Crossings: Rushes submission to Fabrica

RUSHES would become a dance-architecture inviting gallery visitors to play and ponder in an intelligent environment of emergent behaviours. Rushes references the ways bodies are stroked by the vacuum of air which trails people as they pass one another in dense urban spaces. It creates clouds of visual and sonic patterns affected and changed by the presence of visitors and performers and their crossings. Over time the choreography emerges through this interaction as short dances or rushes, unedited situations or scenes from an augmented reality. Rushes aims to create a thick atmosphere of energies and sensations for play, flirtation, dreams and dances.RUSHES Diagram

How it works

RUSHES is a camera based interactive environment merging three levels of creative intelligence. These converge as a site for interaction creating a connected community improvising between different dimensions of space and layers of movement and sound.

The camera informs a swarm of intelligent agents. The agents have rule-based behaviours informed by a perception of local space. These local behaviours generate an emergent global patterning, or intelligence, coming-into-being through a sonic and visual digital terrain.

The interface posits an environment for action inhabited by the intelligent agent and the informed performers. Gallery visitors are invited into the environment; through their movements they affect and change the morphology of the digital terrain. Over time a shared emergent behaviour is created. This choreography of chance creates across time a multitude of embodied forms or ephemeral architectures, fleeting moments held in the memories of the participants.
At present the architecture uses a vision system comprising four top-mounted cameras and a 3-dimensional sound system using six to eight speakers. The cameras are embedded into a projection screen hung from the ceiling like a cloud. Gallery visitors are invited to move through the performance space, guided by the performers and/or to sit, lie or drape themselves on the cushions either side of the active area. Visitors on the floor are encouraged to traverse the active space by moving from one end to the other, negotiating the terrain through a sonic environment comprising granular sounds and a multi-lingual babble of voices and oscillating intensities. A soft edge surrounds the performance space where the visitor can lie on cushions looking up at the projections of the environment and feeling the movement of bodies playing the space.