 incredibly instrumental, pedagogically going around the world, leading workshops. And in terms of the development of the technology itself, since Mark has created Isadora, which many of you are familiar with, some of you may have worked with, but if not, you all will have very soon. All right, so thank you very much, Mark and Don. Can I just point out a funny thing that we noticed at lunch, which is that Mark and I, as David just said, have been touching these digital materials for like 30 years, right? So we feel a little prehistoric, and I wore a shirt with dinosaurs on it. I just think that's kind of funny. I was the one who noticed it. She didn't notice. It was a subliminal thing. But we were actually, Don and I were talking about why are we here? Because in fact, the bulk of what we have done is in the past, right? We started, actually you'll see even before 1994, we're going to start in 1989, looking back at some of our work. And we're going to take a little survey of what we did and what came up along the way. But even though we haven't really made a major work together since 2015, what we're going to try and do is look at what happened in our process and our discoveries along the way, because I think that some of the ways in which we were looking at things still apply to us today. And they led us to a point where, you know, the thing is, even if we haven't made a piece together in three years, we haven't stopped thinking about it. And hopefully we can shed some light on some of the topics that we've been talking about, yeah? Well, I just wanted to start with even pre-1989, which is when Mark and I were students at CalArts, and we were in a composition class for choreographers and composers, and we were randomly paired to work on an exercise together, literally. Just you and you go make, and the rest came. So be careful who you get randomly paired with at a conference. They could be lifelong collaborators. And I also want to mention my absolute favorite quote of all times, which has kind of governed my thinking about my art making, and that is by the awesome baseball player and quotation Yogi Berra, who said, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Because the thing is, we come to you as practitioners. The theories, and we do have some, and we published a handful of papers here and there. I'm sure Don will be publishing more now that he's at USC. But really, it was about making artworks, yeah? And that's where what our knowledge comes from is being in the trenches, doing this work, making the work, showing it to a public, hearing the responses, as well as the things that David alluded to as teaching people, because when we began this, you know, worldwide, I would say in 1994, there were maybe 24, 2 dozen people that were really into this topic, and we happened to be two of them. Well, I just wanted to echo that by saying we did our research on stage in front of live audiences, which is a terrifying place to do your research, but you really find out about what it is, and what you believe in, and what it means to you in that context. So, we'll start here, hopefully it'll behave, and we're fine. Oh, can we do that like that? It's my job, I have to. I don't know like that. What? Isn't this your brain on interacting with the lights? Let's try, I don't know, let's try projection mode. What's that like? I think that's it. Yeah. So, I'm going to try and sum up our entire 25 years, or nearly 30, I guess, in a tiny mini performance, which I will do for you. With sensors on our bodies, or in the space. But, you know, it's weird looking at this. You know, we're going to start, talk, we're going to look back at this history. It's, and I think for some of you it's easier to imagine, but I know for all of your students as pedagogues, to get an 18-year-old to imagine that there was no internet, even today in your talk, I was like, oh, YouTube was 2005. I didn't remember that. I thought it was kind of always there. Forever. And so, we have to sort of put ourselves in that perspective, but just the notion that using a sensory device could manipulate media. We came into this work, into this time of the beginnings of digital media, when everything was fixed, right? You had CDs, or you had maybe a VHS videotape, and essentially these media were completely fixed, and suddenly it became possible around the time we were at CalArts together that you could find ways to sense movement and turn them into something else. And I guess, just to add to that story at the beginning, well, no, I'll tell that when we do the next thing, so go ahead. No, I just wanted to say that the kind of statement that came out of that realization for us was that we were thinking about what it's like to be a dancer and choreographer and have the opportunity to work with like an orchestra, a set of live musicians with a fantastic sensor at the front, the conductor, right? And that if you had the opportunity to have liveness in the sound and visuals that were accompanying the liveness on stage, wouldn't that be wonderful? So our thing was to turn, to bring dead media, fixed dead media, to life using the chaos of this thing. But just the notion that you could do that, that was actually new in the times that we could do it. So let's start, oh yeah, that's our thing, right? That's what we're called. Some people often want to know what our name means. Do you want to know if anyone cares? Troika, we are a mixture of dance, theater, media, three. Troika, Russian for three. Also in the early 90s we tried to call ourselves slash artists because all artists we were meeting at that time were like, I'm a choreographer, slash poet, slash guitar player, slash gamer, whatever. The slash was the unifying part of that. And you left out the ranch part was because we were on a residency with the video artist, Woody Vasilka, who some of you may know as work, very famous video artist from the 70s, and we were drinking vodka and he just declared that everything in the southwest should be a ranch. It should be the Vasilka ranch and we just took that and the Troika idea and we put it together. So that's where it came from. But the ranch also means the collaborative way in which we make our work. Everybody works on it together. So this is the very beginning. Yep. And so aside from my incredible haircut, I've got a Max Plus 512k, you know, and on stage is... Yeah, that's me in the middle. Yeah, that's Dawn in the middle. And so I invented this device and let me tell you the pre-story. So I was deeply influenced and forever grateful to my mentor and teacher who was an electronic composer at Cal Arts called Morton Zabotnik. I was his assistant after school. I was his assistant for seven years. And I wouldn't be anything without him. But it's also apocryphal what happened because I was working for him writing code for a piece he was making and he wanted to have a digital conductor so he could have his electronic music follow the live orchestra. There was a sensor at the time brand new in 1986 called the Airdrum. It looked like a clave. It was about that big around and about that long and it sensed down, up, left, right, twist, right and twist, left. And he used that using the software that I helped him make so that the motions of the conductor would be measured, the tempo of that would be sent into a hardware sequencer and the electronic music would accompany the live performance. So I did that with him as his assistant but I had fallen in love with dance going to Cal Arts. I came from Nebraska. We don't have contemporary dance there. I'd never seen it before. And I saw it and it really honestly, it changed me somehow. It was just to me the most incredible thing, the way that these people could use their bodies to express themselves and I just said, I just want to write music for that. But when more did this piece, I thought we should have an Airdrum but it should be on the bodies of the dancer. We should have a sensor like that that they can be the ones that control the creation of music. So going out to the local radio shack and hacking radio control car transmitters, tearing them apart, I made these sensors so at that point each dancer had a sensor with their arm and their elbow that measured the rotation of that limb, sent the data wirelessly because that was obviously important with the dancers to this ancient setup here where they were able to produce music. Now, at the time, we were beyond thrilled but all we did was go kong, kong, kink. I mean, it really wasn't much, right? You couldn't play video on a... That couldn't play video yet, so there was none of that. It really couldn't even play samples. You had to have an external sampler. By the way, I don't want to talk too much about this. It's kind of like your grandpa saying you had to go uphill both ways, right? But it is important. What we're describing to is an era that came and went, the dance and technology era. And part of the reason it existed, we were talking about this at dinner last night, was because