Real Virtual Games Participatory Dance in Second Life

One of the first experiments with virtual dancing in Second Life. Part of Real Virtual Games Project, following up from the LxFactory Performances (Temps D'Images Festival, 2008 Lisboa)

An invitation call was send for participation in this performance.  Upon appearance at the space movements were shared with them to be performed, along with their own moves and movement in space.
These movements were originated in motion capture sessions (MovLab/Lusofona University) and focused on a dance approach based on principles and practices of Body-Mind Centering, somatics, ideokinesis, and contact improvisation, and others.
During the process of uploading the animation files to Second Life there were errors provoking emergent behaviors that I found very interesting. As if, although different and some times impossible to perform by an humsan being, they retained the aimed kinesthetic attitude and enabled interactions between the avatars related to those occurring in a contact improvisation jam.
These artistic research of dance in SL continued Real Virtual Games project questioning and challenging the typical dance forms, styles and formats found in this world, which although very varied are limited and mostly with a metric dynamic to accompany or be accompanied with music.
The fact that few avatars showed up and at different times enabled a more intimate interaction.

Fw: Reais Jogos Virtuais Follow Up / Nov. 29

Following up on Real Virtual Games Project (Nov. 1&2), at Lx Factory, Lisboa, Portugal  and  SL Kowai (217, 109, 669)

Toddles Lightworker/Todd Cochrane and  Butler2 Evelyn/Isabel Valverde come to invite you to an Emergent Hybrid Performance Environment for SL avatars and video mediated guests from physical site, Lisboa, Portugal. 

Day/Time: Tomorrow, Saturday Nov. 29 

Event Sites: 

                       Kowai 234, 102, 679 (Mature) 

                       (Second Life) 

                       (3.30 PM/PST)

and

                      Rua do Carrião, 5 - 3º dto, 

                      1150-093 Lisboa, Portugal 

                      (23.30 H/11.30 PM/WET)

                                           

Duration: about 2 hours (3.30-5.30 PM) (23.30-01.30 H)

Come on Come to perform by interacting with other avatars and real people on screens around the space. We have mocap emergent animations for you to embody and interact with. 

You can experience these animations alone or combined  with your  movements and gestures.  

We want to offer opportunities for converging our physical and virtual possibilities for creative embodied communication. being and experiencing spaces and bodies. 

We believe Second Life provides the most inclusive embodied mode of being with people around the world in a free networked platform.  

Real Virtual Games Project is interested in questioning and developing more corporeally inclusive physical interfaces for this type of embodied global network mode of communication.

Look forward to see and play with you tomorrow!!

Reais Jogos Virtuais, Lx Factory - Festival Temps D'Images

 

Performance  Híbrida Transdisciplinar /Ambiente Interactivo  

Hybrid Transdisciplinary Performance/Interactive Environment

1.11.2008    21.30h

2.11.2008  19.30h e 21.30h

Ambiente Interactivo / Interactive Environment

1 e 2.11.2008   15 - 19h

Lx Factory

Rua Rodrigues Faria, 103 Alcântara, Lisboa, Portugal

Second Life Location 

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kowhai/232/108/670/?title=3D Game Environment / Ambiente Jogo 3D

Sinopse

Reais Jogos Virtuais (RJV) integra a dança/performance e as artes media numa colaboração transdisciplinar. A arquitectura híbrida de espaços físico e virtuai confunde-se, assim como os habitantes: performers e audiência ao vivo e como avatares no Second Life. 

RJV situa-se na reflexão sobre o corpo face às tecnologias digitais, e a persistente descorporalização, particularmente com a crescente aderência aos videojogos e a modelos imersivos de comunicação em tempo-real da Internet. O entrelaçar de dimensões da experiência, com a virtualização do espaço físico e materialização de espaços e entidades virtuais, permite antever como orgânico e virtual formam as próprias realidades que se criam e apercebem.

Numa coreografia híbrida, personagens ao vivo e virtuais interagem entre si para assumir sublimados modos de comunicação. Movimento (físico e virtual) imagética e sonoplastia interagem entre si, através de sistemas computacionais, mas também co-existem autonomamente. A interacção entre movimento físico e modelos de mediação e representação virtual, os avatares, converge espaços habitualmente separados numa realidade realmente aumentada da experiência. 

