The Topological Media Lab conducted a series of experiments - called Ouija - regarding movement and intentionality, June 25 - July 18, 2007, at Concordia's EV Hexagram-Blackbox.

Choreographers Soo-yeon Cho & advisor Michael Montanaro , 7 dancers, media creators from the Topological Media Lab, and collaborating researchers held a series of experiments in structured improvisation exploring the emergence of collective intention in a field of movement. The field of movement includes un-prepared everyday "un-conscious" movement, pre-conditioned but un-rehearsed movement, as well as fully phrased movement. The experiments included dancers and non-dancers, sometimes identified as such, sometimes not. Themes included entrainment, camouflage, calligraphy and exchanging initiative and momentum between dancers and media.

All these experimental events lived in a set of responsive substrate media supplied with Oxygen's calligraphic media and gestural sound, WYSIWYG's sounding tapestries, and some proto-jewelry. See the TML Showcase of Cosmicomics, Meteor Shower, WYSIWYG, and Excitable Sites for related work.


We will invite expert collaborators to join some of the TML campfires that we'll hold during the Blackbox residency. Please see the Google calendar for the details of our experiment.

A public presentation was held on Wednesday July 18.

VIDEO (320 X 240 :: 28 MB)

VIDEO (320 X 240 :: 7 MB)

Soo-yeon Cho, Choreographer

Dancers:
Mike  Croitoru
Kiani del Valle
Veronique Gaudreau
Rebecca Halls
Marie Laurier
Joannie Pharand
Olivia Foulke

Oxygen:
Jean-Sebastien Rousseau, Calligraphic video, videography, visual effects, production
Tim Sutton, Gestural sound design and programming, production
Emmannuel Thivierge, State engine, camera tracking, production
Filip Radonjik, Live ink painting

WYSIWYG:
Marguerite Bromley (XS Labs), Tapestry design and weaving
Elliot Sinyor (IDMIL McGill), Tapestry mechatronics
David Gauthier, Tapestry mechatronics
Freida Abtan, Sound design & programming
David Birnbaum (IDMIL McGill), Sound design & programming
Doug van Nort (IDMIL McGill), Gestural motion feature analysis

Josee-Anne Drolet, TML Project Coordinator, production, videography, editing
Harry Smoak, TML Research Coordinator, production support, research advisor
Ma Zhiming, Production

Special thanks to Faculty Colleagues:

Prof. Michael Montanaro, Contemporary Dance, Ouija movement experiment design
Prof. Marcelo Wanderley, IDMIL, McGill University, WYSIWYG gestural control of sound synthesis
Prof. Joey Berzowksa, XS Labs, Interactive textiles

Thanks also to affiliates of the TML and the SenseLab for artistic and research support: Michael Fortin, Elena Frantova, Olfa Driss, Rene Sills, Raul Gomez, Paul Melançon, Antoine Blanchet, Younjeong Choi, Shermine Sawalha

Sha Xin Wei - Director, Art Concept
Harry Smoak - Director of production, creative advisor
Jean-Sébastien Rousseau - Video design and Max/Jitter OpenGL programming, Models and special effects video
Timothy Sutton - Sound design and Max/MSP programming
Emmanuel Thivierge - State engine programming, Camera feature extraction
Josee-Anne Drolet - Project Coordinator, Models and special effects video
Olfa Driss - Research, Models and special effects video
Michael Fortin - Graphics programming, OpenGL and optimization

Prof. Sha Xin Wei — PI
Prof. Marcelo Wanderley — PI
David Gaultier — mechatronics & feature extraction programming
Freida Abtan   — sound instrument creator (software)
David Birnbaum — sound instrument creator
Elliot Sinyor  — sound instrument creator
Harry Smoak — assistant project technical coordinator
Doug van Nort   — gesture/sound feature extraction, mapping
Rodolphe Koehly  — physical materials advisor 

As an extension of the research work conducted with the Topological Media Lab (TML), Sha Xin Wei and his team are creating textile objects such as wall hangings, blankets, scarves, and jewelry that create sound as they are approached or manipulated. These sonic blankets can be used for improvised play. A phonetic pun on the old acronym for What You See is What You Get from the era of the Graphical User Interface, WYSIWYG (for wearable, sound instrument, with gesture) draws on music technology, dance, children’s group games, textile arts, and fashion. Created first and foremost to sustain social play for people of all ages, WYSIWYG allows players to express themselves whether enjoying time in a park, dancing at a club, passing the time during a long car trip, or just playing at home. The research is being carried out in collaboration with Marcelo Wanderley, an associate professor at the McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montreal, and draws on Wanderley’s research into the gestural control of sound synthesis and new interfaces for musical expression.

The custom-designed digital instruments embedded in the cloth sample movement to transform ambient body movement and freehand gestures into new sounds or “voices” associated with a player or transmitted to other players in the vicinity. These devices can also be embedded into furnishings or other types of objects. In addition, they can store and re-synthesize sounds by nuancing them using data transmitted by nearby sensors. The research project therefore targets the creation of a series of devices – some made from soft material – that will react in different ways to proximity and contact, movements, noise characteristics, and the progress of the game itself. The sonic behavior of the devices are designed in the spirit of games such as hide-and-seek and blind-man’s buff and also work well with a variable number of players in both ad hoc and rehearsed situations.

When the project was launched in November 2006, the WYSIWYG team experimented with a prototype ”blanket” able to sense how it is handled. During the presentation, eight people manipulated this photo-sensitive blanket to produce a spatial sonic landscape. In July 2007, dancers performed a semi-choreographed movement improvisation around a 20’ suspended “tapestry”and a 6’ “tablecloth” woven with conductive thread on a Jacquard loom by Joey Berzowska’s XS Labs.

With WYSIWYG, Sha and his team intend to develop other architectural-scale sensate cloths that function as agents co-performing with dancers and as image-bearing, kinetic surfaces in other performance contexts.

Dancer Marie Laurier with 20’ sounding cloth woven by Marguerite Bromley during Ouija workshop. © 2007 Topological Media Lab.

Custom electronics by Elliot Sinyor, McGill University. © 2007 Topological Media Lab.

David Gauthier with capacitive proximity sensor in the form of a bird woven from conductive fiber. © 2007 Topological Media Lab.

Erik Conrad + Justyna Latek + Josée-Anne Drolet

Troglodyte is an architectural intervention that investigates the relationship between a phenomenal understanding of the body and the experience and understanding of space. By sculpting the space between our skin and the walls we explore the potential agency of empty space.  What happens when the lines between a body and an environment are blurred?Troglodyte investigates the cognitive and perceptual phenomenon of manual chronostasis: the occurrence of tactile perception before "actual" contact.

The installation is a maze of suspended reflective film (mylar) in which the participant explores an ambiguous space that appears both concave and convex, shallow and deep; in a constant state of becoming. Dynamic lighting creates reflective and transparent passages along the participant’s way.

Thick with continuously emerging elemental symbolism, Troglodyte evokes thoughts of magmatic flow, liquid metal, water based micro-organic life forms,  fire, wind, lightning, thunder ... an embodied gaze mediated by reverberation. Shadow, reflection, echo: representations produced naturally without the intervention of language/technology; representations "before language and after the scream? (Antonin Artaud)


VIDEO (320 X 240 :: 52 MB)