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Dance and Technology

besanradwan's picture

Hello everyone!

So, one thing I love more than ANYTHING is when my classes overlap, and that happened to me today with my Computer Science class and this Education class. We had a speaker come in today and talk to us about incorporating dance and technology. Somehow, I managed to bring up Clark's cyborg reading and it fueled part of the discussion about how people "felt" about technology beign incorporated into their bodies and movement. The answer in short is apparently dancers LOVE it! They feel it enhances their capabilites.

I just wanted to share that! 

Comments

leamirella's picture

I'd love to learn more!

This reminded me a lot of this presentation that I did as a freshman. The audio is really bad and you can't see the screen too well but what it shows is me moving in an out of the screen. (Start at around 3:00 minutes)

But I'm interested in how you wrote that it "enhances" the dancer's capabilities. How so? As a former (and struggling to get back into it...) ballerina, I found that my capabilities hinged on my ability to dig for deep mastery of the corporeal self. In terms of thinking about "extensions" of the skinbag (a la Clark), I can only think of perhaps the shoes and the barre that influenced my movements. (Also, come examination day, I wasn't even allowed a mirror -- I followed the RAD syllabus) Dance, to me at least, required just the body and the mind. I needed nothing else. To this day, ballet (and dance) has been a practice that brings my closer to my body and makes me realize the full extent of this physical self. Though I love technology, dancing with it just doesn't seem particularly appealing. In fact, I feel as though it would hamper my sense of dance and self. 

So I'm curious as to the details of the dance that the speaker was talking about. Maybe we could talk more?

alesnick's picture

dance/tech: how?

Thanks for sharing this exciting connection!  Would you describe how the speaker characterized the connections between dance and tech?  

You remind me of an intriguing Ted Talk by John Bohannon on replacing powerpoint presentations with danced ones: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal.html.

Serendip Visitor's picture

Well, the dancers move and

Well, the dancers move and they want the technology to reflect their dance moves, but they are unsure about how they want to go about that, so I am still waitign on the end result!