Backyard Dances’ transports the backyard as actuated space for live choreography using web cameras, chat rooms, transcriptions, the imagination, text to speech software and the dancing body.
Alongside my group project for Electrosmog, I have been helping out with a project by Becca Wood called Backyard Dance. It is about "being everywhere at once, while staying at home, in our own backyard." Becca is interested in dance so has taken submissions from people all over the world who were asked to provide a short section of footage taken by attaching a camera to a part of their body while dancing in their backyard. She has then taken this footage and transcribed a strictly visual interpretation of it with no personal or poetic influence. Dancers wanting to participate in the live streamed performance are given an mp3 of the transcribed footage narrated by computerized voice and will perform their interpretation of it in the form of dance in their backyard.
This was a bit tricky to get my head around at first and even though what I was helping out with the streaming, as I began to work with Becca and eventually the other dancers, I began to understand what it was all about. James did most the hard yards, nutting out the best way to take the video chartroom comprising of each dancer's chat window and send it back out as an accessible live stream and chasing up the IT people to allow us to work around restrictions of the AUT network. As we did a test on Thursday, I found myself in a video chat with people located in Australia, Germany, America and Becca just out the front of AUT. Most the people hadn't really met before and yet easily struck up conversations about their locations and the weather and general socializing which I think ran nicely alongside the concepts underpinning both the Backyard Dance project and the Electrosmog Festival as a whole; we can not only be enriched by digital communication with those from who we are physically isolated, learning about their country and culture, but we learn more about our own. The base of such connections can be in any common interest, in this case, dance.
Technical difficulties were afoot even two hours before we were supposed to stream; in the end we were unable to use the Max Patch James had developed to stream outside the AUT network so we needed a quick solution which came in the form of Livestream. Once this was set up, there was little time left to trouble shoot as we had to start setting up the video streams from the dancers around the world and arrange them on the desktop in a tidy appearance to be streamed. One of the dancers wasn't present by the start time but the show had to go on and off the dancers went.
The stream crashed a few minutes in and we worked quickly to restore it. The network and the computer struggled with four incoming streams and then sending it out again. It was also at this point we realized that any sounds we made were sent out as the audio accompanying the video. Oops. Visually with the four input screens from the dancers it was a very interesting effect. I did feel like they were each letting me into their space, their neighborhood and further sharing with me their personal expressions through their dance. Though they all had the same audio playing, their interpretations were all different but even besides the geographical and interpretive differences, even with the technical glitches and slightly less than sleek appearance of the stream, they very much appeared to be dancing together.
I would have liked to have seen Becca actually dancing in her space and the reactions she would have gotten. It is interesting to think that people around the world who would've been watching it knew more about what she was doing than those passing by; we have a tendency to stare and comment on anything out of the ordinary in our neighborhood when in light of the concepts of the Electrosmog conference, it is our own local neighborhood and area we too should be embracing and exploring.
Helping out on this project was beneficial for me in terms of picking up some technological knowledge for future reference if I ever want to work with live streaming again. I have however been thinking that it is strange that the Electrosmog conference aims to bring people together using these digital means and yet, the capabilities of live streaming is still quite limited by restrictions of one's internet access. It took me 10-15minutes to be able to load and view an earlier live Electrosmog stream and even through these they have technical difficulties with participants webcams cutting out or lagging. If we are to become more reliant on means such as video streaming, the capabilities of it needs improvement. Overall I enjoyed helping someone else achieve their vision and concept and being involved in exploring it with them and others around the world.
Alongside my group project for Electrosmog, I have been helping out with a project by Becca Wood called Backyard Dance. It is about "being everywhere at once, while staying at home, in our own backyard." Becca is interested in dance so has taken submissions from people all over the world who were asked to provide a short section of footage taken by attaching a camera to a part of their body while dancing in their backyard. She has then taken this footage and transcribed a strictly visual interpretation of it with no personal or poetic influence. Dancers wanting to participate in the live streamed performance are given an mp3 of the transcribed footage narrated by computerized voice and will perform their interpretation of it in the form of dance in their backyard.
This was a bit tricky to get my head around at first and even though what I was helping out with the streaming, as I began to work with Becca and eventually the other dancers, I began to understand what it was all about. James did most the hard yards, nutting out the best way to take the video chartroom comprising of each dancer's chat window and send it back out as an accessible live stream and chasing up the IT people to allow us to work around restrictions of the AUT network. As we did a test on Thursday, I found myself in a video chat with people located in Australia, Germany, America and Becca just out the front of AUT. Most the people hadn't really met before and yet easily struck up conversations about their locations and the weather and general socializing which I think ran nicely alongside the concepts underpinning both the Backyard Dance project and the Electrosmog Festival as a whole; we can not only be enriched by digital communication with those from who we are physically isolated, learning about their country and culture, but we learn more about our own. The base of such connections can be in any common interest, in this case, dance.
The stream crashed a few minutes in and we worked quickly to restore it. The network and the computer struggled with four incoming streams and then sending it out again. It was also at this point we realized that any sounds we made were sent out as the audio accompanying the video. Oops. Visually with the four input screens from the dancers it was a very interesting effect. I did feel like they were each letting me into their space, their neighborhood and further sharing with me their personal expressions through their dance. Though they all had the same audio playing, their interpretations were all different but even besides the geographical and interpretive differences, even with the technical glitches and slightly less than sleek appearance of the stream, they very much appeared to be dancing together.
I would have liked to have seen Becca actually dancing in her space and the reactions she would have gotten. It is interesting to think that people around the world who would've been watching it knew more about what she was doing than those passing by; we have a tendency to stare and comment on anything out of the ordinary in our neighborhood when in light of the concepts of the Electrosmog conference, it is our own local neighborhood and area we too should be embracing and exploring.
Helping out on this project was beneficial for me in terms of picking up some technological knowledge for future reference if I ever want to work with live streaming again. I have however been thinking that it is strange that the Electrosmog conference aims to bring people together using these digital means and yet, the capabilities of live streaming is still quite limited by restrictions of one's internet access. It took me 10-15minutes to be able to load and view an earlier live Electrosmog stream and even through these they have technical difficulties with participants webcams cutting out or lagging. If we are to become more reliant on means such as video streaming, the capabilities of it needs improvement. Overall I enjoyed helping someone else achieve their vision and concept and being involved in exploring it with them and others around the world.
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