in those times you needed to form a community to do it because everybody had to make all this stuff themselves. There was no existing tools to do any of this. And so we helped each other by sharing knowledge and it came up because, well, anyway, yeah, we did that. So we made this piece and really it was very simple what we did but it launched what would become, as you have always said, it launched what would become Troika Ranch. We worked with a filmmaker, an actor, a theater director, a set designer, a costume designer, Don and I, another choreographer because Cal Arts was an incredible champion of, yeah, of intermediate work. And that launched the entire process of the rest of our career, right? Anything else to say about that moment? Not yet. So we didn't really start Troika Ranch together yet. It was like, you know, we were still checking it out. We started making some performances in Los Angeles in 1991. But the big moment for us came. We continued with the MIDI dancer and I refined it and I made now not one made of radio control car transmitters but of specialized hardware that was much smaller, much more reliable and offered the possibility for eight sensors. And I actually will say one thing. This initial MIDI dancer, which actually was two sensors, one on the elbow, one on the knee of each dancer, was made out of a metal bar with a little metal piece of wire that had to be affixed to your skin somehow and not rip all the hair off your arm and allow you to move your arm. So there was a lot of R&D going on with us. Like how do you attach it? We had little metal like tubes that we taped to our arms and it was really just this motion that it was sensing. I was talking earlier today about the limitations of sensors. But already at that moment I started to recognize the choreography that I had to do to make that sensor activate. So all my choreography was very... But it's also brings up... I mean, you know, we talked about the reduction of this. This is like so basic. It barely measures anything, right? But it seemed important. I mean, the fact that we could pull it off felt important to us as young students. But it's also interesting about this kind of reduction. It's also about how you deal with it, right? So in fact, a light switch on the wall is a sensor. So if I wanted to turn the lights off and I walk over and I do that and they turn off, you don't think about it, right? But if I go to that wall sensor and I'm like... and I turn that into a performative moment where I address it and I have an interaction and a relationship to it, now that sensor somehow seems more important than it did. It's about how you work with it. You fill in a lot. You fill in for what the sensor doesn't sense. But that's a flaw, too, and we'll come back to that. All right, let's leave that and go on. So now we jump into that five years. And this was an important moment for us because I think this was the moment making this piece was the thing where people got to know us somehow. And this is a piece called In Plane. And maybe you want to describe what was going on in our head a little bit with that or do you want me to do that? So my memory is that I wanted to make choreography that was hyper-physical, that was really about being as physical as I could be. Something about that was in conflict with the machines and this kind of rigidity that I was feeling from the previous MIDI Dancer. And we were having this discussion, I guess, socially at that time about your doppelganger or your video or your online, which was online, was just coming online for most of us in 1994. And the kind of seductive nature of that creature, that video body and this light body that could do all this magic, like stop in midair and levitate or go extreme slow motion or jump back and forth in time with an edit, which we fell in love with and used in lots of our work. So there was this kind of question of competition, I think, between the power of the sweating, breathing, live body and the ethereal, sexy, amazing, magic light body, video body. But even leading up to that, I think, I knew someone who had an alter ego. It was a male who presented online as a female, right? That was brand new in 1994, the fact that you could have an alternate person that you could represent yourself in a way that maybe wasn't comfortable in your normal social circles but was comfortable because you had an anonymous online presence. So already there's a question about who are we? What does this technology do in terms of what we're doing? I mean, that's an empowering thing. For that person, it was an empowering thing to be able to represent in that way. But it's also, obviously, we can think of situations where that can be used for ill, as we know from recent history, right? So, you know, it's like that was a question that was coming up for us, too. I mean, the difference between this body... The corporeal. And the real, like you've seen. Is there a difference or what are the gradations of difference between, right? So those are the things that are running through our mind. So I want to show you the beginning of this piece in plain. This is near the very beginning. And then I want to break it down for you because some of the techniques that we were using to work with this and in terms of sensing I think are interesting because some of the marks aren't really thought about so much today. Just one small other thing about the R&D and the wearing of the thing on the body, which I was like the R&D department because I had to wear the thing. So I was able to get hold of, and maybe he'll talk about this, these flexion sensors that were more flexible than the just straight potentiometers we were using previously. So there was a little more flexibility in those and we had eight of them and he made the pack much smaller so that I could actually roll around on the floor and not break a spine. Okay, so let's try... I guess it's cinema mode. Yeah. It's doing something that actually seemed... for me was quite a challenge at the time. It was looking for particular postures of the body and each posture when it matched would trigger the next sound in the sequence, right? So it was actually doing a kind of score following. This comes directly out of my work with Morton Sabatnik. He was doing this kind of technique of score following, looking for combinations of simultaneous events to move the score along. That was one of the techniques that he used all the time and I inherited from him. So in this first part, the sounds that you're hearing are triggered by reaching those postures. In fact, let me just do it one more time so you can see those. It's the moment where, again, putting ourselves back in 1994 is really different because Dawn knew that if she went like this, it could be a millisecond or it could be a day, but as long as she stood there and waited until she did both elbows bending and both knees bending and both of them going straight again, nothing was going to happen. And that meant that as a performer, because Dawn is an incredible performer, she had danced with Bella Lewicki, she had this incredible sense of being a performer, she could feel herself, she could feel the audience, the relationship between the two and time that moment exactly as she wished and move on to the next thing, right? And that's the opportunity that, at the time, and I'll come back to this, we thought choreography would change forever. Honestly, I think we really truly believe that. But I don't think it happened, but we'll come back to why. But in any case, it did give her the power to make those decisions. So now she's in this thing and you'll see she's going to bend both elbows and both knees and straighten them and the next thing will happen. The sound comes and the video comes. Now again, computers can't play video yet. This is grandpa moment. We were using a laser disc player because it could be randomly addressed. You could tell it to go to any frame you wanted to on the laser disc, play forward or backward at multiple varying speeds. So I'm sending messages to that thing to tell it to play clips from this pre-recorded material that we have. The next thing it's going to look for is for it to straighten her arms and pull them back. Can you hear the sound? But importantly, it doesn't just make that sound, it moves into part two and the entire function of the sensor changes to something that was a problem really because, and I think even still could be a problem, although people are more familiar now, but the notion that an instrument could change its function from moment to moment was absolutely unfamiliar to any audience. And so what that meant is is that without some kind of explanation they wouldn't understand that this was live, which was a really interesting problem to deal with. We put stuff in our early programs explaining how the technology worked and people would come to us after pieces saying, you know, I was really watching for this, that or the other thing to work, but I didn't see it work