I’ve only had one week’s exposure to Contact Improvisation but already I feel that this is how humans were made to move.

I first saw this dance at Priceless last weekend. It was past midnight, having just turned July 4. I was wandering around the festival and decided to check out the chill stage. This stage was covered with a cloth shade structure, kind of like a futuristic circus tent. There was only one entrance which was crowded with people standing, so I had to push my way through.

Despite being outdoors — the night sky visible through the holes between the cloth structure — the chill stage was covered in carpeting and this carpet was strewn with large throw pillows. Within the perimeter were people sitting and lying down on these pillows, most with eyes-closed, listening to the ambient music the DJ was spinning.

But in front of the DJ was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. Five or six people were moving at about 4x slow motion, writhing, caressing and falling over each other. A multi-limbed, multi-headed, multi-torsoed human mass oozing at 4x slow motion at the center of an audience entranced by psychedelic ambient music.

In my current state, I couldn’t tell whether this was a performance or something that just spontaneously started happening. It was actually so intense that I had to leave.

The next night I hung around the chill stage in a more sober condition and was able to observe how these dancers initiated their dance and the protocols they used to communicate with each other.

I found out that the dance was called Contact Improvisation. And yesterday morning I took my first class here in New York City.

Here are some reasons why I believe that this will be the dance of the future (at least for me):

Intention not form. The form, the shape you put your body in, is not important. The art happens at the point of contact; very subtle pressure changes allow partners to communicate how the point of contact should evolve, whether it be pulled, pushed, slid, or pivoted. But only the participants experience this, everybody else just sees the form which follows from the intention.

Absolute expression. Although there is a vocabulary for common movements, there is no such thing as a wrong move. Other dances require learning fundamentals before one’s own style can be developed, but in Contact Improvisation you’re already developing your personal style on first contact. The personal styles of each partner flower in complexity as they interact. Every dance tells a unique story.

Intimate. All communication between partners is through touch. The dance can be done completely with eyes closed. There is a group that teaches Contact Improvisation to the blind.

Shared control. Like Capoeira, Contact Improvisation is explicitly an action-reaction, feedback-led dance. There is no leader and follower like many partner dances. Instead the subtle energy fluctuations at the point of contact lead the dancers, like the chaotic forces at an unstable equilibrium.

Physics-defying. Here’s the quick principle of a dance like the moonwalk: Michael Jackson goes up the toes of one foot, puts all of his weight on that foot, then slides the other foot (which is flat on the ground) backwards. The illusion in convincing because the audience sub-consciously thinks that MJ’s weight is on the foot that is flat on the ground, so when this foot is slid back it makes him appear weightless/frictionless. Contact Improvisation creates an entirely new dimension of possibilities for movements like this, because weight can be distributed to your partner.

Modular. Any number of “partners” can simultaneously participate in the dance, all linked through touch, the exchange of partners as effortless as the dance itself.

If you’re in NYC, I highly recommend Kayoko’s class. She gradually introduces the concepts of the dance in a comfortable way, has the class go through exercises which help you learn to communicate your intention, and makes very constructive suggestions on ways you can go deeper into the dance.

I dreamed last night about having regions of space copied onto other spaces. The same way I can include an “iframe” in a webpage to have a window onto any another webpage, in my dream there were these community spaces that existed simultaneously in multiple locations around the world.

When I woke up I started looking for technology to implement this, specifically 3D hologram technology. I found this video of Cisco doing an on-stage 3D telepresence demo:

I was thrown off when the physically present Cisco CEO says he can see the hologrammed guy in front of him. He can’t! He’s pretending that he sees the other guy standing next to him.

This is a video showing how the illusion works:

I had to watch a few times to figure it out.

Hint: the “foil” is a one-way mirror, which means it’s both reflective and transparent depending on where the light is coming from. It’s like looking through a glass window at night in pitch black: you see your reflection. But if there’s light coming from outside then you see the outside.

This “hologram” is the same technology that’s used in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride during the Ballroom scene.

Patrons ride across the track, looking down at the ballroom.

There’s a huge one-way mirror between the patrons and the ballroom. The ghosts are underneath the ride track. The patrons see the faint reflection of the ghosts, making them look transparent. By turning the lights on and off, the ghosts seem to appear and disappear.

The hitchhiking ghosts use a similar effect.

