Second Digital Performance Study

In collaboration with Tisch dancer, Yachao Zhu, we set out to explore two new areas of technology unfamiliar to both of us – controlling the lights with dmx and using a kinnect for skeleton tracking. We decided to use falling rain as a general theme. We wanted to explore the juxtaposition of falling rain and our dancing bodies. Here is the Max Patch is execute all of these ideas:

First Patch – extremely messy!

One constraint of the piece was that the computer could only be touched once at the beginning of the piece and that was it. So I set up one toggle and had everything that happened throughout the piece be triggered by it. So the presentation patch that we used during the piece looked like this:

Much cleaner!

For the screen projections we played with skeleton tracking using the kinnect and a simple video of rain falling. As we sped up our movements, the rain would speed up and the rain would slow down as our dancing slowed down. Here’s a quick video of me demonstrating the skeleton tracking piece:

And here’s here the final performance:

Hope you enjoy 🙂 As always, feel free to leave comments and questions below!