and we realized they were looking at the wrong thing. They weren't looking at the piece any longer. I guess I would just say that, yeah, that was a really important moment of who is it most important for these interactive systems? At that moment, at least, and maybe even still for me, the performer who needs to know how it functions and how it plays, whether the audience knows or not became less important to me certainly over time. What was important is that the performer could act in their liveness as much as they could, and they performed differently. They meaning myself, but then other dancers along the way. You perform differently when you know that the systems are waiting for you. You're in charge. Your performance is leading the way. Well, and I think we stopped by already stopped putting those notes in the program. We just let it be. We tried to expose the idea if we could in this moment. But in the end, it's like a jazz performance. If you go to see a jazz piece and you actually don't understand the jazz form, those musicians playing, if they're good musicians, can still make incredible music even if you don't know it's improvised. But if you happen to understand what jazz is and you know that it's improvised, then that adds a dimension to what you're seeing. What was our idea was that the dancers know they're the ones who can take advantage of this, and if the audience is part of the picture, that's only going to enhance their interest in maybe what's going on. And then in this last section, very simple, I had written an eight part counterpoint. By the way, she was the dancer. I was trained as a composer actually. That's my actual training. All the music in the Troika Ranch pieces was my composition. But I'd written an eight part counterpoint for machine sounds. It's a percussion piece for eight pieces of eight lines and different sounds. So I wrote that as a thing. It's just playing all the time. It lasts I don't know, I had a minute and a half of material. I am an eight knobbed volume control. Right. I can't sing it. But the point is that it was interesting because that also I feel like was a new concept was the composer was not the final say of what was going to happen. I handed that material to a dancer and said, now you are the final arbiter of my musical composition. She was making those decisions and every night that she did it, a different set of rhythms and a different set of the different sounds would be emphasized depending on what part of her body she moved. But it's important to say that their volume thing is happening. But then she could go on all eight limbs by doing a quick motion. Doing like this did nothing. But a sharp motion would make an extra sound that she could throw in. I was using for this, by the way. Now I will turn the lights out again. Here is later in the piece when we are letting everything rip. One thing that is interesting to point out, not every sound that you are hearing was made by Dawn. That was a debate in our community. We had some really intense debates with some people whose view was everything has to come from the performer otherwise it was somehow a bit impure. Whereas my feeling was that I didn't want to be limited musically anyway by only having Dawn. Because in fact there was a lot of limitations in the amount of stuff she could produce and make an interesting dance piece. We will come to that in a moment. So my idea was in Baroque music we have an ostinato. And then you play on top of it right. She is the lead. She is playing the melody if you will on top of the ostinato that I have provided a kind of bed of sound that can appear with her and you will be hearing that happening in the next section. But it is also looking at all of her movement and that is leading to the control of the video behind her as well. Because it kind of also sums up what we were dealing with in this piece. You have got all this machine stuff. You have got this body jumping around doing the things Dawn said. Jumping up into air freezing. Going in fast motion. Having edits. Something that a body can't do. And real Dawn who by the end of this piece is drenched in sweat. Because it is a super physical piece as you can see. But in this moment you have this kind of release and suddenly that red light comes on and you hear the sound of human breath. And it is that contrast between these sounds of machines, this mechanical thing and this other side. That is what we were looking at in this particular piece. And in the end it was a kind of like it was kind of a competition in the end about who has the most power here. Which is the most powerful the video that can move around and do these amazing things. Or Dawn who when she turns her actual sweat is going out into the audience because you see her fighting this effort to keep up with the world that's around her. It was in fact a competition and I also just wanted to point out if anybody noticed a golden square show up on the video projection we did that intentionally because most of the time the video in this piece is life size so perhaps you could confuse it as a me, right? We're same size, same shape. Any time I broke the frame we put a golden rectangle on there to say ha ha it's not real it's not now, it's not live, it's her it's this other person that can do things I can't do. So we wanted to emphasize that and the end of the piece I also we called the piece in plain because as sexy as she is that video girl she's stuck on the back wall and she can't leave and at the end of this piece I run and jump over the track that was also being controlled horizontally and I do this kind of yeah one of those and I win I win the game. I don't know. But there were several important things that came out of that and we'll take a second to talk about that because it started leading us into really thinking about what in the hell are we doing with this stuff I mean part of it was just that we could but now we started to really consider it I think and so one thing is that again with this video you see this part it's normally it's her body but in that after that moment of like the red video and you hear the sounds of breath and she runs where she's like tiny in the frame all the way until it's a close up that's something you can never do as a live performer that's only something you can do with a camera right where you can go from being a tiny being to a full frame video like that so we're starting to see this idea but also the fact that we were dealing with a life-sized creature same as Dawn on the back screen that actually is really important and we didn't really realize it until a later piece but. The massive thing came out of the end of in-plane for a discussion for Mark and I that led us into a whole process for another ten years which was and this might have came up yesterday a little bit my question was could we make a work a dance work that uses complex sophisticated technology but isn't about the use of complex sophisticated technology and we decided to find out meaning we started to invent stories imagine narratives as I call them human stories that embedded in the story was always the relationship between humans and their technology and it was neutral at times dystopian utopian etc but it was always embedded but it wasn't the main story usually the main story was something about a human experience or human question but this is the this is one of the outcomes of this time because this little chart came shortly thereafter projection sorry can you all see that would you like to describe it or do you want me to oh it's going to take both of us you start well so I'm the body right I'm inside the suit and I'm coping with it and figuring out how to make something that's both interesting choreographically and interesting sonically and later visually with the media that I'm manipulating and when you watch let's say a violin player right play they might inflect in their body but you're not generally looking at their fingers on the fret for meaning about the piece the music the sonic experience is the meaning of the piece right or the whatever the affect maybe I know but here I am wearing this instrument where I have to activate it by making certain configurations and also choreograph in a way that I think is appropriate for the piece I'm making we started thinking about this I had a teacher at CalArts talk a lot about actually too much about continuums but these are some continuums and they actually I feel like they still hold up 15 40 years later whatever it is so the first one that Dawn is talking about here is the line of physicality between dancer and musician that's a great example for this too because so CalArts had a deal with Yamaha the big music manufacturer they would come around their guys would come around and check us out and see what we were doing and that was when I was a student I invented the MIDI Dancer well a year later after visiting us they patented the MIDI Dancer they patented my device essentially which as a student with no