Great Dance



March 13, 2009

Creating Dances from Wikipedia's HTML Tags

In 2006, I wrote about Ursula Endlicher's multimedia and performance installation "Website Impersonations: The Amazons," in which she generated choreography based on HTML tags.

Endlicher continues to generate choreography from underlying webcode and explores new approaches to encouraging visitors to participate in this creative process.

Last December, Endlicher and her dancers performed "The Ten Most Visited #6 - www.wikipedia.org" at the LabFactory in Vienna. You can learn about this installation in which movement phrases were generated from Wikipedia HTML tags. And I grabbed screen shots of her video of this December performance to show how the installation was configured.

Visual Guide to The 10 Most Visited: Wikipedia

You can click on the following images to see larger screen shots:

In the foreground a dancer creates the initial movement vocabulary for each HTML tag. To the right, a text description is entered into a database for each tag-based movement. And in the background, dancers perform movements stored in the ever-expanding movement phrase library:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography

A dancer creates initial movement phrases based on HTML tags that are projected onto a wall:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography - create movement

A person at the computer stand enters a description for each movement phrase and categorizes the choreography by HTML tag:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography - movement library

The contents of the movement library can be browsed to choose movement tags for the dancers to perform:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography - movement library

Dancers perform the indicated phrases from the library and create their own variations, which are also added to the choreographic database:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography - performance

In the spirit of Wikipedia, visitors to this dance installation are encouraged to be active participants. Visitors can both describe and categorize the HTML-based movement phrases in the database, and they can perform the HTML tags as well:

Ursula Endlicher - HTML choreography - participation

Posted by Doug Fox on March 13, 2009 5:00 AM



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