Dance Hack Day (5th event)
I attended the second annual Dance Hacker Day 2015. The event took place off Market street in the downtown area of San Francisco. The building that housed the event was very strange, the entrance on ground level led to stairs both up and down. One way lead to the third floor, where there was a large dance floor with several projectors, and the second lead underground were there was a smaller dance floor surrounded by mirrors. Strangely, the on ground level where the entrance is, if you simply go straight ahead and not take the stairs up or down, you will end up in the kitchen of a Burger King. Its interesting the disconnectedness of building in San Francisco and how there is always space below and above them.
The event consisted of integrating new technology/coding and dance/performance art. Thought the entire day starting at 9am coders and artist gathered to create some new hybrid of technology and art. At 8pm they presented the results of the days work. There were so many different adaptations of these two worlds meeting that I will go one by one along with its image.
The image above is of a dancer that moved in circles, but attached to her waist were sensors that digitized her spinning on the screen above.
The image above is that of a 90′s hip hop dancer that through the use of the Microsoft Kinect ( a motion sensing input device) coders where able to project his movements on the wall. The interesting aspect of this performance is that although this was displayed on a flat surface the Kinect was able to differentiate between depth and showed the overlapping of the arms on the torso as red, creating this color coded dept on screen.
Through the use of light sensors and lights, two artist were able to create these amazing dancing lights.
Similar to the the projection above these artist also use the kinect but decided to play with the limits of the sensor, and would move out of its range and disappear from the screen.
I really did not fully understand this projection above, but I believe they were trying to visualize the internet, or at least visually follow some of its trends.
The image above and below were part of am amazingly simple project. This project was simple because the ideas is quite simple but but works very well. It consists of using a 360 camera and projecting it on the inside of a paper lamp, allowing the 360 surface of the lamp to create the perfect surface to display the 360 image. Technically, I’m not sure how they did it, but I’m glad they showed that this is possible.
