Dear Mjumbe (I see no name in your mail and I cannot give you a name different from your login. Please send all the informations about your software.) Your tool seems very interesting. I'd like to link answers to Antonio and to Richard Widgery to your tool. I'll be a bit slow, but I'll be back In any case I can start here: thoughts about what you are doing. If I believe in the proposition I did to the list I have to say (as I was calculating from an algporythm) that any software you can think of (at the moment) cannot compose a dance. It can compose a choreography, in the meaning that it will move limbe and body segments in space and time (close to Cunningham definition of dance according to Thecla Schiphporst). But if a gesture starts at the stage of perceptual categorization there's no way unless we are able (I'm sure we will do it in a far future) to make avatar simulate a perception with meaning assignement. I'm a bit fast here, but I said more in the past and I don't want to bother the list. As Iris said, "straight to the point". In any case I can answer to this if there are further questions. Antonio >I agree with you. You >may imagine however my example (two performances of the same piece, one >inspired and one not ...etc) in some - let's say - "invariant" context, to >try to investigate the subtleties I mentioned. Invariant context, I'm afraid, is more rare than gold. And even if you can find it the problem is that : since a gesture quality is DIRECTELY linked to perceptual categorization and meaning assignment perception will probably vary and gesture too. If the dancer that has to interpret the same choreography in time and he/she is really good, maybe he can come to a point to make his/her perception (and the qualities of his movement) vary only a little in order no to go too far from the interpretations the choreographer wants. So the context is important, but all the operations we create in order to vectorize and to give meaning to the environnment is far more important to me now. And we come to Richard If you disagree - I would ask WHY would you WANT a computer to produce a congruent.........harmony performance all by itself. Are you doing it because it is there to be done? Or are you doing it for personal artistic merits? If you fall into the first category I would like to ask where you think the boundaries of A.I. movement interaction should become a moral debate (please do not reply that Art & Morals should not be discussed together - unconstructive), and if you fall into the latter - could you please be more specific about you "product" or "presentation" that you wish to achieve. I don't disagree (we could discuss some technological issues like software environnment that you seem to be interested in, but I would like to link you to Mjumbe and Antonio in order to go on with the thread of language, if you don't see any inconvenient. In Palindrome's home page you can read the link "why do we bother?" Although I'm proud to say that I a Robert's friend and I have esteem for his work, I'm not a part of Palindrome and I can tell you why I bother, since you want to know. In my opinion, in contemporary art, there's something new since conceptual art (liked to Cage and, of course, to his spiritual father and chess teacher Marcel Duchamps) it's interactivity: the ability for the interpreter and/or the spectator to modify the content of the work. there's anothr way to say what is interactivity, the work of is the interface and not the content that the interface is leading you too. That's why I think mjumbe's software CAN be interesting tool for choreographical composition. To make it become dance you have to embody it in an esthetical project that will make redesign a choreographer's perception. Best regards >hello list, > >good points richard.... -- ___________ Armando
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