The Movement is a digital performance tool that supports students’ creative storytelling process. One's location in space controls the appearance of media on an audio-visual backdrop in real time.
THE MOVEMENT
Components
The digital performance tool is made up of two networked components:
1) Placement Tools
First, students use a computer application to assemble media on a digital canvas. This application, built with Processing, saves images, videos or audio in four scenes. These scenes comprise an audio-visual backdrop projected onto the performance space. Within the application, media placed on the canvas are assigned triggers that play or display media during a live performance. There are nine triggers in all, arranged as a three-by-three grid of squares. These square triggers are mapped to the physical performance space, and when the space is occupied on stage, the associated media is projected and played. When vacated, the media disappears.
2) Activation Tools
The second component of the system is a Kinect sensor pointed toward the student performers. It scans for movement on stage, and it constantly communicates with the Processing application which holds media information for each scene. When the Kinect's infrared camera detects that a media-mapped space is occupied, it sends a signal to a separate computer application. This application (written in openFrameworks) projects the media associated with that spatial trigger. If the Kinect is disconnected completely, keyboard commands via the Processing application simulate occupation in space to activate media.
Process
Collaborative Approach
The performance tool emerged over a yearlong series of talks between members of the Digital World & Image Group at Georgia Tech, The Atlanta School, and the Woodruff Arts Center's Young Audiences program. It was envisioned as an additional means of discovery to integrate into the middle school's curriculum on the Civil Rights movement. Being from Atlanta and just minutes from the historic locations at the center of their studies, the students immersed themselves in activities to widen the scope of their understanding. The Atlanta School encourages educational discovery through creative expression, so students produced stop-motion animations, wood cuts, dioramas and other works reflecting their personal reactions to the movement. These works were collected, documented and projected on stage during their final performance.
Creative Expression
The students' curriculum about civil rights culminated in a year-end performance that explored themes of boundaries and polarities. In the months leading up to the event, students studied movement under artist Nicole Livieratos through the Woodruff Arts Center Young Audience's program. The digital addition to this performance provided a narrative background, foregrounded by students' movement through spaces, pathways and around each other. When students' presence triggered media to appear, these overlays imbued pathways and objects with symbolic and historical meaning.
Arcs of Experience
The combination of organizational and visual tools enabled students to author performance arcs in different but complimentary ways. Through gestural cues, a canvas documenting their intellectual and creative pursuits unfurled, imparting to audiences a sensory engagement with students' expressive reactions to the civil rights movement. The students enhanced their own learning experience by occupying a environment of their design and reimagining how historic relations might be. The project offers an immersive opportunity to engage the mind and the senses through planning and performance.
