Embodying Sound A work-in-progress on technologically expanded performance
Bruno Pedro, Cecília de Lima, Daniel Tércio, João Marques Carrilho, André Viana · 2019
Embodying Sound is a performing art project that integrates dance, music and digital technology, it explores a real-time sonification of human motion, captured by inertial sensors, using the XSens system. First and foremost, it is not a demonstration of technical virtuosity, but an attempt to put technology at the service of imagination and creativity. In a world dominated by computation - tending to a dystopic future of "artificial intelligences" [1], we tend to forget that present-day machines cannot really think or feel; Computers do not have purposes, do not love or understand reality the way a living organism does [2]. In this presentation, we explore how technology can act as a mediator between dance and music. The quest of this performative process is to investigate the sound signature of the body. Here we discuss how such phenomenological experience might challenge self-consciousness and the perception of identity. Furthermore, within a more general approach, we question how does this artistic and technological interaction stimulate the expansion of artistic expression, which might result in new aesthetics.