[Dixielandjazz] Art marches on with Computers

[Steve barbone]

Oh my. Moog synthesizers, Sinfonia, and now a computerized visualizer that
improvises graphics images form the dancers movements. Soon we humans will
be obsolete.  Fantasia? Deja Vu. :-) VBG.

Below snipped for brevity. For full article, write me off list and I'll
forward it. 

But if a computer does it, "Is is Art?" :-) VBG

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

April 13, 2005 NY Times By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

A Dance and Its Digitized Echoes

TEMPE, Ariz., April 11 - Over the course of her dance company's 35 years,
the choreographer Trisha Brown has worked with such independent-minded
collaborators as the musician Laurie Anderson and the artist Robert
Rauschenberg. On Saturday, Ms. Brown's newest creative partner demonstrated
that it might have a mind of its own, too.

In an innovative fusion of modern dance and high technology, Ms. Brown is
collaborating with a computer on "how long does the subject linger on the
edge of the volume ...," a 30-minute work for seven dancers and animated
graphics. Ms. Brown has choreographed the dance. And the computer, driven by
an artist-designed artificial-intelligence software program that responds
instantly to the dancers' movements, draws graphics that are projected on a
transparent screen in front of the stage.

At the premiere, on Saturday in the Galvin Playhouse at Arizona State
University, Ms. Brown, 68, discovered that a digital collaborator can be as
unpredictable as a human one. The computer-generated graphics were bolder
than they had been at the dress rehearsal the night before, even though the
choreography was unchanged.