' long history of intertwining improvised speech and dance, these experiments invite anyone to explore the creative possibilities of speech, movement, and machine learning while making new connections with Jones’ iconic work. To participate, users need nothing more than a laptop. The collaboration was documented in a short film that gives a behind the scenes look into the process of creating the final four experiments. In the film, while discussing the technology used to power these experiences, Jones asks: Can it make me cry? This project set out to investigate that question. The collection of experiments released focus not on the technology they employ, but instead on the storytelling they enable.

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The performance-demo The Shadow, after H. C. Andersen, illustrates a method and a set of tools for staging avatar movements that are controlled by a performer during a mixed reality theatrical performance. The focus is on the construction of a visual instrument made of simultaneous scenic movements of five avatars in a virtual shadow theater. Based on the hypothesis of being able to use only two groups of scenic actions, salient and idle, the demo uses a method for implementing a virtual staging that respects the presence effect for the avatars as they act in synchronization with the text. The performer reads the text of the story speaking into a wireless microphone while using a midi controller for playing various real time audio processing instruments requiring him to perform while modulating his acting prosody, as well as for triggering pre-recorded shadow avatar animations.
Concept, Staging & Programming: Georges Gagneré
Music: Tom Mays
Performer: Eric Jakobiak
Programming Assistant: Anastasiia Ternova
Motion Capture : Remy Gorski
Production : didascalie.net

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Babyface is a dance and robotics performance responding to feminized tropes in popular media and modern technology. The piece collages ideas of perfection, servitude, aspiration, limitation, and spectacle. Specifically, this work centers a “cyborg” performer who wears a pair of robotic wings. The wings’ two-degree-of-freedom motion is activated by the performer’s breath through a pressure-sensitive sensor placed on the performer’s abdomen. This machine defines parameters for the performer’s choreographic vocabulary, extending their physical reach and range of motion, simultaneously activating and limiting the backspace of the body. Through breath activation, the wings are an expressive tool that can be consciously and unconsciously activated. Through tight coupling with this machine, Babyface offers an artistic response to the gendered pressures of modern technologies that absorb and disseminate existing feminine stereotypes.

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‘The walls of my room are curved’ is a movement-generated sonic performance of the body living with a connective tissue disorder.

The performance uses several microphones attached to the dancer’s moving body, capturing the live sounds of creaking and crackling bones and joints as they shift, transfer, extend, and rotate. While the dancer moves, an electronic musician samples, processes, synthesizes the sounds of the performer’s body into a musical score in real-time. This generative feedback loop of dance creating music/ music creating dance blurs the lines between body and musical instrument, organic and synthetic, human and device. ‘The walls of my room are curved’ is an invocation to listen deeply to the body, a challenge to crip the cyborg figure, and a meditation on the promise (and process) for interdependence.

This performance contains some flashing lights from projections.

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In a Box is a multimedia performance that tells a story about alone but not lonely. The performer performs inside a semi-transparent box with four lamps. In this performance, lamps become performing instruments that express emotion.

There are four light switches in the installation that become interfaces to generate live music. Light switches are mapped with different music notes, loops, and midi instruments. Through choreographed movement, the performer activates these light switches to generate a live composition of movement, light, and music.

Through a theatrical style, the project illustrates the artist's reflection on the relationship of self and the world. Inspired by night views of tall apartment buildings in New York, each apartment window has different lamps, colors, and shadows. It is like everyone lives in a small box, and each box is unique with its own stories.

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This practice work consists of a suite of tools for understanding human-agent movement improvisation. The core system is LuminAI , an installation where participants can improvise movement together with an AI dance partner. The agent learns and reasons about participant gestures in order to choose a relevant response. MoViz is an interactive visualization tool that can be used to explore LuminAI ’s gesture memory in 3D space. Gestures are represented in colored clusters of similar gestures. MoViz enables researchers to refine algorithmic pipelines as it facilitates qualitative evaluation of gesture clustering algorithms. We also present a visualization tool that allows users to explore how LuminAI utilizes top-down domain knowledge in the form of an encoding of the Laban Movement Analysis framework. Users can explore how a gesture might be encoded into the different planes and vertices of an icosahedron, which is the geometric shape Laban uses to reason about and explain movement.

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This work is an exploration of possibilities offered by Black femme in the southern United States when their narratives and embodied experiences are the lens from which we negotiate our relationship to self, community, and environment. What do Black daughters inherit? Considered through communal and familial lenses this work navigates the knowledge of loving and living that connects the artist with Black daughters in the community currently living and elders who have passed, while reconstructing the landscapes of these narratives and the geographies they inhabit. The work realized out of these ethnographies imagines the possibilities of inheritance while grounding evidenced inheritance, such as intergenerational trauma. What is ingrained and what are the experiences of transmission? Documented conversations, footage, and artifacts become a collaged landscape of these histories projection mapped onto the artist as she meditates on what it means to inhabit her inheritance and inherit her inhabitance through improvisational movement.