Assim, RJV problematiza os ambientes imersivos dos videojogos e espaços de sociabilidade virtual (Second Life), as interfaces físicas (óculos de realidade virtual, motion capture, controlador Wii, e câmara web) e propõe outros jogos com os mesmos "brinquedos". A desconstrução humorada destes aparatos expande as suas possibilidades na inclusão da corporalidade, e desenha janelas experienciais e perceptivas face à realidade Cartesiana do escritório e do fitness que caracterizam a situação ocidental contemporânea.

Créditos
direcção artística / coreografia transdisciplinar Isabel Valverde
arte multimédia interactiva António Caramelo
performance Jorge Gonçalves / Inês Negrão
sonoplastia Ru*mor*
desenho de luz Nuno Valverde
animação avatar (Second Life) Isabel Valverde 

motion capture José Maria Dinis
second life Luís Santos
espaço cénico Maria Matos
figurinos Alexandra Sobral
camâra Rajele Jain, António Forte (DROID ID)
produção Sérgio Parreira

Apoio /  Support

 Direcção Geral das Artes, MovLAb/Universidade Lusófona das Humanidades e das Tecnologias,, VIMMI/INESC-ID DEI/IST, CENTA, Rumo do Fumo, UAveiro, Fundação Ciêntífica para a Computação Nacional, Sylgrut Center,  Lx Factory, NCS, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Fórum Dança, ZDB, Vipulamati – Ample Intelligence, Kowhai Island/Second Life

Agradecimentos  / Thanks to

Filipe Luz, João Abrantes, Joaquim Jorge, João Madeiras Pereira, Bruno Araújo, Daniel Tércio/TeDance, Helena Figueiredo, Regina Mourisca, Paulo Bernardino, Rajele Jain, Kazike, Carlos Gordilho, Maria de Jesus, António José, Tiago e Guilherme Valverde, Bruno Monteiro, Grant Corbishley, Paul Sermon, DJ Aroma, Carlos Santos, Pedro Almeida, Mike Baker, Todd Cochrane, Vasco Sá, Deborah Hay, Luís Santos, Francesc Casadesus, Marlon Fortes, Catarina Assunção, Pedro Joel, Tin Tin, Ami, Clare e todos os que de muitas maneiras contribuíram para o projecto e mudança, 

RVG Mocap Sessions

Mocap Session 

MovLab, Universidade Lusofona

Lisboa, Julho 2008

Com:

Jorge Goncalves (Performer)

Ines Negrao (Performer)

Jose Maria Dinis (Mocap MovLab Technician)

Isabel Valverde (Artistic Director)

In these motion capture sessions we generated animation files to upload into Second Life avatars. These consisted of movement and interaction situations that emphasized a subjectified embodiment oriented to action or sensation regarding own and else physical, simulated, virtual, bodies and environments. 

Later at CENTA Residency we want to be able to interact and dance with each other through our own ghosts. 

By RJG team

About Real Virtual Games

Description
Real Virtual Games (RVG) is a co-autored transdisciplinary project. An alternative hybrid embodied architecture for live and avatar inhabitants, RVG questions the immersive interfaces of videogames and social places (Second Life), in its deployment of handicapted (dis)embodiments. Through constructive deconstruction, we engage in interfacing situations, experimenting other applications for commercial apparatuses, altering and estranging what has became too familiar embodiments. experiencing anemerging posthumanity corporeality concerned with the subjective, collective hybrid and mutable posthuman realities within the globalized virtuality of our contemporary still Cartesian bio-information condition.

Departing from a dislocation of the virtual into the physical, and vices versa, this project is situated in the reflection about the challenges to embodiment posed by increasingly immersive interfaces, as is the massive adoption of virtual sites and bodies for RT communicative models. Through constant intertwining of dimensions of experience, RVG advances in the virtualization of physicality (space and bodies) and the embodying of virtuality, where corporeal and virtual are interconstitutive aspects of the hybrid realities created and perceived.