money it's not like I have a lawyer I can't fight them so it was pretty bummed out but then about a year after that it was called the Muburi suit M-I-B-U-R-I and they brought it to Los Angeles for a demonstration so of course like I wanted to go because I wanted to see and I absolutely swear to you there was a young a woman in their suit which had the sensors actually built into the costume they had more money for R&D than they did yeah and this is exactly what she did she stood there and she went D-D-D-D-D-D-D D-D-D-D D-D-D-D-D I absolutely swear that's what she did and but that was interesting though Yaha makes keyboards they couldn't see past the fact that this was just a keyboard that they couldn't see what it actually was in fact but it's a perfect example because here the choreography there was a choreography she moved for us but it was totally dictated by producing the right notes right so she's over here this person during the demonstration she is moving her body to satisfy the needs of the musical composition of production of sound and then over here now she could have just done like whatever and a lot of stuff would have come out but maybe Yaha wouldn't consider it music I probably would have considered it music but then maybe she's a dancer but we lose some control over the sonic part of it because it can't... we're going to point out with this diagram you can't be both you can end up deciding I'm going to be a bit over here for a while like I'm going to move my wrist to make those breath sounds because those breath sounds are really important but then I'm going to slide it over here and I'm going to start dancing on the ground and going crazy and lots of notes are going to come out and that's fine so thinking about this continuum is what we started thinking about right? and then the other, the one from top to bottom is the notion of a composed work to an improvised work and in-plane is an interesting example because in-plane comes out of the kind of paradigm of score following which is a time-based timeline and this section is a section then we cross into another section across into another section it was composed in time that way and there were segments of improvisation and so I realized though because I performed in-plane for a decade a lot and I got into this funky habit of just doing it the same every single time and I was struck by that I think somebody pointed out to me at a conference like 10 years after its birth that I was still doing it how they had seen it done before and I thought, oh man, okay but it's the same notion of this interactivity which I do this because we like to think of it as reactivity why would you do why would it be fully composed where is the element of liveness and surprise and playability as we were talking about earlier but also again it's good to think of the absolute extremes of this the absolute limit of composed is basically you play a CD or play a digital file on your computer at the atomic level yes, some electrons are not the same as they were the last time but basically on the perceivable level it's absolutely the same every time down here I improvised if I pick up this lectern I can start playing it like I can start improvising with this as a musical instrument I can do that and it actually offers me some opportunities to do that and I can kind of go let my imagination run wild and go crazy I've got the object to deal with I've got to touch it, I've got to stroke it I've got to do something to make it sound so it's not even, maybe it's here but I have a lot of freedom to touch this and improvise with it but the other thing is the instant that you're working with technology you're never ever ever down here because somehow you made a patch in your computer whether it's max or whatever language you use as a Dora you're never here because you had to create it beforehand and that decision making happened before you ever showed up at the theater the closest we ever got was for some unknown reason we were invited to an improvisation festival in Washington D.C. we were mystified about this but we said yes as we did to every piece we got invitation we got back then so we made a deal Don drove the car to D.C. from New York and I started programming the patch when she started driving and we talked about it and we showed up at the venue and we did it that was the closest we ever got to trying to improvise an interactive performance was that experience but somehow you're going to be somewhere along here but the technology really pushes you in that direction a lot and that's something to think about is how can we offer real improvisational choice to the performers that we are working with that are working with technology how can you open that door make it a little bit wider because the opportunities are bigger I think that's something that's still a huge struggle and something interesting to think about but then it leads us right to the last continuum which is clarity obscurity which if the instrument one is changing its function all the time and the improvisational expressivity is totally free how does anyone know what's really happening with that instrument they've never seen and playability that they've never seen so we play often in our pieces like an in-plane we gave a sort of educational moment here's how it works here's how it works so that we could then leave that limitation of needing to be clear about it and go to a more artistic expressivity for ourselves hopefully bringing people along that's exactly right and just to say but when we're talking about clarity obscurity we're talking about clarity obscurity of the instrument of what's happening in terms of the interactive system so it's really a 3D sphere of like all of these continuums and I think that you can make decisions and slide around on it I mean again this was a debate in our community like some people were very fixed on the idea that this notion of like changing the meaning of the instrument was really was really problematic and that we always had to let the dancer champion and we could never let the musician side champion these kinds of these were very personal choices in a way this also came into our pedagogy though when we started teaching workshops together in 1999 and we taught them for 16 years all over the place and this was a useful tool of describing the experience of interactivity and sensitivity so okay so that's 1994 and we do that piece we get to perform it a lot we first did it at the Walker Arts Center Minneapolis we had a lot of chances and that's when people kind of knew about us and we started getting lots of invitations to teach and because there were not so many people in the states anyway that knew about this kind of stuff could talk to students about it show them how to do it and so we were getting a lot of invitations at the same time we continued to make work there's a piece we made that I'm not going to show here tonight today there's too many to show all one day but it's called the chemical wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz it was based on the text of the same name from 1600s about alchemists that was a kind of coded message about alchemy but it was almost it was like I don't know I didn't know if they have LSD in 1600s but this guy took it who wrote the book because it's really astonishing imagery but it was in that piece too that because it's two years after this that we visit the studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam or Stein and it's 1996 and Stena Visoka a partner of Woody Visoka is the leader there that year and she has started a whole program and they've made a software called Imagine, very important software that not very many people know It's IEM Yeah, there's a slash and you see the slash artists they're everywhere and created by a really beautiful guy and wonderful programmer called Tom DeMeyer and it was the first software I know of that ran on a personal computer that allowed you to interactively manipulate video imagery so it's the first one I mean maybe there's something else I don't know about but it's the first I know and we saw that and we're like oh my god and we were there in residency we didn't know going there it existed we immediately had the mini dancer hooked up to it and we were manipulating it and we used that software for the chemical wedding piece but it had a lot of different limitations that I didn't love it had this table based interface that I really didn't like and there was a kind of crucial moment I was in that piece I want to be the one to tell this so it's 1996 so for some years now I'm the one on stage with the systems and the computer crashes sometimes in the 90s it crashes and the rule was the show will go on I will carry on and Mark will catch up somehow I'm not going to announce to the people oh we have to stop improvising if I needed to and then Mark would catch up and we'd carry on and hopefully no one noticed then in the chemical wedding when we performed it in 1998-9 Mark was in that