Presented at ACM Creativity and Cognition 2013, Sydney, Australia, based on a paper accepted at the conference. I illustrate how technology has influenced creative, embodied practices in urban dance styles by analyzing how technological metaphors underlie conceptual representations of the body, space, and movement in three related styles of urban dance: liquid, digitz, and finger tutting. I also predict that the more technology-based metaphors (e.g., rewind, freeze frame, strobe, fast forward, linear & rotational translation) circulate in popular discourse, the more movement that use these metaphors that we will see in popular dance. Maranan, D. S., Schiphorst, T., Bartram, L., & Hwang, A. (2013). Expressing technological metaphors in dance using structural illusion from embodied motion. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 165–174). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2466627.2466654

1. Expressing Technological Metaphors in Dance
Using Structural Illusion from Embodied Motion
!1
Diego Maranan
University of the
Philippines Open
University
dmaranan@upou.edu.ph

2. Overview
• Describe three styles of street dance,
collectively called illusion styles
• Suggest that certain technological and
mathematical metaphors fundamentally underlie
the movement vocabularies of these styles
• Propose a tentative framework that explains
how these metaphors are communicated and
why these dance styles are compelling to watch
!2

3. Research context
• Urban dance communities are highly understudied (in the academic
literature)
• Part of a larger exploratory and participative inquiry into the creative and
social practices of 'illusion styles' dance communities; supported by internet
ethnographic methods ("netnography") (Kozinets, 2010) and Laban
Movement Analysis
• Netnography needed because illusion style dance communities are widely
dispersed geographically
• Posts from two discussion forum sites over an 8-month period in 2011-2012
• Publicly available online videos (YouTube, Vimeo)
• Publicly available online documentation on liquid, digitz, tutting (e.g. www.darkmattersquad.com)
• Web survey (11 respondents)
• Two rounds of Skype interviews with willing research participants (7)
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4. Background
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5. How it all started
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6. Liquid, digitz, finger-tutting:
why study these together?
• All three are related and
referred to as illusion-based
styles
• All three focus on the hands,
arms, and fingers
• Most dancers of one style
are proficient in at least one
of the other ones
• The styles are usually used
in conjunction with each
other
!6

7. From raves to clubs to the streets:
A brief history of illusion styles
Liquid Digitz Finger tutting
Emerged in the 90s; "child of the
rave culture" (Dark Matter Squad)
Emerged in the late 90s from the
NYC underground club scene
Emerged from digitz + 'tutting'
YouTube hits = ~22,500 YouTube hits = ~6,250 Youtube hits =~51,000
!7

8. Technology's role in the history
of illusion styles dances
Electronic dance music
(EDM) is fundamental to
the practice
Media technologies
and the internet
contributed significantly
to spread of practice
!8

9. Technology's role in the history
of illusion styles dances
Partly online community of
practice who "really only
[physically] meet once a year” at an
annual convention dedicated to
EDM dance; Google Hangout
sessions and online "ciphers"
Performer identities are
technologically informed, as
demonstrated by names and
imagery chosen by dancers
!9

10. Technology's role in the history
of illusion styles dances
High level of technological literacy?
• 4 out 11 indicated ability to program in a high-level
language
• 2 out of 11 indicated a "low proficiency", and 2 out of
11 a "high proficiency", in low-level programming
languages (e.g., assembly)
!10

11. "As a culture, [our community] pretty much
spawned from computers. The dance is
borne out of technologically based music,
and many of us are in computer related
fields… What I'm saying is that we inhabit
3d computer space." (phedhex)
Technology's role in the history
of illusion styles dances
!11

12. Questions
• If technology has been influential to the
development of illusion styles dance
community and their practices, how might
technology influence the movement
vocabulary?
• Why are these techniques compelling to
watch?
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13. Methodology
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14. Close reading of digital archives
of illusions styles dance
Ethnographic data and conversations with dancers
• Posts from two discussion forum sites (floasis.net,
EDM Dance Facebook group)
• Online videos (~50)
• Online documentation written by dancers (wikis,
websites)
• Interviews over Skype and email
!14

15. Movement analysis
• Analysis of videos with Certified Movement
Analyst
• First-person insights from learning and
rehearsing movement techniques
Close reading of digital archives
of illusions styles dance
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16. Canonical techniques in
illusion styles dance
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17. Canonical
techniques: Liquid
!17
http://m.youtube.com/#/
watch?v=eL_ACqibNJg

18. !18
Canonical
techniques: Digitz
http://m.youtube.com/
#/watch?
v=w0XPJTGaeuM
(starts around 5:37)

19. !19
• Fixed point
• Tutting grid
Canonical techniques:
Finger tutting

20. Discussion
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21. Strategies for creating
illusions in illusion styles
• Spatial tangibilization
• Spatial quantization
• Rejointing
!21

22. Spatial tangibilization
• Creates illusions of objects in the performance
environment where none exist (e.g., contours,
rails, folds)
• Using the body to suggest invisible forms is not
new (e.g., mime); what is new is how it is
integral to a dance practice and how rhythm is
important
• VIDEO: rail
!22

23. Rejointing
• Handflow
• Box
!23

24. If technology has been influential to the
development of illusion styles dance
community and their practices, how might
technology influence their movement
vocabulary?
!24

25. Technological
metaphors
• Cartesian space, equidistant points along a 3D lattice
• Geometric operations (e.g., linear and rotational
transformations, reflections around an axis)
• Mechanical operations (latching, locking, unlocking,
sliding along grooved tracks)
• Mathematical and geometric forms (e.g., sine waves, 45
degree angles)
• Virtual objects
!25

