Motion Bank Scores: TWO
“We are watching a dance of attention.”
Norah Zuniga Shaw
Online Interactive artwork published on Motion Bank
Digital scores of spontaneous creativity in the work of two unrelated dance companies (Thomas Hauert ZOO company Brussels) and (Bebe Miller Company NYC/Columbus). Hauert and Miller are choreograph improvisation for performance and engage directly with the nature of cognition and human consciousness. Their choreographic materials are theirÂ
Habits Tendencies Memories Impulses
Improvisers draw our attention to the mind/body connection
“The dancing mind and the thinking body”
David Gere
We are watching them at work, we are witness to their forms of concentration, perception, and attention they bring to the moment. We witness and we ask: What is organizing directing and changing their attention? What tasks are they achieving? How are they using or interrupting their habitual patterns?
Highly idiosyncratic and generative these scores ask what if and what else?
As a result, circulation of these materials and the forms of knowledge they transmit has expanded and new articulations and relationalities between seemingly disparate domains are produced.
scores
TWO
TWO a series of original scores
Commissioned by Motion Bank a project of the Forsythe Company
body – code – video – text – motion capture animation – interactive media
(c) 2013
Bebe Miller Company
Thomas Hauert ZOO Company
For this project we spent 3 years working with the choreographers to select a handful of ideas that would reveal knowledge of mind/body processes and could be repurposed through our iterative visualization methods.
Definitions and quotes from the makers are placed alongside the visualizations in pockets of the interface.
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Every visualization is deeply rooted in insider perspectives as well as outside observation, analytical needs and aesthetic or communicative priorities.
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No single inscription is the truth. Each data point, chart, object, game, and animation, is in a dance of communication with the original choreographic ideas and in the process they act on those ideas.
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The final versions are set alongside a series of other interpretations expressing different aspects of the same ideas in their function, form, and in the qualitative choices made in the process of algorithmic translation, animation of the figure, user interaction, and placement in the interface.
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And audiences and web visitors make their own contributions to communication, navigating in their own pathways, making contact with different aspects of the work at different moments and staying for sustained engagement or leaving after a brief encounter.