Kinetech Arts Blog

Dancing in Frames and Lines: Open Lab Summary, 10/14

Kat L -

Another Wednesday, another open lab!  This week was host to a precious pair of guest artists: Jonathan Cortes-Rodriguez and Shannon C. McMullan. Jonathan is an architect/computational designer/rock climber/artist and Shannon is a 4th generation Isadora Duncan dancer. They came to speak about some cool arts projects they were working on.

Frames - a Virtual Event

First off was their event called Frames. Inspired by another virtual event, Jonathan and Shannon are hosting an online virtual event for performers of types to showcase their work and do a live Q and A. The deadline to submit is Oct 31, and the showcase is happening on November 14. Check out more details here:http://frames.collective-exchange.com/

Lines and Computational Art

Next, we learned how Jonathan and Shannon work together to create these beautiful images.

Just kidding - that's actually their faces. Here's an actual example of some of Jon and Shannon's work.

The objective of these pieces are to visualize the energy flow of the dancer's movements. Though these are only static images for now, eventually, Jon wants to create similar types of visualizations with real videos as well.

These images are made in Rhino and Grasshopper. He starts by putting some skeletal arrows and vectors according to the energy of the dancer's body, like this:

Then he overlays some computational designs in Grasshopper.

And then the entire thing ends up kind of looking like that.

And when you finish editing it... you get this!

Or this! 

Anyway, there's a ton of potential for where these sorts of visualizations can go in the future – more types of dance to explore, more dimensions (time), and more in general!!!

If you are curious on more lines and dance and body mapping and algorithmic art, feel free to join our meetup group here and pop on by between 6-7:15 PM Pacific time on Wednesdays!

Further Readings: