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The previous post explored this phenomena, from the “core” movement space of the body in the camera frame through combinations of “created” spaces, up to a confrontation with the newest space, the live, three dimensional space of the virtual world (such as Second Life).

Here we stop and divert for a bit, because we encounter the other parameter of dance… time. All of the created spaces, up until the last, were created in video. The dance was recorded (fixed in time) on video tape, environments were captured on videotape, spatial environments were created in the computer and then variously fixed in time for combination with the dance movement. Then we come to the last spatial discovery, virtual worlds, where things are “live”.

Dancer’s have *always* been “standoff-ish” about video. On the first level, video means “equipment”, and dancers are profoundly *not* “equipment” people; their equipment is their body. However, (necessarily generalizing…) dancers are usually ready to use something for which they can find a good use, so video was early on adopted as a stand-in tool to record and learn new  movements. It is cheap, simple and fast. Nowadays, video is a familiar part of every dancer’s life.

But dancer’s don’t consider what’s shown on video as their “work”. Watching the video is not experiencing the “work” itself. Every dancer knows that video doesn’t really show the dance movement, but only the shapes and turns and travels that make it up (and often not even those very well). The “quality” of the movement… in some cases the “weight”, the “effort”, the ”execution”… these are usually lost. Dancers feel that watching their work on TV (video) is simply watching the image of their work, and not the dance art work itself.

Of course, if we look at performing arts in general in this light, there is nothing new here. Music and theater have each spawned their own derivative art forms (recorded music and movies), and such interesting pseudo-hybrids as “recorded live” music. But dance has not suceeded at this. Aside from the sparsely exposed “dance created for camera… videodance” (the subject of the previous post) and the occasional “Baryishnikov Recorded Live!” DVD, dance remains primarily a live art form.

Let’s look at another angle. Back in the 1970′s many modern dances experimented with the newly invented portable video equipment. Obviously, lots of recordings were made. But also very interesting, at least in concept, were those experiments attempted in which live video images, displayed on TV sets scattered around the stage, showed the images which the videographers were capturing live at that moment. The dancers on the stage were seen directly, in person, but also on the video screens.

I say “in concept” because, well, why would anyone look at the TV sets when they could simply watch the dancers themselves?  (Especially those ancient, fuzzy black and white monitors.) The choreographers were motivated to try experiments such as this because they enjoyed the juxtaposition… the spatial connection of dancers’ bodies moving in live space with displayed video images of the same dancers seen through the eyes of videographers. Many choreographers delighted in these kind of mental exercises (I participated in many such events).

The video result of those early experiments was very disappointing. But the concept is an intriguing one. Let’s remove from the concept the wire to the fuzzy old black and white TV, and imagine if we can a wire with a perfect transmission of what the videographer sees in her/his camera, in those *live* performances, to the recipient viewer.

A bit of “tech” here. All video cameras, unlike many still cameras, are sensors (which pick up the image) connected to screens (which display the image to the videographer). The “perfect wire” proposed in the last paragraph is just an extension of that screen in the camera to another screen somewhere else, which the “audience member” can see.

Using this “perfect wire” the viewer experiences what the videographer experiences, live, almost. “Almost” because while the audience member sees what the videographer sees, the audience member is a passive recipient. The videographer, on the other hand, is engaged with the dancer, with the effect of moving as the dancer moves, adjusting with every adjustment of the dancers position, at one with the dancer in “shaping the dance space” described in the previous post.

This becomes very interesting. We’ve posited an experience where the viewer is the passive recipient of the dancers’ motion in space, while the videographer, experiencing the *identical* image, is an active participant in the dancer’s expression, forming the space around them by the motion of the camera. And all of this is live; experiencing a living, breathing, sweating person moving  simultaneously to being seen. The only aspect of the experience blocked by the “perfect wire” is the smell of their sweat.

