This article was taken from the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Ten dancers appear in Wayne McGregor's new work Atomos. An unseen eleventh is a self-generating digital "creature" that scans films, then generates weird new limbs and uses them to dance on a plasma screen mounted in the studio. Called "Becoming", its moves join the human perfomance on stage. "It's a badly behaved dancer," says Marc Downie, a digital artist and Becoming's creator.
Becoming is an evolution of a tool that Downie created for McGregor in 2007, the Choreographic Language Agent (CLA), a prototype interactive notebook for choreographers. "The CLA was an attempt to get to the middle ground, between the cold, formal language that computers have and Wayne's choreographic language," says Downie. Although McGregor used the CLA, it meant sitting down at a computer with a mouse every time he wanted to make a note. "That's a fatal flaw when you're working with movement. We thought we'd give Wayne something much closer to an autonomous artwork that required much less intervention."
Downie's new system watches a secret film. "No one will ever figure out what it is," he says, only revealing that it is a well-known title distributed to all of McGregor's collaborators as text and reference for Atomos. The Becoming program breaks the film into 1,222 discrete shots, analysing the movement and the colours in each. "The core of the piece that results is about how the creature can grow its body. It will take a decision about how to edit its body, and then it will play out the motion that the body generates."
Atomos *opens on October 9 at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London.
A version of Becoming is on display at the exhibition* Thinking with the Body, which runs until October 27 at the Wellcome Collection, London.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