Parallel RT interactions are developed towards situating the performative action in associations with real-simulated virtual immersive environments. These interactions are complex, allowing multiple readings of various interfacings at play. Through a practice-based exploration of posthuman corporealities where technologies of virtuality and materiality become fully impregnated in our ways of behaving, relating and communicating, we aim towards a conscious and transforming creative familiarization with the very technologies, aware of their reductive and expansive effects to our physicality, modes of perception and reasoning capacities. RVG includes practices of appropriation of VR on-line environments and virtual beings along with physical world artifacts. Provoking momentary disorientations, these help regaining a renewed embodied awareness that includes the confluence of physical-virtual entities towards an emerging posthuman subjectivity.

The processing of bodily movements nourishes the interlinking of materials and artistic disciplines to reveal an organicity of the mediated elements. Emphasizing the deployment of choreographic process and of audio and visual representations/depictions of the spatial and temporal experience in/between realities.

Authors
Isabel Valverde (transmedia choreographer)
António Caramelo (media artist)
Jorge Gonçalves (dancer, choreographer)

Collaborators
Helena Figueiredo (media artist)
Inês Negrão (dancer)
Regina Mourisca (virtual dancer)
Rui Viana Pereira (sonoplast)
Xana Sobral (scenic space)

How
Using Mocap, we are acquiring particularly subjective and strange movement sequences, which will become movement viruses to upload to Second Life. During the hybrid physical-online (SL) performance and audience participation, the virus movements are shared amongst avatars and between these and live subjects. Constituting the work's choreographic dramaturgy, performing and interacting with the movements intervens within hybrid instanciations, spreading the virus in physical-virtual realities.

Real Virtual Games' performative environment is meant to be presented within a gallery space about 10x10 meters, or large enough to include the work apparatuses (2 computers with VR glasses and vision-based responsive system, with 2 projectors and movable soft screens) and about 50 visitors/audience members. At the same time it will happen at a Second Live scheduled location, and open to avatar audiences and participation.

The performance itself evolves in simultaneous, not always related, situations, including performers' altered and shared interfacing with live and videogame (Hidden & Dangerous) and Second Live environments and characters. Whereas one performer engages in the VR immersion through VR glasses, contacting with the other performers mainly through touch, other performers are immersed in the physical space, their movement generating sound through a responsive device, while interacting with the projected VR space and bodies. In the virtual online environment (Second Life), the virtual performer engages with the virtual site and the physical performer through its avatar. The audience members are asked to experience the multiple mediated immersions, to free associate or interconnected realities, and are invited to engage with the interface systems and characters before and after the performance, uploading to their own avatar or dowloading to their bodies the virus movements.

Feasibility
After a first phase of the project developed in the context of TeDance (2007), we want to mention the continuity of the disponibility of the 3D glasses by VIMMI (Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal Interfaces Group), INESC-ID/Lisbon Technical University, and the recent support offered by Lusofona University making the MovLab (Mocap Studio) available for the development of the virus movement sequences database and edition for upload into SL characters. Following, the opportunity of Residencies at CENTA and Teatro Aveirense, will enable to work other acquired and generated material( movement, bodies, images, videos, sound) and architect the piece's multimodal interaction dramaturgy .

Equipment
1 VR Glasses (TeDance/VIMMI)
2 Computers (RJV team)
2 Webcams (RJV team)
2 Video Projectors (DuplaCena; CENTA)
Equipamento de Som (to be provided)
5-10 Light Projectors and mixing table (to be provided)
Isadora software (movement-sound interaction)

Support from other institutions
1. Lusófona University of the Humanities and Technologies - School of Comunication, Art and Information Technologies - MovLab (Motion Capture and 3D Animation Lab) – Logístics Support
2. Lisbon Technical University, VIMMI (Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal Interfaces Group), INESC-ID – Logistics Support - 2 pairs of 3D Glasses
3. CENTA (Center for New Artistic Tendencies) – Project Residency for implementation of interfaces and dramaturgical development
4. Teatro Aveirense - Co-production / Presentation (undergoing discussion)
5. Duplacena – Logístics Support – Technical Equipment (videoprojectors)


