Expressing Technological Metaphors in Dance Using Structural Illusion from Embodied Motion

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Diego Maranan University of the Philippines Open

University dmaranan@upou.edu.ph

Overview• Describe three styles of street dance,

collectively called illusion styles

• Suggest that certain technological and mathematical metaphors fundamentally underlie the movement vocabularies of these styles

• Propose a tentative framework that explains how these metaphors are communicated and why these dance styles are compelling to watch

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Research context• Urban dance communities are highly understudied (in the academic

literature)

• Part of a larger exploratory and participative inquiry into the creative and social practices of 'illusion styles' dance communities; supported by internet ethnographic methods ("netnography") (Kozinets, 2010) and Laban Movement Analysis

• Netnography needed because illusion style dance communities are widely dispersed geographically

• Posts from two discussion forum sites over an 8-month period in 2011-2012

• Publicly available online videos (YouTube, Vimeo)

• Publicly available online documentation on liquid, digitz, tutting (e.g. www.darkmattersquad.com)

• Web survey (11 respondents)

• Two rounds of Skype interviews with willing research participants (7)!3

Background

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How it all started

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Liquid, digitz, finger-tutting: why study these together?

• All three are related and referred to as illusion-based styles

• All three focus on the hands, arms, and fingers

• Most dancers of one style are proficient in at least one of the other ones

• The styles are usually used in conjunction with each other

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From raves to clubs to the streets: A brief history of illusion styles

Liquid Digitz Finger tutting

Emerged in the 90s; "child of the rave culture" (Dark Matter Squad)

Emerged in the late 90s from the NYC underground club scene

Emerged from digitz + 'tutting'

YouTube hits = ~22,500 YouTube hits = ~6,250 Youtube hits =~51,000!7

Technology's role in the history of illusion styles dances

Electronic dance music (EDM) is fundamental to the practice

Media technologies and the internet contributed significantly to spread of practice

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Technology's role in the history of illusion styles dances

Partly online community of practice who "really only [physically] meet once a year” at an annual convention dedicated to EDM dance; Google Hangout sessions and online "ciphers"

Performer identities are technologically informed, as demonstrated by names and imagery chosen by dancers

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Technology's role in the history of illusion styles dances

High level of technological literacy?

• 4 out 11 indicated ability to program in a high-level language

• 2 out of 11 indicated a "low proficiency", and 2 out of 11 a "high proficiency", in low-level programming languages (e.g., assembly)

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"As a culture, [our community] pretty much spawned from computers. The dance is

borne out of technologically based music, and many of us are in computer related

fields… What I'm saying is that we inhabit 3d computer space." (phedhex)

Technology's role in the history of illusion styles dances

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Questions

• If technology has been influential to the development of illusion styles dance community and their practices, how might technology influence the movement vocabulary?

• Why are these techniques compelling to watch?

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Methodology

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Close reading of digital archives of illusions styles dance

Ethnographic data and conversations with dancers

• Posts from two discussion forum sites (floasis.net, EDM Dance Facebook group)

• Online videos (~50)

• Online documentation written by dancers (wikis, websites)

• Interviews over Skype and email

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Movement analysis

• Analysis of videos with Certified Movement Analyst

• First-person insights from learning and rehearsing movement techniques

Close reading of digital archives of illusions styles dance

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Canonical techniques in illusion styles dance

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Canonical techniques: Liquid

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http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eL_ACqibNJg

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Canonical techniques: Digitz

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?

v=w0XPJTGaeuM

(starts around 5:37)

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• Fixed point

• Tutting grid

Canonical techniques: Finger tutting

Discussion

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Strategies for creating illusions in illusion styles

• Spatial tangibilization

• Spatial quantization

• Rejointing

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Spatial tangibilization• Creates illusions of objects in the performance

environment where none exist (e.g., contours, rails, folds)

• Using the body to suggest invisible forms is not new (e.g., mime); what is new is how it is integral to a dance practice and how rhythm is important

• VIDEO: rail

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Rejointing

• Handflow

• Box

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If technology has been influential to the development of illusion styles dance community and their practices, how might technology influence their movement vocabulary?

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Technological metaphors

• Cartesian space, equidistant points along a 3D lattice

• Geometric operations (e.g., linear and rotational transformations, reflections around an axis)

• Mechanical operations (latching, locking, unlocking, sliding along grooved tracks)

• Mathematical and geometric forms (e.g., sine waves, 45 degree angles)

• Virtual objects

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Dancer is immersed in an environment containing invisible, mutable objects

and structuresThe dancing body has a reconfigurable

structure.

