e-Dance

The sixth research intensive of the project is taking place over several days throughout November, the first of which was held on 13 November 2008.  The team worked in two locations, at University of Manchester and the Open University in Milton Keynes. The team comprised myself (Helen), Simon, Michelle and Louise at the OU and Sita, [...]

  I spent a week in New York (26-31 October) with New York/Berlin-based Dance tech. company Troika Ranch http://www.troikaranch.org/.  I was participating in the MIMA: Moving Image Media Artists workshop, along with ten other international artists/academics.  The workshop was funded by the New York State Council for the Arts and provided an intensive engagement with the Isadora software developed by Company [...]

Last week I (Sita) was in Dresden, Germany, as a guest presenter at the Post Me_New ID Forum (31st October-2nd November 2008).  The Forum web site describes this international gathering of academics and professional artists as “a platform for reflection on how we are creatively and socially engaged in digital networks, how we perform our [...]

We (Simon & Michelle, Open U) are now working on embedding video into Compendium, to enable not only the usual temporal annotation of video, but adding a spatial dimension so that choreography researchers/practitioners/students can locate annotations in specific locations, for specific time-windows. Moreover, annotations in Compendium are not simply free-text ’stickies’, but hypertext nodes, embedded in [...]

The whole project team (Helen, Sita, Martin, Simon, Andrew, Anja and Michelle) spent two days together in Manchester last week 9-10 October.   The focus of the ’sandpit’ was the software development aspect of the project.  It was a really good opportunity to bring the two areas of tool development together to look at the respective purpose [...]

JISC are having a roadshow at Manchester - Advanced tools and technologies for collaborative research:  Thu 6 Nov 2008.  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/manchesterroadshow Included is a section on e-Dance within the “Specialist Access Grid Projects” discussion, and an image from one of the previous intensives is on the main flyer.

  I have been selected as one of the ten artists to take part in the MIMA (Moving Image Media Artists) workshop with Troika Ranch in http://www.troikaranch.org/ New York at the end of October.  This week-long workshop will give me the opportunity to work directly with Mark Coniglio, the Co-director of Troika Ranch and developer of Isadora.  [...]

The presentation consisted of a related group of projects under the theme of interfaces; sort of sub title ‘where is the interface’. A sub-context was on tool building and their use. There were a few comments and questions during and after the set of presentations. Couple of questions considered the use of ‘visualization’ tools that could [...]

       We all managed to get together for one day during DRHA 2008, University of Cambridge, UK, 14-17 September http://www.rsd.cam.ac.uk/drha08/ .  It was great to have the chance to catch up after a summer of really interesting activity on the project.  Sita, Martin, Simon and myself (together with Scott Palmer from University of Leeds) were [...]

It’s always a nice feeling when a book you’ve been working on for months finally lands on your doormat, and so what better way to kick off the week than to proudly hold up Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques! Co-edited with KMi Research Fellow Ale Okada, and NESTA Fellow Tony Sherborne, Creative Director at [...]

http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/index.cfm Just back from the UK e-Science All Hands Conference 2008 held at the University of Edinburgh.  Our presentation was part of the Workshop led by Lorna Hughes, CeRCH http://kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerchfocusing on the use of e-Science in the Arts and Humanities - “e-Science in  the Arts and Humanities: Early Experiments and Systematic Investigations”.  The morning session, of [...]

SIGGRAPPH (ACM Special Interest Group in Graphics, http://www.siggraph.org/) has been a long running and very large conference aimed mostly at the technical aspects of Computer Graphics: Games industry, Hollywood, animation productions are all beneficiaries of the outcomes from these research topics. The University of Manchester runs a Professional Chapter of the organisation and was at [...]

       The fifth research intensive took place between 4 - 8 August in Bedford.  This week-long laboratory included the following project participants: Helen Bailey, Michelle Bachler, Anje Le Blanc and  Andrew Rowley.  We were joined by Video Artist: Catherine Watling, and four Dance Artists: Catherine Bennett, River Carmalt, Amalia Garcia and James Hewison.  There were several aims for [...]

  Sita and I went to Singapore at the end of July to present the project paper titled “e-Dance: Relocating choreographic practice as a new modality for performance and documentation”.  The conference took place at venues throughout Singapore including the Singapore Management University, National University of Technology, Nang Yang University and Lasalle College of the Arts.    [...]

  Martin and I, together with Dance Artist James Hewison, who has contributed to several of the research intensives, presented a paper at EVA in London in July.  The presentation titled “Choreographic Morphologies”, outlines the key findings from the Morphologies practice-led research.  The conference proceedings have been published by British Society of Computing.

Last week, I attended the fifth eDance intensive in Bedford.  Upon arriving, we discovered that we were to put on a public performance on Friday (unfortunatly after I had to leave).  This increased the pressure somewhat, although our confidence in the recording software had recently improved after it had been successfully used to record the Research Methods [...]