Retro-Engineering: Wearable Sound

Abstract

Around the turn of the millennium reviewers began to take note that the marriage of dance and technology had produced a few significant stage works which startled audiences and drew attention to digital dance and interactivity in the theatre. Projections of virtual dancers appeared on screens in Merce Cunningham’s Hand-drawn Spaces and BIPED, emanations or graphic phantoms that fluttered in space while the real dancers performed the choreography on stage.¹ In Ghostcatching, Bill T. Jones’s animated figure danced a virtual solo, at times alone and then with multiple copies of ‘Jones’ spawned from the data extracted (motion-captured) from the performer’s body. The virtual Jones was heard talking, grumbling, and singing, which gave the animation an eerie sense of surreality. In Trisha Brown’s how long does the subject linger at the edge of the volume…, the projected graphic creatures interacted with the dancers on stage as if drawn to the human bodies and their movement gestures. The jagged geometric creatures as such (irregular triangles, squares, rectangles, and lines) remained indeterminate images hovering between abstraction and figuration, unaware that they were acting. Yet the graphic phantoms, sometimes referred to as digital doubles, have become supplements, algorithmic emergences allowing us to reflect upon the mediations between analogue and digital systems, between bodies and technical beings.