Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Edinburgh
Bodytext
Developed by Biggs, Sue Hawksley (dance artist, University of Bedfordshire) and Garth Paine (sound artist, Arizona State University) 'Bodytext’ is a performance work, involving speech, movement and digital projection that experiments with and interprets the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language. In ‘Bodytext’, a recursive agency is established between a human performer and the digitised environment in which they perform.
A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented computer mediated environment, employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and granular audio synthesis.
The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the movement of the performer causing the texts to interact and recombine with one another through their subsequent compositional arrangement. What is written is affected by the dance whilst the emerging recombinant descriptions determine what is danced.
‘Bodytext’ was developed whilst the artists were in residence at the Bundanon Trust, New South Wales, and the VIPRe Lab at the University of Western Sydney.
It premiered at Critical Path, Sydney, Australia as part of the SEAM 2010 festival, was performed as part of the Figures of the Visceral Conference, September 2010, Inspace, University of Edinburgh, UK, as part of the Dance Live Festival, October 2010, Banchory, UK, and as part of the Gaming the Game conference, April 2012, University of California Davis, USA.
A paper on ‘Bodytext’ (appendix 2) was presented at Multimodal Communication: Language, Performance and Digital Media, Lisbon Portugal May 2-4 2013. Another was presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, Sydney Australia June 11-14 2013.
