This article was taken from the June 2014 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 <span class="s1">subscribing online.
What does a dancer look like translated into shapes, colours and light? In The Measures Taken, coming to London's Royal Opera House in May, ballet choreographer Alexander Whitley and digital media artists Marshmallow Laser Feast bring a visually rich answer.
The team used Microsoft Kinect sensors to track a dancer's movements, render them into a shifting data image and cast them on to a transparent screen in front of the on-stage dancer. "Movement is part of the performance through the lights," Whitley says. The dancer seems to move with a shadow that morphs between triangles, lines and puffs of mist -- the options are endless. "It's almost like choreographing a show, but where one of the dancers is these abstract visuals," says Memo Akten, cofounder of Marshmallow Laser Feast. Says Whitley, "Humans are reflected in technology as it is reflected in us: we produce it, see ourselves in it and it affects us."
The next step is to teach the sensors to react to the dancers' movements independently. "We're keen on developing a system that doesn't just mimic the dancer, but responds to it as another dancer might," says Akten.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