piece as a kind of actor character and it was the first time that the computer crashed on Mark and there was a blue screen and the Mac reboot sound is like standing there it was a hard crash there was a moment of like this can't happen and I was like I've been saying this yeah well it was it was more like fuck this shit I'm going to write my own software it was more like what happened so that actually was really important but seeing Imagine and using it that was super influential because suddenly a new media was added to the toolbox we had the possibility of not only controlling sound but of controlling imagery and the whole new door and it really we did use it in that piece but it just it also it was really the table-based interface was really inflexible and I wanted something that fit under my fingers a little bit better so I'm going to jump to 16 reps because we are way running out of time yeah well it's we're at 45 minutes I think what we should do is we're finishing a quarter after we're stopping a quarter after we're three across and we can have questions yeah okay let's skip the we just have to go to 16 revolutions so we're going to skip like 10 years the reason I weren't what I normally would do here if I was not having a workshop with you in a little while I would talk a little bit about how Isadora came into being and why the choices were made about that well but I think I think we can sort of say it as I'm teaching you the beginnings of Isadora during the workshop I don't think I have to do it right now but suffice to say I think the important part I will say right now is that again because we were getting invited everywhere and then I eventually I started making this tool it wasn't for another three years that I started selling it thinking that you know I could sell like a few I really didn't know would turn into what it turned into but what happened was every time we would go teach a workshop we would give it to the dancers there usually they were dancers and usually especially in those days they were incredibly unfamiliar with technology and so what I did in every workshop with Dawn working with me both of us we'd watch them fail we'd see they'd be like I don't understand that and I would literally go home recode that part of the program and show up with a floppy disk yes a floppy disk the next day and we'd put a new version on their computer so together we were observing a test reacting to that really in situ and providing new versions so there is this kind of incredible two and a half year long beta test thing where we were interacting with these usually young performers and dancers who are working with this material but that's why Isadora turned out the way it did that's why it wasn't Max Max was designed for I'm using Max as an example as something where there's a little box and if you're not really into it then you're like I have no idea what that means some of the simple things in Isadora that made a big difference and I don't know why I chose to do them necessarily was you see the numbers you see the actual values you see the titles of the parameters you have an icon for every actor to let you know what that thing does or give you a guess about it those are very comforting for beginners and the other thing about being a beginner with it is that in this first workshop that we taught in 1999 they didn't have computers they didn't touch computers they didn't know what the trash was or how to save files, none of that and the software that Mark kind of hacked together to do that workshop was so the learning curve was so intense that we didn't get to really the creative part of playing with this tool another motivation for Isadora and why those numbers and things are visible is so that you know something's happening something at all is happening and also when you first touch Isadora in this box generally something happens it might not be the something that you want you get there 5, 10, 15 years later but something happens so there's immediate feedback do you want me to stop over on future memory for a second or to just skip it oh sure I don't know just briefly we just wanted to make sure and have room for questions too just briefly speed and intensity of the visual effects I've just made a complete mess of everything hold on one second say something incredibly interesting to all of you I was going to have us jump to 2006 because okay here's an interesting thing I'll say back then and I even feel it now there was a lot of energy around going to the next new thing and the MIDI Dancer was built from like you know Mattel Power Glove yeah so it was like that that was the paradigm of that moment everybody was hacking these and we really early we said how we thought of this as building an instrument we built a new instrument I just learned how to play it how could we play it well if we gave up on it after the first piece and went to the next new thing we need to spend 10 years with this and we committed like shook hands 10 years with the MIDI Dancer and we did that and we did all kinds of things with it and then some new paradigms came into existence in 2004-5-6 which we'll get to in a second let's show and it wasn't the last MIDI Dancer piece but it's useful because of one element that I really want to point out so this is called Future of Memory this is the piece that we want to bestie for in New York and there's one element though that was super important this is also a very interesting solo I don't know the set designer we said this piece has to do with passing through spaces and he brought up the idea of windows and doors which we like and we set him off to make this design and you see these panels behind Dawn here and it just so happened that they were 6 feet high in other words they were the size of a human being and what that meant was in this piece we can either have a full frame image with obviously with the gaps between the different panels but we could also have an image that was the same size as Dawn a lot like in plain right because the problem which I'm sure as a pedagogue many of you have experienced is that the first thing that you know are often the first thing that happens as soon as people get the opportunity to work to work with video and dance they put a gigantic interesting image behind the dancer and nobody looks at the dancer anymore it's the first mistake that we all have to make but here we had a whole bunch of surfaces that were human sized basically and that meant the idea of a duet which we all know for making choreography was really easy to manage because you had things that were of similar size and you could play with this thing is doing something and then this thing is doing something in a much easier way so his choice I mean he decided he didn't tell us he was going to make these objects this size but that actually we used that a lot in that piece using individual panels to show the dancers and that was something that became really important for later stuff but I just think that that point too about we always try and work in our workshops especially when we have longer ones and some materials I don't know if we'll get to this in this time but you have to think in 3D do not think about putting an image on the back wall you have an entire space with depth there's all kinds of opportunity to put that image forward and backward and above and below it's like having students play with those possibilities and to see what they can really do with it opens a lot of doors in terms of the relationships you can create on stage and I'll just say pedagogically that has come out of Mark and I teaching workshops together and our own interest in sort of drawing video off the back wall and bringing it into the space somehow is that I created a thing I call the V5 which is basically the 5 ways I've ever seen video used in a live performance ever again there's a series of continuums the first one is as character in plane is a great example of that there's a her in there and a her out here and we are in relationship or it could be an anthropomorphized entity that's not a face or a person but feels like a presence a character the second one is as environment where you're giving a place for the performers to perform that is not literally in the theater it's a set, it's a set design the third one is a cinema which in this piece there's a recurring piece of video that happens that actually evolves over the course of the piece by adding material that you saw from the piece live a few minutes ago now recurs in this recurring video segment that third one is called video as cinema where the dancers are not important the performers are not important watch the movie the fourth one is as light where you actually use the projector as a light source this is very common these days the next piece that we'll show I think we explored that really fully for ourselves and the fifth way is video as score I was talking about a little bit in Kiri's lecture and symposium after this morning about using digital