The interaction course started in February, 2001. Please see the course description for more details at http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/courses/mov-sound/.

pillow
Being almost completely ignorant of dance and electro-accustic music, I had no idea of what I was getting into when I decided to take this class. I felt after our first few meetings that the technology itself was incredibly seductive. In a sense that seemed to me to mirror the current state of our internet, techie present. Watching the composers and dancers exploring the technology made me think about cyborgs and our relationships to technology in our everyday life. I thought perhaps there might be a way that we could have a dancer or violinist interact with a physical manifestation of technology as a kind of duet or seranade. That is where the "pillow" came from. I thought if we could use pneumatics we could occupy a large volume easily. Perhaps by having this pillow "breathe" we might begin to point to the life inside the machines around us. Alex proposed that we make the pillow out of "wee wee pads" it seems silly or even juvenile, but I think that if you look at the wee wee pad as being a technological intervention into a most basic part of being alive, it becomes a pointed commentary about where we are as humans. Living beings are really just membranes that absorb and excrete. Art, music, dance, culture, technology, these too are excretions. Breathing is (inspiration/exhalation) is a constant, continous, process of absorbtion and excretion.

isolation booth
This portion of the project came about from a request by Nicholas, for an isolation chamber. Maja would be providing the base sounds that Liz and Diana would be altering during their duet. Nicholas wanted a means of having Maja present on stage but unheard. Initial ideas revolved around a kind of "telephone booth", with windows so that the audience could see that Maja was actually playing. To make a more efficient use of space I then thought of making the booth 5 or 6 sided. When we met to discuss the booth, the idea of making the booth as form fitting as possible occurred. I liked the idea of making a violinist's case. Maja was absent that day so very rapidly we decided to enclose her in a case, not unlike a hard shell cello case. The idea being that the form of the case would be a reflection of a particular Violinist playing a particular composition. Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to construct such a case properly. I plan on making such a case for our later show. For now I am aiming to make an isolation booth that is teardrop shaped in plan. This will be a fairly efficient use of materials and will be relatively easy to build.

inflation suit
After watching the early attempts to get the Diem Suit and it's attendant patches running, I was struck by the notion that the technology was in fact a constraint. I thought that perhaps one could design a patch for the Diem Suit that might function as a sort of imprisoning device. I was already excited about the possibility of using pneumatics or simply air for the pillow and I extended the idea to a suit that might inflate itself, ultimately restricting the available motions of the wearer. Perhaps this inflation might be tied into the kinds of interactive feedback that was being utilized to filter the sound. At this point a number of technical issues related to the implementation of such a suit have yet to be solved. The dancers naturally desire a system that is as small and discrete as possible. While the ultimate intention is to restrict the dancer's motion as much as possible, initially I would like to see them as free as possible from encumberance.

ic233@columbia.edu