26. Dancer is immersed in an environment
containing invisible, mutable objects
and structures
The dancing body has a reconfigurable
structure.
'Spatial Tangibilization'
'Spatial Quantization'
'Rejointing'
Strategies for creating
illusions in illusion styles
(Janet Murray's
"holodeck without the
machinery")
!26

27. Spatial tangibilization, spatial
quantization, and rejointing are not new
Laban and Ullman
(1966)
Forsythe (2000)
!27
Mime

28. What is new
• Street dancers, not by contemporary
dance choreographers
• Complexity of forms used (such as the
fold)
• New kinds of (very mathematical) forms
(e.g., sine waves in finger waves,
Cartesian grid)
• Spatial tangibilization, spatial quantization,
and rejointing are fundamental, not
incidental, to the styles
• New ways of understanding virtual objects
different from mime (tell us more, Albert)
!28

29. Some illusion styles
metaphors
• Mathematical representations of space and time (Cartesian grids; fractal structures;
sine waves; Newtonian mechanics)
• Geometric operations (rotations, translations, scaling, reflections)
• Mechanical operations and machine operations (latching, locking, unlocking, shifting
along a conveyer belt)
• Digital interactions (clicking and dragging, resizing, drilling down, card-based
interactions such as click and flip, alert messaging)
• Computer graphics (collision detection and avoidance, gravity simulation)
• Media operations (rewind, pause, fast forward, slow motion, strobing, frame-by-frame)
• Animation (pixel-perfect fluidity.... the "idea of fluidity" as opposed to typical real-world
messy instance of fluidity)

30. !30

31. Why are these dance styles compelling to watch?
They create two kinds of illusions:
• Dancer is immersed in an environment containing
invisible, mutable objects and structures.
• The dancing body has a reconfigurable structure.
!31

32. Structural Illusion From Embodied Motion (SIEM)
A tentative conceptual framework for explaining
expressivity and virtuosity in illusion styles dance
!32
How do dancers do it?

33. Structure from motion
• Inferring "biological motion" from sparse moving point-light
displays (Johansson 1973)
• Inferring the sex of the mover (Kozlowski and Cutting, 1977)
• Reconstructing shape from motion (Ullman, 1979)

34. We adapt the notion of structure from motion
and conjecture that illusion styles dancers
leverage viewers' assumptions about the
fundamental properties of Euclidean space and
of dancers' bodies to create illusions about the
structural properties of the human body and the
space around it.
!34

35. SIEM
When gestural movement is observed which
appears to the viewer as difficult to execute, all
other things being equal, there is a
(temporary?) preference to choose an
interpretation at some cognitive level which
requires the least sophisticated mechanics of
the body, even if the interpretation requires the
viewer to accept alternative models of the
structure of space or the body.
!35

36. SIEM Principles
• We have mental models about how the human body is constructed
and how movement is patterned neuromuscularly
• We have mental models about the properties of the Euclidean space
that the dancing body occupies
• To use 'illusioning' strategies, dancers must develop unfamiliar,
sophisticated neuromuscular patterns. Performing movement at a
higher speed, with more consistency, and more precision requires
more skill
• In a highly-skilled performance for an illusion, it may be temporarily
easier for the users to 'believe' (at some cognitive level) that their
mental models of the physical properties of the body and of space
might be wrong, rather than the 'believe' that the dancer is capable
of such unusual and sophisticated neuromuscular behavior
!36

37. !37

38. Audience participation
(if there's time)!
!38

39. !39

40. Summary
• Illusion styles represent instances where the language
of technology influences our. It has changed the way
people are creatively constructing movement.
• The quantity of the metaphors associated with a
technology practice, and the transformations that are
possible with these metaphors, are linked to
expressiveness
• SIEM explains how these metaphors are expressed
and communicated
!40

41. Why this matters
!41

42. Anticipates how technological
metaphors can create new and
expressive (dance) movement in
popular culture
• Technological metaphors that support more
variation, complexity, and detail result in
movement with greater expressiveness,
articulation, and phrasing.
• Deep understanding of how to embody these
metaphors can lead to more sophisticated
operations on these metaphors
!42

43. Robert Shields and 'robot movement' hydraulics
Technological metaphors can
create new and expressive (dance)
movement in popular culture
!43

44. A prediction: The
more technology-
based metaphors
(e.g., rewind, freeze
frame, strobe, fast
forward, linear &
rotational
translation)
circulate in popular
discourse, the more
movement that use
these metaphors
that we will see in
popular dance.
Technological metaphors can
create new and expressive (dance)
movement in popular culture
!44

45. SIEM could be used to explain
expressivity and virtuosity in dance
and other body-based practices
• Expressivity in Laban Movement Analysis is
often linked to Effort
• Ideas such as "grace" and "efficiency" might
be understood in terms of how dancers create
illusions of how the body and space are
structured
• Dance, mime, puppetry
!45

46. Spatial cognition training
Pietsch and Jansen (2012) suggest that the
ability to perform mental rotation is correlated
with rotational hand movement. Other kinds of
cognitive skills might be enhanced by leveraging
the kind of training illusions styles dancers
undertake.
!46

47. New communities of movement
expertise for the design of
movement-based systems
• Typical movement experts: certified movement analysts,
"contemporary" dancers, somatic practitioners
• Rich vocabulary of expressive movement
• Movement knowledge is localized; if you want to design
hand-based interfaces, consider working with hand
movement experts
• Popular culture matters; phedhex, Code Red, houdoken
!47

48. Thank you.
Questions/Comments
!48