marlon barrios solano: dance-tech.net

I want to share with you three three projects (one of them with Rachel, another made in Ohio University as an artist in residency and the last one with the choreographer Noemi Segarra as her MFA thesis at Temple University ( will include videos later)

I went to Dickinson College for two long weekends to work in a collaboration with the choreographer and dance artist Rachel Boggia. She included this project as part of her post-doctoral fellowship.

It was a very interesting experience with several challenges. The piece configured as an structured improvisation for two female dancers: Emely Lawrence and Pam Veil. Rachel has been investigating the Kurosawa film "Rashomon" . This project continues investigating the relativity of the narrative perspectives foregrounded in the film.

We tried to reflect the concept in the architecture of the system and the performance space using 4 networked Imacs with embedded cameras as the source of the imagery. The camera angles and the placements of the screens created an slightly skeewed perspective and included images from the audience. A computer station was developed to allow the members of the audience to write in a digital "form" (a patch) "problems" and "solutions". This visitor"s generated text (content) was fed to the video and displayed in the screens in crucial moments of the piece. The computers were released autonomously within defined states to create the images and sound interactively reflecting a bottom-up architecture. I was controlling the global state of the system with fourth station. A character of a "narrator" developed by Emely Lawrence, at some point uses the words donated by the audience to improvise her lines and "ground" her deliberation about the relativity of the narrator and lies.

I was very pleased with the results of this project.

I went back to Ohio University. I was invited to present some of my work developed last year in a month long residency for a conference of the ACDFA. It was a very good to be back at the Aesthetics Technologies Lab and feel the support from Katherine Milton and the efficiency Nathan Berger. I was also a good scape from the NYC madness and dirt. I actually made a new work called Dissipative 1 and presented the installation SLIVER, developed last year, here some pics, well, many of them.

Dissipative 1 is a performance installation is inspired by the work of the Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine. He coined the term dissipative structure and pioneered research in the field wining the Nobel Chemistry Prize in 1977.

Dissipative I is a technologically augmented space that detects our body heat and translates it into visible light patterns. It happens in total darkness and allows the performer to be mediated by his/het body heat and real-time processing. It helps us to be aware that our bodies are dissipative systems that exits far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and dissipate the heat generated to sustain themselves. According to Prigogine, systems contain subsystems that continuously fluctuate. At times a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so magnified by possible feedback, that it shatters the preexisting organization. At such revolutionary moments or "bifurcation points", it is impossible to determine in advance whether the system will disintegrate into "chaos" or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of "order".

Dissipative structures need more energy to sustain themselves than the simpler structures they replace and are limited in growth by the amount of heat they are able to disperse. It makes visible the minimal dance of existing Klaus Krippendorff's Dictionary of Cybernetics

Concept and Interactive Video Design and programming: Marlon Barrios Solano Guest Performer: Julie Cruise Environment Sound generated in real time by the application Amazing Maze developed by Karlheinz Essl (http://www.essl.at)

I went to Philadelphia to work with Noemi Segarra in her piece Satisfaction Guaranteed. I collaborated in the process as a visual and interactive video designer.

This is Noemi's description of the project:

"Satisfaction Guaranteed examines ideas of placement, the sense of identity and worth, structure and authority as experienced individually in our current urban consumer and mediated realities. The work re-considers the notion of "final product" versus the ongoing experience of be/ing alive in a moving body trained to please and crave. It reexamines "choreography" with the awareness of artifice of its manufactured methods that comodify our bodies and aesthetics time and again; bodies that continually search for approval and new items for consumption."

The piece is an structured improvisation by two performers and the main exploration for me has been to develop a system that allow the performers (and the audience) trigger text (media) scanning bar-codes tagged to the performer's bodies in a section of the piece. The bar-codes are coded with words given by the audience while they wait before the performance. The audience is asked to place the bar-codes in the body of the dancers and they ask the audience to scan them in certain parts of the piece. The triggered text is used a prompt or as a "score" for improvisations and to create the metaphorical frame for the piece. Other artist involved in the project: Electronic Music, Jason Carr Lighting Design, Sandra Giasulla Movement invention and performance, Noemi Segarra and Samantha
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