Ink & Dance
NU2s it’s a non-profit organization which has been organizing several activities arround dance and new technologies and to promote the use of digital media in choreographic works.
Every year NU2s organizes a “laboratory” in L’Animal a l’Esquena [ a dance & body research center in Celrà – Girona ] where basically diferent kinds of artists, projects and media artists meet and share a week to develop, experiment and produce in the field of body, movement and new medias.
In 2012 the NU2s Lab was organized on the idea of mixturing media artists with traditional contemporary visual artists.We collaborated with Francesca Llopis, a visual artist from Barcelona which lately has been painting small booklets droping ink on it’s pages.
Our idea was to digitalize one of her ink booklets in order to navigate inside it very carefully and deeply. Inspired by the way people explores Francesca’s booklets we thought on generating an interactive system where the “dancers” could dance into the painting and explore it digitally with a great detail and resolution. So we made a series of digital photos of the pages of the booklet and stitch them together to generate a 24.000 x 2.000 pixels image.
Using Openframeworks libraries and Kinect depth sensor we developped a small app which tracks the dancer position precisely and sensitively. Subtle movements of her body drives the navigation over the high resolution scanned painting. The main idea was to work on the detail of movement and it’s relation to a huge digital canvas. Here is a short demo of how it worked.