Elemental Agency —2017

As a part of The Space Between Incubator

Doug Van Nort: conception, direction, system composition, void state sound/interaction design

Performers: Vanessa Boutin, Holly Buckridge, Shaelynn Lobbezoo, Joshua Murphy, Paige Sayles, Marie-Victoria de Vera (emergent and collective choreography)

Yirui Fu: Spotlight visual/behaviour design

Akeem Glasgow: Kinect tracking and mapping to visuals

Rory Hoy: Earth state sound/interaction design

Ian Jarvis: Fire state sound/interaction design

Kieran Maraj: Water, wind states sound/interaction design

Michael Palumbo: Mobile audience interaction,network architecture programming

Mingxin Zhang: Spotlight visual/behaviour design

Elemental Agency is a piece concerned with an emergent gestural language that manifests across movement, sound and light. Rather than sound/light articulating movement, or movement driving media, the approach builds outward from gestural metaphors as a point of shared intersection for these phenomena.

The work draws upon the metaphorical constructs of Japanese Godai and Indian Vaastu Shastra theories of five elements: earth, water, wind, fire and void/space. Working with conceptual metaphors drawn from these traditions, constraints are provided to the dancers of embodying a given element as a collective – a texture of movement, rather than a singular human entity, that manifests the non-human agency of a given element.Using machine learning methods, the sonic interaction designers seek to capture moments of gestural expression and fuse this with sounds that similarly embody a given elemental quality/profile.