patchwork pauses
tony schultz teaches a class at sarah lawrence college which covers aspects of dance and technology. the other day i came across a group blog for the class which is used for «out of class discussion»
apart from the theoretical discussion (with some good insights by the students) tony is posting the max/msp/jitter (mmj) patches they develop in class and extend for home work.
if you have access to mmj and have been at a loss to writing dance-tech related patches go take a look. i wish that more dance and performance technologies lecturers would put this kind of material up online. it is important that pedagogic approaches to dance technology are shared.
i digress, go read «motion active recording» which is an mmj patch post. the patch records video when motion is detected in the screen area. tony suggests playing around with the patch to make part of the screen area motion sensitive. why? because whole screen sensitivity is boring. this is an arts module … application and creativity not just function.
(i hope, that the students dances will get linked back to the blog with video via blip.tv and the patch amendments they made)
but the patch got me thinking … what would i do.
not what tony suggested (yep i was that kind of student). to record my dance, i would invert the patches function. recoding would only take place in the pauses; i would record the absence of movement.
there are two contexts here …
the judson era highlighted the notion of stillness as dancing. so conceptually (at least) the pauses are interesting and valid dance works. from a structural perspective i could use the inverted patch to see where the rests are in my dance. so rather than a performance creating tool, the patch becomes a performance analysis tool.
tony suggests that the patch is an «effective surveillance technology» which is right. as long as you want to see what people are doing. invert the functionality and you get to see when people are doing nothing. for example i may want to carry out surveillance on a fitness group. rather than watching hours of movement i should be able to watch minutes of stillness.
tonys patch (the functionality at least) is an example of what should be an exemplar in dance and performance technologies. it not only teaches you about applied coding but also addresses fundamental concepts in dance praxis … that is dance-tech teaching at its best.
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