But… why of course! This describes exactly the experience of the audience member sitting in the live audience. The dancers move, on the stage before them, live, and the audience members sit passively watching them. The only real difference is probably that the viewer watching the videographer’s screen sees the dancer’s body much closer up than the audience member sitting in the audience. In every other way the experience is the same (I assume the perfect wire carries audio as well as video).

I can obviously speak regarding the experience of viewing the dancer as videographer. The experience is a powerful symbiotic participation in the body motion of the dancer… a voyeuristic merging with that motion. Depending on the nature of videographer’s response, the experience of the viewer (at the other end of the perfect wire) can be intensely powerful.

It’s very important to remember, at this point, that the concept is *not* of a “played back” dance art performance, but one which the viewer watches *live*. This is not one of the “live recordings” of the many ballet’s which can be collected on DVD. The closest my conceptual thought proposal comes to anything currently done is the “Live From Lincoln Center” performances often broadcast live on network television. But in those cases there is no real effort to engage the video camera with the moving bodies themselves in symbiotic “movement space creation”. Those “live broadcasts” are really more like sporting events, bringing the sights and sounds of the event to you live.

Well, we still have a stretch to travel before we get the dance fully transported into the virtual space of a virtual world, so there’s…. [more to come].

And then… hmmm… a thought. Is immersion in virtual reality really a significant world apart from creating dance for the video medium? Dare I even consider this a expansion of a theme?

I became involved with dance in 1972 when, taking a position in the CUNY system (City University of New York) teaching students to use the newly invented portable video equipment, one student turned out to be a serious modern dancer, and i was suddenly catapaulted into both performing arts and video.

As I said in an article in 1975 , pointing a video camera at dance, with the intention of conveying the art of the movement, creates a new “space”, and indeed a variation on the movement art: “videodance”. The dancer and videographer together, with their respective motions; the dancer initiating, the videographer responding; shape space out of the video ether. The space is an extension of the dancer’s movement, in a very literal and graphic way. The videographer participates in the dancer’s motion; the collaborative effort of the two people create the new movement creation.

Clearly, with videodance, space is created. The videographer, and later the viewer, experience that space as if through a window. As with a movie, if the art is effective, the viewer is absorbed; outside stimuli become forgotten, and the viewer is transported into the space itself.

The concept was formed in the abstraction of the “black box”, a standard theater environment where all spatial references are removed, and the audience sees only the performer as the sole visual element. An example of this is “Bone Dream“.  “Mother and Child“, created with Maureen Fleming, is another very successful example that’s been shown at festivals around the world.

But, creating a “movement space” led to a curious question. Maybe the space could be structured. While perhaps the core was that space created by the “initiator” (the dancer) and the “responder” (the videographer), maybe that core could be structured into a relationship with other “spaces”, either visual images or literal three dimensional spaces.

I began by collecting video footage of spaces that convey some depth… a beach, a path, natural spaces of all kinds… and combining the dance “movement space” with these “found spaces”. (Somewhat more complex examples are “Widening Gyre” and “Elayne“) I also found real life spaces and videotaped dancers moving within those spaces.  ( “Story“)

Hmmm… well. Space turns out to be interesting. Naturally one considers in what other ways can we shape space. Back in the late 1980′s, in what was for the PC computer world still a “DOS” environment, several new programs surfaced.

Microsoft Flight Sim shaped space, and the user could fly airplanes in that space. Using the primitive technique of recording the computer screen with a video camera, I captured the flying space of an airplane in Flight Sim (fortunately, the cockpit was removeable), and then combined the dance movement with the Flight Sim space.

