March 10, 2006

Spreading Dance with Mashups

Over the past few weeks, I've posted articles and podcasts that cover a range of approaches to creating interactive dance performances. There are telematic performances that unite multiple sites via high-speed Internet connections, There are mediated dance programs where dancers are outfitted with sensors and other devices, which control video, audio and images in real-time. And there are many technologies from wearable computers, motion capture and motion tracking that provide choreographers and dancers with many ways to explore their creative impulses.

But one area that I haven't touched upon is how end users - dance fans and enthusiasts - can play a role in creating or manipulating their own digital-based dance performances.

Before I explain what I mean I have to give some background about a hot trend called mashups. Mashups are a type of digital mixing of sounds, videos and pictures that just about anybody can create with relatively easy-to-use software.

Mashups

The first type of mashup was created by taking a vocal track from a song and adding it to an instrumental mix. While most of these mixes are unauthorized, they are widely available because of the many sound editing software programs and digitized songs available online. (This week's edition of Newsweek has a good introduction to Mashups.)

The Beastie Boys are joining the mashup craze by making authorized acappella tracks available for download so that their fans can create their own remixes.

Mashups are not just limited to mixing audio tracks. Here's an example of "Film Genre Remix" from Mashup Mansion (via: Micro Persuasion). The goal with these genre remixes is to create your own movie trailer for a film from one genre (such as horror films) and add your own voiceover to make it seem that the film is of a completely different type (such as a romantic comedy).

There are new online video editing apps being introduced all the time that let you create your own video mixes. Here's one Eyespot that I came across on the Mashable blog.

Web-based applications are also part of the boom in Mashups. The idea is that you take data from one source such as Google Maps or Flickr photos and build a new front-end so that your website visitors can access this data in new and innovative ways. Here are some sample applications so you can see what I'm talking about:

- The Geography of Seinfeld combines mapping data from Google with address information for famous New York City locations featured in this popular TV series. By clicking on, say, "Soup Nazi" or "Elaine's Apartment," you can instantly see on a map where they are located.

- Retriever is a mashup that allows you to upload or draw an image, and then the application will pull pictures from Flickr that match the structure and colors of your starting image. From my brief experiments, it doesn't seem that this application works too well, but it's amusing to experiment with.

You can find a whole bunch of Flickr Mashups on Webmonkey.

Back to Dance

Mashups are proliferating because they are fun and they put creative control in the hands of millions of Internet users. My purpose for writing this post was to consider whether there were opportunities for creating mashups for dance so that millions of online users could create their own dance remixes?

Dancers, choreographers and new media artists are already creating their own dance mashups - even though that's not what they would call their video creations. This is what Jimmy Miklavcic of Another Language does during InterPlay performances when he takes video feeds from multiple performance sites and mixes them together into abstract videos (listen to podcast). The same is the case for the global performance events hosted by the Digital Worlds Institute when they overlay a musician from one continent with a video feed of dancers from another continent (listen to podcast). And I'll write about the video mixing work of new media artist and professor John Crawford next week that combines pre-created video with live dancers and other imagery.

But what happens if dance enthusiasts are provided with videos of different styles of dance in various settings? Maybe some of the dance videos could be shot in chroma key (against a blue or green background) so that these images could be easily mixed with different backgrounds. Videos of dancers could also be combined with abstract imagery or distorted in various ways. I'm sure there are hundreds of possibilities.

Would dancers and choreographers be willing to make videos available online for the purpose of creating video remixes? Could this help dance companies reach larger audiences by giving fans direct digital control over the final output? Could dancers generate greater levels of interest in their upcoming performances by sponsoring a dance mashup competition that incorporates video of dancers who will be performing in this upcoming program? Or does the thought of making this video widely available scare you to death?

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