materials as choreographic generative methods and we'll talk about that with Luke Diver moving on so jump forward how do you want to jump into that I think we need to just leap forward to 16 revolutions and the onslaught of infrared camera tracking it was a moment we learned about this process from Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman who had done a piece called messa de voce with Joan Lebarbra and yep he's a Dutch extended vocal technique singer and the beauty of using infrared light camera tracking systems was that you could now for the first time project and track in the same space because as maybe you know when you're tracking you have to distinguish between the thing you're tracking and the background using an infrared light system if you're just to explain that it's actually messa de voce if you don't know it find it because it's a seminal moment again I never know if anything's the first but it's the first I know of where people were using interactive infrared light to allow projections to appear on the performers as they were performing that was just something I had never seen before and then right after that was apparitions which was a reminder then it explodes and it starts to be everywhere and now it's very common so that's an important piece but the thing is is that when you the thing that was lucky or the thing that made this work because of course if you're tracking me and I have light on me let's say you just point a theater light at me or you turn one up it ruins the tracking because maybe my light level changes but if you shine infrared light on the back wall and I'm down stage of that and you point an infrared camera at me it sees a big white wall and a black mark a silhouette in front of that wall and now I can track it because luckily projectors produce no infrared light that's the key to it so but I'll just let you this is a little explanatory clip that I think will give the whole picture just so that you can see it real-time motion tracking allows the dancers to interactively manipulate the digital media as they perform 16 revolutions the motion tracking features of ISWEB are combined with the analysis and image generation capabilities of Isadora the real-time media manipulation software designed by artistic director Mark Coniglio the stage environment consists of a cyclorama filled with infrared light and a single infrared camera located downstage as the dancers move in front of the cyclorama the cameras use a black silhouette ISWEB analyzes this image generating a 12-point skeleton that tracks the movement of their torso and limbs the position and trajectory of each point is sent from ISWEB to Isadora over a local area network there the path of each point is analyzed using the gesture module measuring the straightness, curvature complexity, path length velocity and other parameters these measurements are then used to generate the visuals and to manipulate aspects of the Sonic Square providing an motion tracking does that look familiar to anyone? our research has focused on sensing the quality of a gesture meaning we wanted to quantify parameters that relate closely to the viewer's experience of a gesture when analyzing a single path some parameters are easily quantifiable like velocity or acceleration others with subjective labels like simple, complex, jittery angular are less obvious a special Isadora module called gesture was created to break the path of each point tracked by ISWEB into meaningful units represented here by different colors and to perform an analysis on these paths by carefully linking these measurements to an oral score a rich network of interactive control was offered to the performers so there you go so that was our entry to that but it's also significant around this time like everyone who was at the forefront of this field stopped using video imagery it all became graphics I don't know it's just like a thing that happened I think it's just because it became possible it's where tracking was a thing and then particle systems all that they don't because they had no video it was all graphic imagery like that so that's sort of a significant change in the field but I made that thing about the particle system you saw just now because that's mostly what we see with interactive dance today is stuff that looks like that one way or the other it's interesting that that's like the remnant of this that we see the most so it's now three o'clock 15 minutes 10 so I think we should just go into a loop there though I think so by now one thing about 16 revolutions because we also showed that piece which you didn't see any of the actual piece around a lot and it was at that moment that we were coined by somebody else who was writing something about us as content-driven artists rather than materials-driven artists which means we turned off the interactivity sometimes in 16 revolutions there's a 12 minute section of two almost naked dancers in complete like distraught states in a theatrical moment where there is no interactivity no visuals, none of that it's a theater moment and it's long in this piece and we thought that was fine because the piece we were making was about this kind of distinction between our animals and our intellectual selves and this was how we needed to express that idea in this moment and then we go back into some graphic imagery and some interaction but it's worth talking about that for a second because everything that we did with technology was because we had an idea and we wanted to use it to serve that idea so let's talk about 16 revolutions in this regard I feel like I should show something but can you show it at the background and talk that's like impossible to see no I can do that actually this is just like the excerpts take tape and I'll just talk over it so so the basic idea though the basic keep going the basic theme is on said was who are we as animals and who are we as human beings what is the distinction between that you know I mean an animal you know basically is worried about reproducing and eating feeding fucking fighting that's it and and that's where they're at but human beings get lost in what we all get lost in this moment that Don was talking about this 12 minute moment one morning I was eating breakfast I was having cereal and I realized I came out of like some trance and I realized I hadn't thought about anything for like a minute or two I was lost and I was just not there animals are always present because there always could be a threat that will kill them we can be actually not present that to me is one just one of the many distinctions we were thinking about and that moment at the table she's talking about is that moment for me that moment that I was eating breakfast so but everything that we were doing was how because the technology came to represent us as human beings us as intellectuals because it is the extension of our intellect the stuff that we have made and we were trying to put that on stage in such a way that you could see those representations I think after this is one good example of the line yeah well I'm thinking about that anyway but because the other side of it was we were representing like there's one like again this part here there's no media or interaction they're just relating to each other there is a technology two of them there's a shoe and a table right well we were considering technology in a very broad sense and there was also the first time we worked with a dramaturg later on and he helped us and I thought it was important to mention just because of yesterday he helped us create a kind of arc for the way the visuals presented themselves in the piece that it had its own dramaturgical arc yeah because now we'll come to the part that I was talking about because here like you've only seen single straight lines up until this point and now in this section we have this first particle system which you saw a moment ago and in a moment right now it's still single straight lines but then there's it becomes horizontal as well and it almost looks it starts to, to us it's suggested a cityscape it almost looks like buildings it looks like architecture and the way in which this movement is being choreographed is also done from this intellectual perspective right? this is also us breaking the system because IZWeb only puts one skeleton on whoever it sees but Mark and I both went in front of the camera and it put one skeleton between us what, the left hand and the left foot and then the right hand and the right foot was somewhere in the middle and so we used that we just was like that's great let's have the sort of club of dancers moving around, manipulate these images even though it's not exactly point to point it's kind of hard to get into these pieces because really to analyze this piece and show you everything that we were thinking about we have to watch the whole piece and we don't have time but the point is is that and this is what we always emphasize this to your students too you do not put something