Ella Emanuele

Ella Emanuele in collaboration with Zach Duer

Pendennis Field (2022)

Data Visualisation, HD Video, 2 min

Exploring how the agency of dance moves from the performative to the visual via technological means, dAnCing LiNes investigates performative drawing beyond notions of gestural traces of the body in movement. Capturing chorographic scores and task-based instructions, the act of drawing is interpreted as a choreographic activity through data visualisations. Using the model of flocking, the dancers’ movements became an act of drawing, a transposition of movement into line.

A group of twelve dancers strive to move as ‘one body’ and actualise a collective consciousness of movement that responds to public environments through the assertion of choreographic scores that explore the extension, reorientation, and variation of the dancers’ bodies in dynamic dialogue with the environment. Five multi-participant choreographed performances are reinterpreted through digital technologies.

Establishing a set of relations between the trajectories of the moving bodies, the organization of movement in space and time, the data visualisations apply the same set instructions of the choreographic scores to a computer software, addressing the specificity of each location. Converted using algorithms into lines, points, and coloured block shapes, the data collected during the live events generate an imagery that sits between an index and a diagram. Bringing attention to the dancers’ patterns and formations, these visualisations reveal sightlines and perspectives that cannot be seen simultaneously during the live events.

Pendennis Field: Rope Flocking, which is displayed in Aperiodic, visually interprets the score that guided the dancers’ movements during the live performance that took place at Pendennis Field, an outdoor location in Falmouth, Cornwall. In Rope Flocking the dancers work in pairs. Two belts are linked together to create a loop, which is placed round the waists of each couple. The couples move together keeping the belts in tension. The couples are instructed to constantly move forward, circling around each other creating a circular pattern as they traverse the expanse of the field. Multiple pairs wearing the belts, work together attempting the same action, evenly advancing in circular motions the pairs move to where its neighbour was, perpetuating a ‘periodic order’ of movement through repetition.

The project has been developed in collaboration with choreographer Simon Birch, and data visualisation experts David Hunter and Zach Duer.
With thanks to the Arts Council England, the University for the Creative Arts, Falmouth University and Virginia Teach, USA.

Ella Emanuele is an artist, a researcher and the course leader of the BA (Hons) Drawing at Falmouth University. Her practice-based explores dance and choreography as generative modalities for contemporary drawing. Central to the work is the interplay between dance, drawing, and time-based media.

Hew work has been shown nationally and internationally. Solo and group exhibitions have taken place in the UK, Italy, USA, France, Germany, Azerbaijan and China. Significant projects some of which lead up to publications, include collaborations with artists, dancers, choreographers and data visualisations designers. The most recent research outputs are: Organic Creative Spaces Exhibition for C&C24, University of Chicago at Bridgeport Art Center, USA, Drawing Repetitions:Drawing in Motion for DRN24 at Loughborough University, dAnCing LiNes at the James Hockey Gallery, UCA in Farnham, UK, What is Drawing Research Exhibition with the Drawing Research Group of University of West of England and Birmingham City University, Birmingham, Tenth: Art, Language, Location, at Quip&Curiosity, Cambridge, Gather Town, for C&C23, University of Chicago, Drawing in Relation, Online Exhibition curated by Arno Kramer with the Drawing Research Group at Loughborough University, I4 Residency, Virginia Tech Residency for Improvisation, Inspiration, Incubation, and Immersion at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, A History of Drawing at Camberwell Space curated by Kelly Chorpening.

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Henna Koivusalo on ‘Pendennis Field’ by Ella Emanuele

The area of mathematics known as fractal geometry is interested in patterns that have fine structure on all levels of magnification. One pattern with such infinite level of detail can be obtained like this: Take infinitely many smooth objects, such as balls, and position them randomly. The random set of points which is inside infinitely many of the balls is called a random covering set. 

Mathematicians studying random covering sets might attempt, for example, to classify the sizes of the random covering sets in terms of the sizes of the balls generating them. If you were to listen in on mathematicians discussing results of this sort, you'd often notice them interpreting the different layers of balls heuristically as the balls appearing in the space in some order as time evolves. Despite the need for analysis up to `infinite detail', the investigation of the fractal properties of such patterns is always done on some finite scale. A mathematician only looks at a few layers of the balls at once, and the fractal property arises from this finite scale of the analysis is taken to be arbitrarily fine. 

This artwork shows the overlaps between two different kinds of balls: those traced by pairs of dancers at a fixed distance from each other (like the points of the circle are from its centre), and those balls overlayed by a computer animation. This is exactly the type of picture that a mathematician would draw while working on the fractal analysis of a random covering set, to analyse the finite scale behaviour.

Henna Koivusalo is a Finnish mathematician working on fractal geometry and aperiodic order. She obtained her PhD from the University of Oulu (Finland) in 2013, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Universities of York (UK) and Vienna (Austria), before settling at Bristol on a permanent basis in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. She is now a Senior Lecturer at the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol.