{"id":5169,"date":"2017-07-05T16:02:34","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=5169"},"modified":"2017-07-05T16:02:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:02:34","slug":"when-dance-making-goes-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2017\/07\/05\/when-dance-making-goes-digital\/","title":{"rendered":"When Dance Making Goes Digital"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arianna here! I\u2019m another one of the summer fellows working in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio. I\u2019m also a dancer! I\u2019m currently working towards finishing my MFA in Dance Performance this spring.<\/p>\n

During my first couple weeks in the studio I\u2019ve been exploring some digital media components to incorporate into my dance performance, including some digital interactivity and motion capture work. This requires familiarizing myself with the Kinect motion capture system, digital creative programs like Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro, and, perhaps most importantly, a computer program called Isadora.<\/p>\n

In short, Isadora acts as the control unit that drives visual manipulation components in a performance. Within the program, the user connects different modules in order to manipulate components like lighting, special effects, or video imagery that is played on a projection screen. The modules allow information to travel from source to source, and allows the user to transform an experience\u2014similar to the way a stage manager would orchestrate the configuration of lighting, sound and other effects in a theater experience. Here\u2019s an example of a skeletal tracking sample patch within the Isadora program:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now you\u2019re probably thinking, \u201cThat looks like computer programming,\u201d and you\u2019re right. Your next thought is probably (and understandably), \u201cDance and computer programming? But why?\u2026I don\u2019t get it\u201d. It\u2019s true, these two mediums don\u2019t seem to mix.\u00a0 But there is a growing and evolving following of this marriage of mediums that people have grown to call \u201cdigital dance making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without question, the programming aspect of this work has been the most challenging. Maybe frustrating is more accurate word? Okay, I\u2019ll say it: it\u2019s the worst.<\/p>\n

Jokes aside, as someone who has very little experience with computer coding and programming, it\u2019s really challenging to trouble shoot issues as they come up. Maybe the most surprising realization has been how many extra programs need to be installed just to simply start running the skeletal tracking and motion capture programs.<\/p>\n

But I think I\u2019m getting the hang of things. I\u2019m most excited to start meshing my dance practice into the digital aspects I\u2019ve been working on. I think the motion capture data from my improvisational dance scores is going to be incredible once mixed with the Adobe design components that I\u2019ve been creating.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty passionate about this idea of blending artistic mediums, and especially this idea of incorporating anything digital into artistic practice. One of my favorite debates is whether art imitates life, or life imitates art; regardless of the answer, our lives are certainly incredibly influenced by technology\u2014how could this not be true of our art?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arianna here! I\u2019m another one of the summer fellows working in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio. I\u2019m also a dancer! I\u2019m currently working towards finishing my MFA in Dance Performance this spring. During my first couple weeks in the studio I\u2019ve been exploring some digital media components to incorporate into my dance performance, includingContinue reading “When Dance Making Goes Digital”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,32],"tags":[36,35],"syndication":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5169"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5173,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169\/revisions\/5173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5169"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=5169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}