on stage because it's cool because you know what cool is last in a public's memory for about 15 seconds and after that they have forgotten it you put it on stage because it supports something that you think is great or that you're pissed off about one of the two that's why we put things on stage and that involves the lighting, the costumes, the set, the technology everything right and that's the thing that we emphasize over and over again that you know and we'll close, we'll go to a loop dive in 1971 before we went there there was a very strict rule in the visual art department the rule was no technique before need this was in the painting department and the idea was they didn't want to produce copies of the teachers they wanted to have individual strong artistic voices so no teacher could offer a technique to a student only if the student asks how do I could they answer the question that was the rule it didn't really exist in the same way when we were there but we have a rule book an imaginary Troika Ranch rule book rule number one is never buy plane tickets before you've got a contract with someone that would learn the hard way but rule number 17 or 18 is no technology before need that's a really strong and important rule to pass on I think to young people and students especially so anyway and then you know because and this by this point by the way suddenly curved lines has appeared because for the first time someone does something of their own volition they leave this kind of state of being lost and really act after being at that table for 12 minutes and something changes and you see color and you see curved lines for the first time so the graphics are supporting the dramaturgy of the story of this piece right okay so right at this moment you want a loop diver? wow are we talking fast now or what? right at this moment I think my memory serves Mark and I were getting a little underwhelmed with what was happening visually in these kinds of works it all kind of looked beautiful and seductive and particles flying everywhere and you know 3D models and stuff and we were wondering about the disturbing that was one thing that was going on the other thing I know for me is I turned 3D in 2006 and I had this and we'd been teaching workshops and if anybody has ever downloaded the demo of Isadora it comes with some example files and one of those files is of me in in-plane from 1993 that video and I've been looking at that video looped in all kinds of different ways in workshops for 10 years at that point or more than that 10 so this notion of repetition and looping was kind of on our mind and so we just had, all we said was we're going to make a dance about looping and we had done some other stuff before I skipped over it but I'll just flash it on the screen for you to let you see so there's like this little thing that we just did as an experiment really so it's the same same phrase shot in 8 different locations but then you see the same bit of that location 8 times this was from 2001 and what we were already interested in was error, which that came up earlier today too error and that notion gets kind of exploited the notion of error in loop diver so so we said we're going to make this piece about looping we started off by making a study I'll just flash that on the screen briefly too and we thought we're making dance moves we put it into the computer, we do some looping on it but she's going to learn it but we're still putting the actual result of that loop video behind her and you see her syncing up with that at times more often than not she's in a state of error yeah that's important to notice partly because as we all know an edit is impossible I can't go from here to here in zero time with no transitional movement, it can't happen so we're simulating but the important shift I'm about to describe was we were thinking in the kinds of movements one would generally call dance as a way of working but after doing a lot of research and skipping a lot of steps in terms of that research what we figured out was what was really more interesting to watch was extremely pedestrian actions walking forward, shaking hands embracing someone side stepping like this and it was partly because if the action we're going to do if the action I'm going to do is this could be that or it could be that right sorry on the way in the looping you don't know what it's going to be until it gets there and even the act of getting there doesn't reveal its intention fully because of this weird breaking up of time so I made a special tool in Isadora to do this looping and it allowed because normally the loop that we all know it's the same piece of material and you loop it over and over and over again in this tool the starting point and the ending point of the loop could be changed as the looping progressed and I'll let you to see that so you can understand what I'm talking about and we came up with a name these are the atomic looping units that's our little name for it there are 16 variations of this I'm going to show you a couple but let's start with this is just the small piece of material they stand up basically they shift apart and they turn here's the loop that we all know the one where it's the same bit each time it comes back the other variation is a palindrome loop where it goes forward and backwards but it's still the same piece of material that's the one that a human dancer can almost do the other one with the edit they can't actually do that's impossible they can try but it's not possible but now this one I want to describe it before it happens here is the chunk of video that's time going this way if it exceeds this bit it's going to shift both loop points a little bit later and then it plays it and it shifts them a little bit later and so that looks like this the next one the starting point is going to be fixed and the ending point is going to get later in time we call this a growing loop here's one where it's shifting it says growing but it's wrong it's shifting later in time but the end point is moving this way so they're moving towards the same piece of material there's some of the possibilities so we have this tool and in the end again I'm really skipping so many it was the most money we ever got we took two years making this and made three versions of the piece until the third one being the final one but in the end what we came to was we made a five minute dawn choreographed a five minute long dance of this very pedestrian material to a piece of music that you had written I wrote a five piece long did I do it first? probably not because I always made the movement first but what I mean is the dance and the movement were made to go together and then using six cameras around the room we recorded that we then took that material Don and I and we sat in front of a computer and we started doing this composition process by looping it so we had the five minutes it was now set it was recorded all we could do was looping which is a slight lie because actually her part was totally fixed as a composer I could go in and change my file and move a note by a tenth of a second mine was done it was recorded it was done there was no change in it well because also we're doing this while we're starting to teach the dancers anyway so we can't go back basically but I actually had a little bit of leeway I must admit but the interesting tension was Don would be like she'd loop it so she liked it and I hated the way it sounded musically we had a struggle about this or he'd loop if it sounded great and I'd be like oh my god we can't do that so there was this really because it was the only piece we always work really closely together but it was the only piece where both composer and dancer had to be present for every second of the composition together there was no way out of it because it had to be made together so that was really interesting for us and difficult too because we had to navigate like when am I going to give in how's that going to happen in the end that five minutes through the repetition became 45 minutes long and because there's a little bit of unlooped material at the end of the piece that's a kind of epilogue but basically there's 45 minutes of material and there's 4,000 edits in that video we exported that final result and that video was never seen by the public that was given to our dancers and we said learn this and do it exactly like you see it and that process was excruciating it was fascinating but it was excruciating actually people quit some of the dancers quit the guys quit it had a psychological effect on them they reported to us that they were getting depressed that they were actually having a psychological result because think about it I always mention when we talk about loop diver that during that time part of it was made in New York one day we had a day off and went to Central Park there was a guy a homeless guy on a bench and I observed him from a distance and he was sitting on the bench ragged clothes dirty and he was just doing