Interactive performance engages technologies from Motion Capture (MoCAP) to video tracking, bio-sensors, to simple accelerometers. These may control or generate music and visual content for a performance. Such practices raise a number of fascinating issues, pertaining to: embodiment, agency and dramaturgy. If the performer becomes the generative agent in a work (the instrument), they are no longer ‘dancing to’ something, but generating the media in realtime. This extends the dancer’s embodiment to the media itself. This transformation of relationship to media presents a profoundly different notion of agency, where the dancer becomes a generative agent rather than a responder. Such changes raise issues regarding choreography (does the dancer become enslaved to the system?) and dramaturgy (if all actions are momentary how does one produce temporal forms?). This workshop will explore some of the possible technologies and will also engage in questions of agency, embodiment and dramaturgy in relation to interactive performance.
Dr Garth Paine is an Associate Professor at the School of Art Media and Engineering and the School of Music at Arizona State University. He is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in experimental music and media arts. His work has been shown throughout Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Hong Kong, Korea and New Zealand.