hyt-Looking-Outwards-06: Randomness

For this week’s topic, I came across a multidisciplinary performance piece by Claire Bardainne and Adrien Mondot, “The Movement of air”. The piece was mesmerizing to watch as elements of acrobatic dancing movements, algorithmic stage design, and live music performance come together with the perfect rhythm and movement, eventually capturing the invisible movement of air using the tangible visuals and sounds.

It is interesting to learn about the duo artists’ work of progress and mechanism behind the final result. Particularly, the stage visuals are in fact projected and controlled by both human interventions and reactive data censors reinterpreting the three dancers’ location. Therefore, the factor of “randomness” is in some way controlled and “biased”, yet still spontaneous. That being said, each performance is real-time and never repetitive; while having an agenda, it concurrently allows the dancers to move freely in alignment with the digital projections, deconstructing the three-walled cube space.

However, it was disappointing that the artists disclose more information on how the set of algorithms is constructed, other than the fact that it was created with the software Millumin 2 (after ten years of using their custom made software eMotion). It seems that the speed and direction of the dancers are all detected by the sensor, then translated into those geometric patterns such as circling lines and pieces.