Another *early* DOS program was Vistapro. This too was a “world-builder”… different than Flight Sim in that you could shape your own hills and valleys. But, soon after this, came Animatek “World Builder” (version 0.9 then, and now available as version 4). And suddenly I had the opportunity to shape a world in detail, the hills, valleys, trees, sky and sun. I explored combining the dancer’s movement space with the three dimensional created space from Worldbuilder. (“Axis Mundi“)

You’ll note a small Greek church in Axis Mundi. This is an import from 3D Studio Max, again in its DOS versions when I first learned it. Worldbuilder enabled the creation of “outside, natural spaces”… the fractal geometry of the real natural world. But 3D Studio Max enabled the creation of inside spaces… in this case the inside and outside of a church. I explored this most elaborately in “Sorrows” which combines all the kinds of spaces discussed here… black box, real world footage, WorldBuilder and 3D Studio Max spaces.

Well… by the early 2000′s I had explored all the spaces that I could devise. What qualities characterized all these experiments?

The essential element is video. The movement, and the spaces structured around it, were “captured” on tape, which later became files of course. But the essential quality is that they are captured; that unlike the live performance in which the “initiator” and the “recipient” share the same “time space”, with video the event is captured, the movement event is frozen; no matter how often the video is “played” the experience is identical, pixel for pixel, and audio bit by audio bit. Like watching a well known movie, the experience becomes familiar. It is no longer “at the moment”, such as what the videographer experiences when immersed in the capture of the movement.

A diversion here. In 2001 Microsoft released Train Simulator, on the premise that the train fans wanted into the fun that the airplane fans had been having for so many years with Flight Simulator. Train fans like myself became instantly absorbed, and the volume of user generated content swamped the forums within months of its release. An instant community was born.

Apart from my tiny experiments with the DOS Flight Sim in the late 80′s, I’d never before worked within a live, interactive, three dimensional space, and I was completely hooked. Train Sim was, and is, a severely limited space, and not at all one that could be exploited for the movement arts. But it does incorporate the ability to create and shape one’s own naturalistic world, and embue it with stuuningly beautiful qualities of land, water, sky and weather, as well as vegatation and buildings. I became an expert in Train Sim weather and water systems, and contributed a very successful freeware product called Kosmos.

Train Sim is not captured experience, but, like a video game, it’s live. For years I’d observed younger relatives playing videogames, and I became particularly excited when videogames became MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games… Everquest, World of Warcraft). But games were depressingly structured. My interest was personal creativity, especially the motion of the body.

In November 2004 I became aware of Second Life, and within hours had inserted myself there. As many folks know, I’ve been completely absorbed ever since.

Second Life is a totally live environment. Only the “machinimists” are doing what I used to do, capturing live time events and preserving them, fixing them in time (I’ve done a few, of course, for clients). But world creation, as in WorldBuilder, is infinitely capable, and in this case I, in the form of my avatar, can walk thru it, also in real, live time. The buildings I did in 3D Studio Max, these too can be created and experienced, all live. The palette for creating space has exploded. The possibilities are infinitely greater  than the options I faced 20 years ago.

So, we come back to dance. Yes… one could use Second Life for a substitute WorldBuilder/3D Studio Max space shaper, and then record x minutes of that space, combine it (“share its space”) with x minutes of recorded human movement art, and call it the more perfect “videodance”. But… why? Why go back to fixing something in time for playback later? What about thinking of enabling that exhilirating experience of the videographer’s  participation” in the experience of movement *with* the movement artist?

(more soon)…

Beta Technologies will continue. As Web 3.0/VirtualKosmos takes form and emerges from the current flat internet, Beta Technologies will thrive.

But at this time Beta Technologies is a frontier business at the wild western boundaries of global culture. A labor of love; an investment in the future. But today, too, must be provided for, so I confront a change of direction.

It’s time for a new venture to which my energies will be devoted. It leads off like this:

Jeffrey C Bush
non profit finance and administration
people management
business and technology management
virtual world content development
Goals
Administration and creative output in arts and business related organizations of all kinds, management of creative personnel, computer business systems and media technology. To engage in the forward edge of cultural communications, such as the new wave of attention to virtual worlds.

Far from being “escapist”, virtual reality space is a marker on the path of human evolution.

In Second Life reach me via IM to Jeff Brooks.

In Real Life I go by the name Jeff Bush.

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