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January 25, 2007

Transforming Webpages into Choreographed Movement

In a June 6, 2007 post, "A Dance Vocabulary for Performance Art," I wrote about multimedia and performance artist Ursula Endlicher and her "Website Impersonations" gallery installation.

In a comment to this post last week, Ursula provided an update about her latest project called "html_butoh."

html_butoh analyzes the tags within a webpage and converts this html code into a choreographed dance work. Here's how this project works:

If you go to the "View" pull-down menu at the top your web browser and select "Page Source" (Foxfire) or "Source" (Internet Explorer), you'll see the code for the web page you are currently viewing. Click on the image I've included right below and you'll see the html code for Ursula's home page. You'll notice that this page includes purple tags such as <html>, <head>, <body>, <script> and <table>.

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HTML page code

What html_butoh does is scan the HTML code of a webpage (like the one above) and finds the most popular tags. When the program finds a specific tag such as <body>, it then accesses the html-movement library to find the dance video clip that corresponds to this tag. Once you reach the library, click on the "body" tag and you'll see that there are three different short videos that represent this tag. Each video is an abstract representation through movement of how a dancer expresses a tag.

Now all the pieces are put together. If you visit the movement library page again, you can click on html_butoh to launch this application. html_butoh analyzes the home page for each of the most popular 500 websites. It transforms the tags it encounters into corresponding dance movements. So each of the screen shots below represents a visual movement interpretation for a single webpage. In the first and third screen shots, you'll see that there is a lot of repetition. That's because the same tag was encountered multiple times within a single page.

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html_butoh

html_butoh


html_butoh


If you like this project, you can even submit your own movement videos to the library and your videos will appear when visual views of webpages are generated. Here are the instructions on how to produce video clips.

Posted by Doug Fox on January 25, 2007 12:54 PM

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