Patrons face a mirror (actually a one-way mirror) and see their reflection. The ghost is behind the mirror, moving on a track in sync with the ride.

Mirrors are folds in space. I’m excited for emerging technologies that can fold and rearrange space into “hyperspace” — the way that it is done on the web, with doors and windows leading you to new spaces unconstrained by physical geometry.

I’m reminded of the psychogeographer Constant Nieuwenhuys who would cut up and collage together maps of European cities to envision his utopic city, New Babylon.

I have in mind several projects exploring this theme:

1. Using mirrors to reverse gravity (interactive sculpture in progress)
2. Treadmill surrounded by projections, allowing you to physically walk through Google Streetview
3. Grids of cameras mounted to the ceiling of an indoor space, creating a live video “Google Map”

I am compiling a list of magical items. Magical items are fun to play with and inspire creativity. If I’ve found it, I’m also noting the best place to obtain such items. Please add your own magical suggestions.

Crystals

I hang these from threads and tape them to the ceiling next to my window. When the sun shines through it makes rainbows on my walls.

There is a proliferation of new age websites which sell crystals and talk about them. These unfortunately tend to drown out any other discussion of crystals.

I finally found this cheap place to order good sun-catcher crystals.

For hanging rainbows, I found these 38mm tear-drop ones to work the best. The tear-drop is definitely the best shape for making rainbows, and any bigger than 38mm is too heavy to hang from tape.

The above image was made with a 76mm tear-drop crystal.

Magnets

Neodymium magnets are super strong! There are a bunch of places to order a variety of shapes, I don’t know what vendor is cheapest.

A special mention has to be made for acquiring large amounts of small spherical magnets. Here are a few pictures of sculptures I’ve made with them.

You can order these from Neocube.

Finally ferrofluid is an amazing magical substance, but messy. It is an oil-like liquid that is magnetic. When placed near a magnet it makes these amazing spikes due to the interaction between the magnetic forces and surface tension.

Mirrors

I have been having a lot of fun playing with mirrors recently. I’m not sure the best place to acquire them online, but I found a place in Manhattan, TT Plastic Land, that cuts acrylic mirror to any size you need. They also sell one-way mirror (transparent on one side, mirror on the other) which I’m psyched to do a project with.

You can do video feedback with a mirror and laptop webcam.

LED’s

Deal Extreme (which sells many other magical items) has a 10-pack of colored super-bright LED key chains for $4-5, free shipping! Warning: It takes weeks to get your stuff from Deal Extreme, they ship from Hong Kong by boat.

More

Here are other magical items that I don’t have as much experience with:

Miracle berry temporarily blocks your sour and bitter taste receptors. Get the tablets and try eating a lemon, etc.

Electronics are a lot of fun to play with, I only started programming my own stuff a couple days ago. Arduino boards are very easy to get going. Order one with the USB port. I ordered from SparkFun which seems good enough. This ITP page has tutorials to get you started.

Little mannequins that you can pose in various ways are fun. No idea where to get them.

Dichloromethane is used in those drinking bird toys to create a heat engine. Might have some potential.

You can order tapioca balls and fat straws and make your own bubble tea. Magic?

Bryan Newbold and I made a game for the 2010 Global Game Jam, a worldwide, 48-hour game making marathon.

The theme for the 2010 jam was deception. We decided to make a 3D game where the space was constantly changing due to datamoshing.

Read the whole story here.

Visited Newbury St galleries with AB today. My favorite work was Philippe Bertho.

It reminds me of SNES/Genesis-generation video games. Depth is shown by parallel projection flat planes and drop shadows. Falling infinitely. Even the gold rings look like Sonic coins.

This one has a nice fold.

The portrait the girl is painting is twice as ridiculous as the situation that she and her model are in.

I saw this amazingly vibrant watercolor while visiting the Berkeley Art Museum with Lei yesterday.

It looked pretty cool from far away, but then when we got up close, Barack Obama just put it over the top. Unfortunately I can’t find the artist.

The other exhibit we both really liked was a little hut that you enter and you see all these medallions hanging from strings. Each medallion has a symbol on it that looks like some alien hieroglyphic. There’s a sign that says to pick your favorite and commit it to memory. When you walk out, there’s a station with pencils and small pieces of paper where you’re supposed to reproduce your symbol. You then hang it on the wall and look at what everyone else picked and remembered. Artist is Farley Gwazda.

