Principles of Gesture Bending:
- Works with continuous non-anthropocentric and unscripted movement as well as structured movement
- Poetically (dis)embodies (ie. not simply for the wow effect)
- Is informed by the result (perceived or felt relationship between gesture and sound) as much as the process, techniques and the concepts.
- For example, if mappings between a continuous signal to a certain synthesis process sounds predictable, and uninteresting then it simply does not matter what concepts are incorporated in the code.
- Similarly, if something sounds interesting by the way of “mimicking” a rich sound to gesture relationship, then the immediate aesthetic effect is deceiving and insignificant since it would be only a matter of time till the shallowness of gestural possibilities make themselves felt by the inhabitant.
- Is not bound to discretized human/machine notions such as body, skeleton, blob, “note”, and instead is driven by continuous, unsegmented phenomena or qualities such as vibration, resonance, field, motion, flow, nuance, spin, scatter, harmonicity, noise, spectral slope, and etc.
- Aims to extract, follow, and sonify “gesture” without algorithmically presuming what constitutes a “gesture”. This is achieved for example through:
- Multi layered calibration, entrainment and feature extraction, use of statistics to dynamically separate background activity (noise) from potentially “significant” movement, form , and potentially expressive nuance.
- Dynamic separation of small and big gestures; for example often big gestures shape the spatio-temporal form while small gestures add expressivity and nuance.
- Temporal segmentation of movement-events and the extraction of event data (various triggers) are used to modulate continuous parameters and ornament and enhance their percieved formal structure within the synthesized field of sound/media.
- Whenever releavant we aim to preserve the continuous richness inherent in the “original” movement.
- For example, if at any point in the sonification process our extracted continuous data is reduced or mapped to a bang, trigger, predetermined temporal sequence, or even notes within a musical scale then it important to acknowledge that continuity is broken, hence making it impossible for fine nuances within the continuous movement to surface themselves.
- Aims to explore Enactive paradigms that substitute symbolic/iconic systems with dynamic interaction models based on sensory-motor perception.
- (Enactive) Knowledge is gained through perceptually guided action; through motor responses and motor skills. It is the mode of interaction intuitively used when manipulating an object, chewing a gum, riding a bicycle or performing a martial art.
- A successful Gesture Bending Environment should simultaneously or at least with minimum technical adjustments survive the following contexts:
- Improvised Play
- Extended Improvisation with Expert Artists
- Enrichment of Everyday Movement and Phenomenon
- Work well with small and large crowds
- Responds to activity cats, wind, lights, rumble, as well as people.
- Performances, public Installations and Interactive Theatres, etc
- Themes:
- Everyday live actions -- yielding poetic effect
- genre-movement, "vs" (open) structured movement studies
- continuation
- prolongation of gesture
- memory from physics
- delay (in time, place, body)
- shadowing
- camouflage