Performance and digital arts

This article reports on interim findings from an evolving research project that sets out to examine and document the experiences of hybrid dance artist-academics working across academia and the professional arts sector. Three round table events and an online conversation enabled the capturing of voices of those who operate in academia and the professional arts sector in response to the research project's three main aims: • To understand the experiences of the hybrid dance artist-academic • To shed light upon the contextual factors that shape these experiences • To offer recommendations that may support a productive, creative practice environment for the hybrid dance artist-academic. This article further contextualizes commentaries within wider discourse on artistic practice and/or Practice as Research (PaR), such as those from Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) and the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts (ResCen). The relationship between arts-making practices and neo-liberalist frameworks is explored. The emergent issues of hierarchies, dissidence and the epistemology of the hybrid dance artist-academic are presented and conceptions of agency and community are reconsidered.

On Junitaki Falls is a digital score characterized by the use of intelligent computational systems. There are several different approaches to the implementation of computational intelligence within the digital score with each offering differing degrees of felt co-operation, presence and autonomy. This composition explored the musicianship and creativity in digital scores employing artificial intelligence (A.I.). The musician at the centre of this exploration was Christopher Redgate, a musician-researcher who investigates the contemporary oboe. On Junitaki Falls is concerned with creating a thinking-machine counterpart that worked co-operatively with the musician within the flow of musicking. After a period of several months practice with this score, the pieces were performed at Tempo Reale festival in Florence, Italy in December 2017, as part of the 30th anniversary of Berio’s studio. About the Composition On Junitaki Falls is a composition for live instrument and two artificial int...

This article reports on child-focused reflections from research findings of a year-long investigation working with primary school aged children and young people in England exploring mixed reality play. 58 children and young people were engaged in the project and actively participated in 29 focus group interviews over time. Thematic qualitative analysis revealed five broad features of mixed reality play from a child’s perspective: dimensional embodiment, creating worlds, dramatizing and gaming, agentic action and inside and outside spaces. Through the adopted lens of children’s reflective engagement, this article hypothesises that mixed reality presents an environment for digital natives (Prensky, 2001) to play openly and creatively, and puts forth an argument for new technological opportunities and transformations of pedagogic practice.

The aim of this research project was to design and develop a dataset that captured embodied music-making (hereafter musicking (Small 1989)) for use in human-computer interaction between AI and human musicians. The proposed solution to this challenge was to capture embodied musicking through data harvesting of physical and sonic elements from a musician embodied in the flow of musicking. This report describes the small-scale, first stage proof-ofconcept design, development and deployment of such a system. The hard question here was to develop a dataset that could inform perception of music-AI so that it could co-create within the realtime flow of musicking with other machines and/or human musicians. The results highlight the importance that any modes of capture other than real-world musicking, would be a setup for failure. Problem definition To date my experiments with Ai and musician interaction have dealt with symbolic representations of musicking. These were working successfully w...

The aim of this research project was to develop a Creative AI compositional system for live performance with a human musician. The resulting composition Postcards centred around a central computer system controlling and generating multiple streams of media into a cohesive experience. The software environment at the centre of this score is embedded with autonomous or generative behaviour that actively composes the work in real-time and evokes the presence of the composer(s) in the flow of musicking. Additionally, the Creative AI was driving a central dramaturgy (flow of narrative) with the system articulating/ exploring/ exposing or revealing this through time. Introduction to the project and the research team This case study was a collaboration between Anne La Bergei composition and programming, flute and voice performance; Fabrizio Poltronieriii visual concept and programming, and Craig Vear as consultant composer. A top-level objective was to understand the complexity of working a...