dress with LED and text display

4 LED, wires, switches and batteries are sewed on the dress.
By doing this I wanted to trigger light from the Led with particular body movements. In the dark, light from the dress is detected by the light sensors and the data are send to the computer where they are processed and give a dynamic animated text which size, position and content is related to the intensity of the light.

For the exhibition I didn’t have enough time to investigate thoroughly the installation and issues occurred related to the number of sensors and LED needed for the sensors to detect a wide range of light.

People would use a wearable bracelet with a led to browse through the projected text that was taken from the dance dictionary of Valerie Preston-Dunlop, quotes from choreographers.

(video from the installation on the sidebar)

about body-space position & attention

“when I still my body, I can track the movement of my interior life” , M.van Imschoot

She talks about stillness in space and stillness in movement. She
speaks about becoming more aware of her senses reaching inward and outward into space, and the movement in the environment around her, while still. She adds that this perception is important to the dancer but not specially of use to the observer.

she also speaks about the state of attention induced by the relative stillness of sitting in a chair and looking at sth. She sees the space as a canvas to her imagination that would prompt the desire for a new movement or relationship in or of the space.

And at this point she mentions 2 qualities of the observer’s attention. The one she calls it ‘innervation’, activate to explore, like a detective exploring the food on his/her plate, or the action of the performance, where the mind imagination and its associations are very alive. Then from this points comes the ‘entrance’, where the audience becomes entranced, no longer actively perceiving but is taken to a journey out of the body. ‘Your body becomes so entrained that…you don’ t noticed your leg is falling asleep’ under you.

Finally she claims that the performer reaches a high state in performing when both states, activated in the mind & imagination while being entranced in the action, happening together.

But she thinks that the observer shifts from one to the other. And that often she as an observer is not in either (??)

source coreographic encounters

what about the movement of the fabric on the body?

reading about fashion communication, I found this nice paragraph where it underlines the pleasure of feeling the clothing on the skin and the pleasure of the movement of the dress while body moves. -source is to be posted- And it came in mind the airy clothes of the dancers how they move along with the bodies.

It’s a liberal flow that occures when the clothing is flexible by material and design. ~creating a dress with leds that lights on by movement am not sure how much this can give a nice feeling of body expression (will see..)

do u love me?
what’s that?
and this?
in the first meetings with soldering and kits, i got a wheel of fortune. then i sewed one of the led of the wheel on a t-shirt inside a heart-pattern. the rest leds and the button-trigger is sewed down on the t-shirt. the other person comes and i ask him/her if he/she loves me. then he/she has to press ‘my’ button on the wheel. if the led in the heart after the rounds through all the leds of the wheel , doesn’t light on, i could applied sometimes ‘you don’t love me!’

funny enough, i found this video afterwards
by heavy industries (OUT OF THE INTERNET AND) INTO THE NIGHT

while having the idea of creating a dictionary of body exressions and their different qualities, I started reading researches about positions and motion in dance.

extracts by the book choreographic encounters, published by the institute of choreography and dance (2003), ireland

a conversation on stillness
Andre lepecki: “stillness as an accusation of certain choreographic choices being a kind of anti-dance… what is provoked in the spectator when they see a dancer not dancing. Why the imperative for the danser to be moving all the time?”

Further he compares the ‘silence’ piece of John Cage to the performances where stillness is used as part of the work. He sees a relation between silence and stillness and he points that as the ‘non-playing’ piano of Cage opens up the audience perception to take in everything that otherwise would seem as noise. likewise stillness forces to intensify our attention of the little events -tremors, small movements- .

He questions if stillness is being totally stil or not moving? for him stillness allows the creation of intimacy and contributes to our vision to become less scopic and get as away from dance as image only cause we start to invest in the other senses -listening-.

myriam van imschoot: “one is that in moving into stillness a shape materialises… a containement of energy within shape” she referes S.Paxton who was describing stillness as paragraphing; “sth that delinates the structure of the dance… that little bit of space after a paragraph makes the paragraph become a paragraph and gives the shape to what preceded it…” she also mentions the modernist approach of dance where the dancer should not be too much on the foreground otherwise he destroys the dance. this is also the soil where the ‘pure dance’ was grounded in movement while stillness as its repression.

ric allsopp: he talks abou D.Gordon uses techniques to expand time by using filmic images that are both still and moving, through slow motion or repetition and looping…”stillness is that bit where you come from somewhere in the process of going somewher else”

isabell ginot: she quotes Dominique Bagouet who was saying ‘I don’t want dancers, I want women and men who dance ‘. He uded many techniques to investigate stillness. it could be a detailed microscopic choreography or as moments where the presence of the person would be shown as opposed to the form of the dance moving

extracts from the dictionary of V.P.Dunlop ‘dance words’ (1995)
pure dance:
“is a dance without a support-no music, no narrative, just the dance”, louis horst, 1958

“it intigrates force, time and spacepatterns into a meaningfull whole. This whole is the abstract form of the dance “, barbara mettler, 1980

absolute dance:
“a wigman term for a dance genre free from subservience to music and theatricality, a dance that would take its impulse from the primordial sources of the body and space”, walter sorell, 1975

movement based work:
“kinetic work, not necessarily regarded as dance, which arises out of movement exploration rather than as a response to sound or to the embodiment of a narrative , Rosemary Butcher, interview”

movement:
“one of man’s languages “, rudolf laban, 1966

pedestrial movement:
“a source of movement for choreographers, generated from the everyday behaviour and functional motion of ordinary people going aout their business”, eds

shadow movements:
“tiny muscular movements such as the raising of the brow, the jerrking of the hand, the tapping of the foot which have none other than expressive value”, rudolf laban, 1971

some notes about artist’s book

Ulises Carrión: “Bookworks are books that are conceived as an expressive unity, that is to say, where the message is the sum of all materials and formal elements.”

Like other postmodern genres, such as installations, artists’ books allow, and even require, versatility in the use of materials; and, by virtue of their built-in complexity, encourage intertextuality as well as multimedia experimentation.

We might find it rewarding to “read’ an artist book in the same manner as we might interpret a performance where act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, insofar as we can define them, substitute for and reflect one another

from a “poietic”standpoint, subordinates all the parts that go into its making, and, from a theatrical point of view, upstages at every turn of the page its supernumeraries: texts, graphics, binding. For the book to achieve dominance, the artist quite frequently diminishes the signifying powers of text or image

by Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert

april 26th

discussions about a book split in different parts and placed in space. Different materials of which the book is consisted, move in space for reading it, the space of the book and the space of the body movement

danja: create a kind of vague cloud of memory or experience and throw the details.

- a transparent castle of glass, capture a dream, fragile, create a common experience that people can talk about it

-use of kaleidoscope as a distorted small world that you have to go closer to see it.

linda: use of recordings in order that people understand the notion of creating virtual spaces with movements

kristina: dictionary (prospero’s book by greenaway, the book of love by abramovic)

-the unfolding time of the book, the time needed to write it and the time of the reader

april 19th

how to explain an idea for a project in 10 minutes

building written patterns of language together with body movements in space. A dress with words and leds as sensors that coresponds to different movements of the body.

Exploring different kinds of composition of different languages (body, letters), or recomposing existing patterns. A way to investigate alternatives patterns of expressing thoughts, mapping communication to another level. Using metaphores for being more sharp or indicative of hidden emotions and thoughts. Transforming regular, everyday patterns of expression in a more abstract way. Adressing the necessity to tickle imagination for widening perception of life.