'Spatial Tangibilization' 'Spatial Quantization' 'Rejointing'

Strategies for creating illusions in illusion styles

(Janet Murray's "holodeck without the

machinery")!26

Spatial tangibilization, spatial quantization, and rejointing are not new

Laban and Ullman (1966)

Forsythe (2000)!27

Mime

What is new

• Street dancers, not by contemporary dance choreographers

• Complexity of forms used (such as the fold)

• New kinds of (very mathematical) forms (e.g., sine waves in finger waves, Cartesian grid)

• Spatial tangibilization, spatial quantization, and rejointing are fundamental, not incidental, to the styles

• New ways of understanding virtual objects different from mime (tell us more, Albert)

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Some illusion styles metaphors

• Mathematical representations of space and time (Cartesian grids; fractal structures; sine waves; Newtonian mechanics)

• Geometric operations (rotations, translations, scaling, reflections)

• Mechanical operations and machine operations (latching, locking, unlocking, shifting along a conveyer belt)

• Digital interactions (clicking and dragging, resizing, drilling down, card-based interactions such as click and flip, alert messaging)

• Computer graphics (collision detection and avoidance, gravity simulation)

• Media operations (rewind, pause, fast forward, slow motion, strobing, frame-by-frame)

• Animation (pixel-perfect fluidity.... the "idea of fluidity" as opposed to typical real-world messy instance of fluidity)

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Why are these dance styles compelling to watch?

They create two kinds of illusions:

• Dancer is immersed in an environment containing invisible, mutable objects and structures.

• The dancing body has a reconfigurable structure.

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Structural Illusion From Embodied Motion (SIEM)

A tentative conceptual framework for explaining expressivity and virtuosity in illusion styles dance

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How do dancers do it?

Structure from motion• Inferring "biological motion" from sparse moving point-light

displays (Johansson 1973)

• Inferring the sex of the mover (Kozlowski and Cutting, 1977)

• Reconstructing shape from motion (Ullman, 1979)

We adapt the notion of structure from motion and conjecture that illusion styles dancers leverage viewers' assumptions about the fundamental properties of Euclidean space and of dancers' bodies to create illusions about the structural properties of the human body and the space around it.

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SIEM

When gestural movement is observed which appears to the viewer as difficult to execute, all other things being equal, there is a (temporary?) preference to choose an interpretation at some cognitive level which requires the least sophisticated mechanics of the body, even if the interpretation requires the viewer to accept alternative models of the structure of space or the body.

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SIEM Principles• We have mental models about how the human body is constructed

and how movement is patterned neuromuscularly

• We have mental models about the properties of the Euclidean space that the dancing body occupies

• To use 'illusioning' strategies, dancers must develop unfamiliar, sophisticated neuromuscular patterns. Performing movement at a higher speed, with more consistency, and more precision requires more skill

• In a highly-skilled performance for an illusion, it may be temporarily easier for the users to 'believe' (at some cognitive level) that their mental models of the physical properties of the body and of space might be wrong, rather than the 'believe' that the dancer is capable of such unusual and sophisticated neuromuscular behavior

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Audience participation (if there's time)!

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Summary• Illusion styles represent instances where the language

of technology influences our. It has changed the way people are creatively constructing movement.

• The quantity of the metaphors associated with a technology practice, and the transformations that are possible with these metaphors, are linked to expressiveness

• SIEM explains how these metaphors are expressed and communicated

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Why this matters

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Anticipates how technological metaphors can create new and

expressive (dance) movement in popular culture

• Technological metaphors that support more variation, complexity, and detail result in movement with greater expressiveness, articulation, and phrasing.

• Deep understanding of how to embody these metaphors can lead to more sophisticated operations on these metaphors

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Robert Shields and 'robot movement' hydraulics

Technological metaphors can create new and expressive (dance)

movement in popular culture

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A prediction: The more technology-based metaphors (e.g., rewind, freeze frame, strobe, fast forward, linear & rotational translation) circulate in popular discourse, the more movement that use these metaphors that we will see in popular dance.

Technological metaphors can create new and expressive (dance)

movement in popular culture

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SIEM could be used to explain expressivity and virtuosity in dance

and other body-based practices• Expressivity in Laban Movement Analysis is

often linked to Effort

• Ideas such as "grace" and "efficiency" might be understood in terms of how dancers create illusions of how the body and space are structured

• Dance, mime, puppetry

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Spatial cognition training

Pietsch and Jansen (2012) suggest that the ability to perform mental rotation is correlated with rotational hand movement. Other kinds of cognitive skills might be enhanced by leveraging the kind of training illusions styles dancers undertake.

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New communities of movement expertise for the design of movement-based systems

• Typical movement experts: certified movement analysts, "contemporary" dancers, somatic practitioners

• Rich vocabulary of expressive movement

• Movement knowledge is localized; if you want to design hand-based interfaces, consider working with hand movement experts

• Popular culture matters; phedhex, Code Red, houdoken

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Thank you.

Questions/Comments

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