9B Interactivity and Improvisation
(continued)
Improvised elements from different performance art disciplines can strenghten the artistic audio-visual-movement-theatrical connection created by technology. The still existing imperfections of the technology created by an imperfect and noisy dataflow of computers can trigger an unintended sound response from the computer and these imperfections necessitates a capability to improvise from the involved artists. This can ofcourse also create a spontaneity that keeps the audience’s attention because it presents interactivity with an unexpected factor. Joel Ryan explores this ‘innovation by spontaneity’ further in his writing:
The real time artist may be forced to compromise technically but always has the option to resolve an unsatisfactory computer part simply by playing a little more in the right place. As we can learn from the past, each newly designed instrument can deliver a new sort of music (Ryan 1992:2.
On the other hand Andy Clark (2003) argues below that we have to limit some elements of this ‘discontrol’ when working with movement artists who are not necessarily sound artists. It is easier to use the system intuitively when the result is more predictable and to be able to learn the responses of an interactive set-up by knowing what result a performer gets from a certain movement or gesture. He also stresses the limitations of a technology that is often too ‘closed’ as we can read below:
Dancers see problems in working with interactive systems that don't deal with higher level concepts such as shape, position, velocity or displacement in space. Some of these concepts (shape) must be used within these systems, but are not exposed to the user in a meaningful way, while others (displacement) can be extracted from the information we have, but are not stand-alone trigger values (like velocity, for example, tends to be in these systems). On the more general issue of how much the tools we have influence our choreography, clearly everything we use (lighting, costume, music, space, etc) will force us to make choices, but I feel that because the tools that we use are so ‘closed’ and lack flexibility and power, they impose very tight and very firm limits. This is particularly problematic given that a work that uses computer technology is labelled and categorised in a way that one which uses a certain type of lighting, costume or music is not (Clark 2003).
It seems we have to pay a thorough attention to the translation between the computer data and the resulting artform, i.e. ‘mapping’. Disregarding the fact that the system can be either reliable or unprecise it should still provide an environment where the (robotics / movement) performer is able to experiment with different choreographies and choices to trigger the gestural sensors to compose the sound parameters.
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