Location:
The Brendan Iribe Center, Room 0110
Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering
8125 Paint Branch Drive, College Park MD 20742
LED BY AMY LAVIERS
How do we make a robot crawl like a centipede, buzz like a bee, wiggle like an octopus or walk like a human? This workshop will pose a possible direction toward such ends. First, we will move together. This will activate an innate ability to imitate each other and, in doing so, illuminate the principal components of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies—a field comprised of Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals—and the Body, Effort, Shape, Space and Time (BESST) System of movement analysis. Next, we will try to write down what we’re doing. A set of symbols for describing elements of the BESST System, which seem to be perceptually meaningful to human observers, will be presented so that movement can be notated and, thus, translated between bodies. We will explore both Labanotation and “motif”-style notation for movement on both natural and artificial bodies to understand platform dependence and invariance. Finally, we will envision future bodies, which might crawl, buzz, wiggle or walk. Simple mock-ups of artificial bodies will be created in hopes that they may enact the ideas from our movement scores. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t matter if they ever do—the point of the exercise is to learn about ourselves.
This workshop is partially supported by NSF award #2234196.
This event is part of Moving with Screens + Machines: A Symposium on Embodied Practices and Technology.