Researching digital choreography through a Creative Process
Sonic Organism is a multi-performer interactive performance for a participatory audience. It is the second examined artistic component of the research project on Digital Choreography. The artistic concept of this artwork was to explore the social aspects of an interactive improvisatory performance. The research methods were deductive with a mixed method approach; hence, the process was aimed at generating knowledge through the practice of making such a performance.
Sonic Organism
Premiere 5.6.2024. at Uniarts Theatre Academy 5.-8.6.2024
Public participatory workshops during creative process 25.4. - 6.5. 2024 in the same location.
The Creative Team:
Choreography and Concept: Hanna Pajala-Assefa
Data organisation design: Aleksandar Koruga (Aalto University)
Sound Design: Janne Storm
Visual design: Tomi Paijo
The artwork is a participatory interactive performance for a group of 3-12 audience members. The artwork is framed as an improvisatory, digitally extended, participatory performance. The audience is encouraged to explore the interactive space through their movement and to attune to the sonic and visual real-time feedback in the space. The participants' movements are tracked through optical motion capture and mapped to launch and conduct the sonic and visual materials of the performance. The real-time movement sonification and responsive visual scenography create a feedback loop of the audience's bodily behaviour for them to experience, giving them expressive agency over the material content - hence, turning them performers as well as perceivers. This experiencer's double role and the performance environment's digital relational responsive nature are the artwork’s key choreographic concept and the premise for the design of the interactive system, which enables the unfolding of each performance for and by its participants.
The compositional frameworks of interactivity are embedded in three successive scenes, the scope of which is expanded following the compositional elements of movement in space-time within the body kinesphere, the relationality of the moving objects, and open-ended collective composition. The artwork's conceptual foundation is predicated on the fostering of emergent choreographic activity, which is grounded in the increasingly intricate and evolving virtual potentials of the agents. These agents are engaged in the improvisation of the performance in which they are involved. The material-mattering and compositional properties are revealed to the performing community through their corporeal activity, which is characterised by playful experimentation and sensitive listening.
Via this artwork, the research aims to provide a detailed investigation of the knowledge production in the practice of digital choreography. That is to elaborate via diagrams and conceptual visualisations on ways in which the choreographic concepts are profoundly and conceptually linked with the computational system that governs the interactive properties of mattering. It also explicates how the thereby constituted choreographic system allows the posthuman performative phenomena and the emergent choreography to appear in the event of the intra-active performance.