this and it went on for I watched for at least 15 minutes this is someone who had a trauma so severe the only way he could cope was by repeatedly doing that movement I'm just sure of it I'm really sure but I believe that's what the story is and lots of people and I think that this kind of repetitive motion is one way to deal with a traumatic stressful event which helped us discover what the actual story behind this piece was so this process was because it was so fascinating because every dancer had a different method to try and memorize and learn those 4000 edits somebody one of them had a notebook another one just watched the video over and over and over again another one had a set of bizarre icons that they looked at so we had actually completely changed not only the compositional process but now the rehearsal process was totally different somehow right there was also because you're in a constant state of failure because you can't actually edit in real time and because it's very hard to know what 0.001 of a second time movement is exactly we had to make some rules for how we were going to be a unified group performing together the notion was that you try to be right you try to do the right loop because also you know sometimes we're palindrome we're going forward we're going backward and then you get off you're like wait am I going forward am I going backward and you get lost in the process Mark gave us some sonic cues to help us know we had two terminologies the loop step well let's just look at it there was a lot that came out of it in terms of vocabulary and how to work this physical system amongst us as the performers so here is the first 25 seconds of the 5 minute recording that we talked about with the music that I put with it so they stand up they all touch their face in various ways this thing about understanding that this was somehow a piece that dealt with trauma of some kind because that's what it really became for us by this point before we made that 5 minutes we knew it because that moment they're standing up you know the moment in a movie when someone has had a terrible experience and they go in the bathroom to watch their face and they look in the mirror and you see them looking in the mirror that's a kind of icon or a trope let's say that's that moment now you won't know that when you see it looped in a second you would never have recognized it but that's what we told them that they had to invent their own trauma they had their own story about it we didn't want to know but that's what they were doing this whole 5 minutes was about them coping with this imaginary trauma that they did for themselves so here's the looped version of that same material this is what Don was talking about this is the looped number and this is the looped step the looped number changes when the kind of loop changes this is a shifting loop but the duration is staying the same that's why the D is there there's like 27 of them so I'll zoom in on the middle part that was just 3 of the 6 cameras so like I said I think it's clear but this video was never seen by the audience this was only a score for the dancers to follow loop number 2 the starting point is staying the same the duration is decreasing so the rhythm is going to speed up what we discovered too walking was the worst thing that they had to deal with walking was the worst I'd love to show you more but we have to keep moving here's what it actually here's what it looked like when they did that same part PMX lighting information and the video that's in the screen which is not the video re-record it's a different video that's all digitally looped and then the dancers are it's looped in the exact same way that the choreography was looped in this section let me just say this much about that but this statement for me anyway is that what I recognize and I wrote about this in a paper that's in the end chapter of a book called digital movement that was published a few years ago there are two kind of models and most of people that were doing this kind of work and still a lot today have this model of what we would call the digital reflection what you see on this stage what you see here in the sound what you see in the video what you're going to monitor so you have this movement you're picking it up with sensors and then behind or around is a result that's coming from that it's kind of like a funhouse mirror it might be all wavy and you can't really you know exactly see the original image but you still know that the image in front of you in the funhouse mirror is a body it's you right that relationship is how most people were working in this piece really by accident we have an interactivity in this because that's what Troika Ranch does we have interactivity and it did not belong in this piece every time I tried it ruined what we were doing it ruined it instead we adopted something else which I call the digital intervention the idea is we adopted a technology called looping the most core technology for any computing system is the fact that it will repeat something a billion times and never complain it's part of the nature of computing we took something that is so essential to that world and we put it on a human body and said you be like a machine now what does that do to you and what story does that tell and in doing that all of the things that Don alluded to already the fact that you can't get from here to here the fact that you know we were talking about you had to run back when those giant loops happened it wasn't possible so we turned the light up look they're running back to where they belong we're not going to deny that it's happening bring attention to it because later what we did to the dancers that was their challenge those spaces to recover got less and less and less as the 45 minutes went along so that it became even more intense for them to try and live up to our instruction so that intervention and it's not a new idea Arnold Schoenberg did it with the 12 tone system what's the thing with Patricia Brown Locus 26 letters in the thing the idea of this intervention isn't a new idea it's been done plenty of times before in the art world but I think what we did with Loop Diver and what I myself I know and Don too have continued to do when the work since then is take an idea from the world of technology and use it to intervene in the way we create rehearse or perform work because the main thing was I told you that we thought in 1989 that choreography would emerge from this interactive work if you look at it it absolutely didn't like Merce Cunningham biped New York Times calls it a masterpiece and it's excellent I love that piece did it look any different than any Merce Cunningham choreography that ever came before no it looked exactly the same it hadn't changed at all nothing bad about that because it's a great piece but it didn't change the way we were choreographing and one thing that might be interesting for you to look at look at 16 revolutions before and then look at Loop Diver you will see that an entirely new choreography that we had never done before came out of adopting that system that's what was powerful for us was that it led us into directions we just never thought we would go in and that's something that I still to this day I have a very strong feeling about using technologies as interventions as opposed to you know a reflection idea so that's my last my last bit I don't know if you want to say last thing I think we're out of time I'm not going to summarize it you want me to answer a question I'd be happy to maybe you want to stand up and shake your butt yeah not a question a small request a really lovely phrase right at the end it started I believe we take an idea from technology and then there were three things you did with it and I lost one or two in there do you I was worried about that oh you mean the v5 no just now you literally said it you had this idea that you take something from technology I think you're sorry about this the loop has got a fundamental element of things technological and oh yeah I think you take something from the nature of technology and you use it very strictly you adopt it impose it upon your way of creating rehearsing or performing work or preferably all three but the key is the rigorousness of it which is why when Kiri was showing those DDR videos I was so into the guy do this one because I was like Jesus Christ you know that was opposing on him and it was making him move in a way that he probably doesn't normally move and I love that so we've tried to end it 315 but if we still should take a question some questions we can tell we have more time to talk actually we can even continue in the workshop if someone has a burning question no talking in the workshop no questions no burning questions okay well good then let's take let's I'd say even though we have a short day today it's 331 let's take 15 minutes and then we'll reconvene to start the workshop so we will be meeting in a new place that will be there all day tomorrow