My favorite though was Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Juggernaut. You first walk in and see a film that cuts between shots of an arm holding a color chart in various locales. The color will contrast the main event in that darker room further back with the droning Lynchian noise. You go in and sit down to watch the film on a large projection.

It starts with an expanse. Ground and sky as the camera slowly tracks right. What is on the ground? Is that snow? I would almost think it’s an aerial shot with clouds below, except there are clouds above.

Then a huge vehicle drives across the screen. The tire gives scale. Our camera is mere inches off the ground. The vehicle tows another vehicle behind it. And another one behind that. For about four minutes, you just see this massive thing on giant wheels drive across the alien landscape.

Turns out the place was a salt plain in Mexico.

Momus is one of my favorite songwriters. (He’s also a favorite of Belle & Sebastian, Of Montreal, and Vampire Weekend). I got into Momus through his connections with Cornelius and Kahimi Karie. He had a couple top tens in Japan with the songs he wrote for K.

Last night I saw Momus, accompanied by ipod, chronologically karaoke through a career-spanning retrospective. I knew about half the songs. All of the backing arrangements were completely fresh to me though.

Throughout the performance, Aki Sasamoto did interpretive dance dressed as a Kubuki stagehand. Aki is an amazing, intuitive dancer! I especially liked when she started taking all the spare mic stands in back and ceremoniously adjusting and arranging them on stage. She and Momus have a great dynamic together, playing with the fact that you know they’re making it up as they go long. They are fresh out of a long-running improvisational performance piece in New York.

I think what makes Momus special is that he can sustain an idea (usually a language-formal idea or literary-cultural comment) for several verses while consistently keeping the language pushed to its limit, never wasting a word. His melodies and arrangements always support the lyrics absolutely (he’s strongly words first, music second). And his choruses never disappoint (a problem with many other talented songwriters).

It always amazes me to see an artist present a singular concept while pulling all the stops constantly, effortlessly. Roman Polanski does this for me too. His movies are full of cinematic memes, like the creepy guy hiding in a private space glimpsed in a mirror and then he’s not there, the voyeuristic neighbor in the background who watches the main action until he’s spotted, or the camera following a character through a busy street with jazz in the soundtrack (all examples from Repulsion). But these effects are always done in service of the story, never for their own sake.

All too often in my own creative endeavors, I think of an effect and build a piece around that, whereas I should start with a concept and use effects to enable the concept to be born. I suppose the key is to internalize a repertoire through practice and experience, to make it intuitive.

There was a time period where I had Resolume and Dan Jacobs going on in my room 24/7. I have so much footage like this of people wandering in and watching themselves through layers of Dan’s distortion. This video is footage from what must have been our final session.

Dan you should be a VJ!

Fast forward 1302 days.

I’m at this art show/club environment, and I notice that the VJing grammar is the same as it was 186 weeks ago. The standard filters. Random clips on loop.

Eventually a grammar will evolve for more multi-dimensionality.

The closest I’ve seen to this is Hifana performing live.

Too often VJing has a kind of consistency to the motion that strips it of all engagement. Unmoving moving images. Here the performance had percussive feedback, synchronizing our heartbeats, building and releasing tension. A shape.

Bonus!

Catherine as a redhead! I’m pretty sure this was shot in Jen Chia’s old room, when she had the double to herself. Date on the file is September 2003.

Play my Flash Game! (has sound)

From September of 2005 for an attempted second semester of Joe’s video art class. Was to be one part of a three part installation on interactivity, about a man from the year 10000 traveling back in time to the year 3300.

Last night I started watching Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE AREA (full video) which I think captures really well the vision of the virtual future I was going for in Joe’s class.

My final project for that class from spring 2005 (or fall 2004?):

If Modern was about manipulating space, and Postmodern was about manipulating time (Western culture’s timeline), then Altermodern is about manipulating alternate universes.

Our understanding of time (with respect to quantum physics, for example) is beginning to suggest that alternate realities exist. Exist in that they have some sorts of relationships with our reality. Or at least are a useful extension of our understanding of our reality. Like complex numbers as an extension of real numbers.

So I’m excited about this new “movement”, though I don’t know if it has started moving yet. I don’t think we’ve yet started seeing the art. When we do it will manipulate contexts like a sculpture.