Collaborative Choreography: A Critical Inquiry into Designing Creative Interactive Systems

Abstract

In choreographic process, technology can participate as a collaborator rather than as a tool, by transforming and eliciting creative opportunities. We propose that techniques such as modality shifts and abstraction are useful design strategies for provoking creative compositional choices. Modality shifts are the translation of movement data from one representation to another. Abstraction refers to the resolution and aesthetics of movement data representation that can modulate between greater specificity and ambiguity as a compositional interpretive strategy. This paper presents a contextual inquiry for an interactive system used to provoke creativity in choreographic process. Contemporary choreographic process is often distributed, relying on interactions between the choreographer and dancers to develop and evaluate movement material through exploration on different bodies. Based on this interaction model we choreographed and analyzed a dance piece in order to design a set of features that support system collaboration and agency in an intelligent autonomous choreographic system. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2014.