Project TimeLine
April (2 weeks) - Lusófona University/MovLab - Motion capture and edition of character animation
May-June (2 months) - Online Rehearsals in Second Life with Avatares
July (1 week) - CENTA - Artistic Residency for responsive environment structure and implementation
July(1 day) - CENTA - Informal work-in-progress performance
August (1 week) - Teatro Aveirense - Artistic Residency for dramaturgic construction (under discussion)
September (2 days) - Teatro Aveirense - Performance and Participatory Environment (under discussion)

Authors' Bios

Isabel Valverde is a performer, interdisciplinary choreographer and researcher originally from Portugal. Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from U.C. Riverside, supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology/PRAXIS XXI (Portugal), her dissertation is titled “Interfacing Dance and Technology: a theoretical framework for performance in the digital domain”, (publication forthcoming by FCG/FCT). Isabel is currently pursuing her research as post-doctoral fellow of the E.U./ F.C.T., affiliated with the Institute for Humane Studies and Intelligent Sciences, the Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal InterfacesGroup (VIMMI/INESC-ID/IST/UTLisboa), and College of Social and Humanities Sciences/UNLisboa. Isabel holds a MA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Inter-Arts Center, San Francisco State University, supported by a Fulbright/I.I.E. fellowship. Her dance studies include the Licenciatura in Dance from the FMH/UTLisboa, and diploma from the School for New Dance Development/Amsterdamse Hogeesschool vor de Kunsten, under the ERASMUS Fellowship Program. Developing experimental solo and collaborative performance work since1986, Isabel performed in Portugal, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Paris. Since 2002 she develops My Fado Dance: What Portugueseness?, a work-in-process solo using Portuguese Fado music, and RT som-video interaction. Towards a familiarization with new posthuman embodiments and human interactions as well as the continuum of actualization and virtualization, Isabel has been collaborating in participatory responsive and interactive environment projects, such as Blind Date, a participatory multimodal environment, with Y. Melanitis (Monaco Dance Forum, 2002), IN TOUCH, a mixed reality performance based on costumed made touch sensor wearables, with V. Zordan, K. Chi, V. Sundar, P. Chagas, (first prototype performed at Siggraph 2005 - Cyberfashion Show, Los Angeles), and more recently working collaboratively in works, such as Touch Terrain, with Melanitis (MDF, 2006), and BlobDance with A. Moura and J. Gonçalves.

António Caramelo is Assistant Professor at the Évora University , lives and works in Lisbon since 1997 in the field of visual arts, especially in the real time manipulation of image and sound. The last exhibitions in which he participated: “Toxic – o discurso do excesso”, Fundição de Oeiras, Oeiras, 2005; “God With Us”, Plataforma Revolver, Lisboa 2005 (como José Berenguer); “Noite na Terra”, Plataforma Revolver, Lisboa 2005, amongst many other.

Jorge Gonçalves is a computer engineer and, currently, pursues the Master of Performative Arts -Dance at the Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Lisbon Technical University. Began his Dance education at the Balleteatro Profissional School where, in 2005, he concludes the Contemporary Dance Program. Since 2003, has been working regularly as dancer interpreter in the productions by Né Barros of the Balleteatro Company in OPorto. At the Encontros Imediatos of Alkantara 2006 Festival, created the piece “Dueto” with Ana Mira . Presently, he is teaching Contemporary Dance teacher at the Centro de Formação of Balleteatro.

Real Virtual Games' Work-in-Progress Performance (excerpts A+B)

Excerpt A


Excerpt B



Esta performance foi apresentada na mostra final da Residência do Projecto TeDance (Dança Tecnológicamente Expandida) no Teatro Aveirense, Maio 2007

This performance was presented within the TeDance Project (Technologically Expanded Dance)Residency at the Teatro Aveirense, Aveiro, Portugal, May 2007

Participantes/Crew:
Inês Negrão, Marlon Fortes, Catarina Félix, Jorge Gonçalves, Helena Figueiredo, António Caramelo e Isabel Valverde