Shadow Dance Performance Project, Cucuma Festival, August 2011, 8’38 min.
This awesome performance is one of the first art works misusing Kinect v01 for interactive dance.
Another shadow dance performance created for the Cucuma Open Air. The story is about a marionette becoming a human and searching for the sense of life. On her journey she comes across the ocean and deep underwater world, playfully she collects experiences as a girl, but also fights against dark creatures before finding the peaceful mean. In addition to the performer’s shadows, we used different analog effects and digital animations for creating the story. Two scences are interactive including motion tracking via camera-cased depth-sensing.
For this project I was mainly in charge for creating the visuals, setting up the technologies on stage, developing the story, and supporting the choreographic work. Since the Microsoft Kinect Sensor has been released in the end of 2010, and first art projects used this cheap interactive technology, I wanted to try this for our upcoming performance project in 2012, too. I was already familiar with Processing at that time but had no clue how to program from scratch with the C family in order to get access to the Kinect. After an elaborated web research and thanks to the open source community, I was finally able to get the raw depth information from the device and to prepare my own simple tracking software with openFramworks. Based on the OSC protocol I sent the pre-processed motion data to the Processing sketch that runs the show and contains two interactive scences where the performers directly influence the projections through their movements.
Premiere _ Cucuma Festival, August 20th, 2011.
Performers _ Claudia Kühn, Michaela Honauer, Susan Kinsch, Evelyn Singer
Music _ dwig