Team: Molly de Blanc

Bodies and motion are most commonly computationally modeled as a skeleton and joints. While these models have their uses, our prior work with dancers has shown that these models do not adequately account for the myriad and nuanced forms of communication that happen during embodied collaborations and communication – breath, temperature, the sounds of motion, muscle tension, and soft body dynamics. Many models, and the technologies built from these models, also have a limited scope of what a body is and what a body can do. Motion, physicality, and embodied interaction is so much more than the motion itself – it is an aspect of identity. We aim to conceptualize alternative ways to understand and represent the body in motion through understanding bodies in motion as they exist today and may exist in the future.

EveryBody Dance

In physically integrated dance collaborations, dancers with different physical abilities dance together. Physically integrated dance brings together people who use wheelchairs, prosthetics, other assistive and/or adaptive technologies, and those who use none at all in a collaborative creative practice. Through conceptualizing physically integrated collaborations between people, we can then incorporate those concepts into embodied collaborations between people and machines.