Re:Forming
Re:Forming explores the integration of real-time performance and additive digital fabrication through the lens of dance and 3D printing. This collaborative residency and performance work includes Samuelle Bourgault, Philip Kobernik, Mark Hirsch, and brooke smiley.
This Collaborative Media Arts and Technology immersive worlds research group began with a grant from the University of California, Santa Barbara to research ways to bring audiences to interact with dance performance virtually. Exploring the agency of a dance artist’s relationship to technology, this group is passionate about creating unconventional approaches to audience participation, agency, and connection.
Utilizing the sustainable material of liquid salt, a 3D printer translates movement memories from a live performance as crystalized salt artifacts, sharing the expressivity and composition of one moment or durations in time.
This work presents a system within which brooke smiley guides the fabrication process by utilizing a 3D printer which remembers and tracks her movements through space. In turn, this system fosters a bridge between dance improvisation and a generative method of choreography by centralizing specific methods of experiential anatomy based process and practice interactions.
Data from a pose tracking algorithm is sent to a novel, rapid 3D printing system, the Liquid-Crystal Printer (LCP), which fabricates material structures based on the dancer's movement. Due to the constraints of COVID-19, Re:Forming was designed in, and designed for, a remote setting in which the dancer, fabrication system, and audience remain in separate locations, but which a unifying object is made from each of our locations.
3D Printing by Mark Hirsch.