DanceTag dissemination at the Pervasive Media Studio:
Augmented Dance – A Conversation
Tuesday, March 4th
10:00 – 17:00
Bristol
UWE Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, Seth Giddings from Dance Tag and Laura Kriefman from Guerilla Dance Project invite you to participate in a sounding out day investigating the future of Augmented Dance, hosted at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol on Tuesday, March 4th.
The term augmented dance brings together three streams of creative and research practice:
- For Laura augmented dance “is a specialised and evolving form – where the choreographic language is interrogated not for form or content sake, but in response to the changing stimuli and physical liberties of the technology itself. As such the role of dancer, choreographer, audience and manipulator are often inter-changeable, and the choreographic language is consequentially liberated from more traditional vocabularies”.
- Research by the Play Research Group and Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE has in recent years explored the intimate, playful and creative relationships between videogame technologies and videogame players in embodied, gestural play. Popular dance and rhythm games configure intense collusions between algorithms, gestures, dance steps and players’ kinaesthetic skills and pleasures.
- A current Nesta Digital R&D project has seen a collaboration between Pavilion Dance South West, the developers Mobile Pie, and Seth Giddings of the DCRC, from which an experimental game app for mobile devices has been designed, tested, and released for iOS and Android. The game – DanceTag – encourages players to video themselves dancing in a location that is geotagged. Uploaded videos can be accessed online via their tagged location and players can compete to perform the dance that will see them capturing that location. Through locative media and online community, DanceTag aims to connect young people’s everyday popular use of digital media (smart phones, dance games) with established dance arts institutions and events.
Augmented dance is a somewhat new expression. It resonates with developments in experimental and popular digital games – Augmented Reality Games (ARGs) – experiences where “technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality”.
“I use the term augmented dance because we use technology to enhance one’s current perception of dance, and the physical environment.” Laura Kriefman, Guerilla Dance Project
This one day event, facilitated by Laura Kriefman and Seth Giddings, looks to bring together a group of practitioners, programmers, academics and technologists that are experts in a range of fields and have an understanding of their craft in the UK and beyond. All of whom have, over the last few years, been engaged in separate conversations with us around this theme.
We’d like to talk about:
- The best examples of Movement and technology we’ve seen (both in the UK and globally)
- What new cross-overs can we explore between dance and games?
- What are the key concepts for exploring augmented dance?
- What methods are the most productive in capturing the experiences and behaviours of augmented dancers in formal and informal environments?
- What are the possibilities for collaborative research between dancers, creative media producers and academics?
- What we would like to see happen
- Whether working practices need to change
- And what the consequences might be for funding, research and legacy.