Digital Intermedia Collaborative Platform

Supported by a Digital Humanities Grant, 2015

Lisa Wymore, working with Adrian Freed from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, created a new performance and exploration space in the Z-Lab. They worked together to build a digital platform to investigate human/computational interactivity. Currently UC Berkeley lacks dedicated digitally enhanced spaces in which to gather dance artists, computer scientists, sound/music composers, and technologists interested in working collaboratively. The platform includes three major digital hardware technologies: 1) depth sensing cameras to capture three-dimensional visual data of the body, 2) wearable, inertial sensors to detect velocity and body patterns, 3) heart rate and respiration sensors to capture more internal body data. These well-tested and commercially available sensors combined with CNMAT based software including Open Sound Control (OSC), “o.” and “o.io” were optimized within the dedicated dance studio (Z-Lab) to create a robust and user friendly platform. In essence we were creating an interactive research space that could be “plugged in” and would be available for classes, performances, and research. Several deliverable outcomes include: 1) creative and reliable hardware configurations; 1) new open source software; 3) reliable body and music/sound based performances; 4) a public document sharing protocols for creating a similar platform within other institutional settings.

Other partners/collaborators working on the DICP project are:

John MacCallum

Rama Gottfried

Ian Heisters

Sheldon Smith

Teoma Naccarato