Today at 4am USA Eastern Standard Time, and 6pm in Brisbane Australia, the interactive Waterwheel platform will launch with a crew of collaborators and audience members from around the world converging online in real time. Waterwheel is an ongoing interactive, collaborative platform for performance, presentation and exchange exploring water, as a topic of politics, science and metaphor. The brain child of Brussel’s born Suzon Fuks, a media artist, choreographer and director, the project developed out of her growing interest in global water politics and the richness of the topic for artistic expression.

Last week as the site was in its final stages of tweaking, Fuks gave me a tour of the platform and showed me all the things it can do. Along with her team of technicians and artists Fuks has created a very sophisticated site, one that works as well or better than most social media sites or online conferencing platforms. With years of experience designing intermedia and live networked performances, Fuks knew what she wanted, and what was needed to achieve the intentions of the site. Each section of the site is modeled to emulate some function of water, with the net result that it “flows” together seamlessly, and feeds and regenerates the overall experience for everyone who uses it.

When you first encounter the site on the homepage there is a beautiful wheel with 40 concentric rings that ripple with the latest media content that has been uploaded to the site. From there you can explore the raw media, or you can enter one of the “Taps” which are highly sophisticated real-time spaces to hold networked performances, presentations, workshops, or exchanges. All of the media up-loaded to the Waterwheel by users is available for real-time mixing and integration on the Taps as well as live video, audio, and drawing tools.

Another component of the site is a map showing “Fountains” going on all around the world. A Fountain can be anything flowing from the Taps (ie current or up-coming Taps), or they can be events about water that users submit to the site. These could be a performance or presentation, an exhibition or conference, a book launch or a film premiere. The Fountains are the place for users to promote their projects or events, or find other similar projects of interest and upcoming events happening nearby or around the world.

While the Waterwheel is focused on water, the platform itself is incredibly facile and could be useful for any group that wants to converge around a specific area of interest. I asked Fuks about whether she would be making more platforms like this in the future. In her reply, she emphasized that exploring water topics remains her primary motivation, however she does see the marketability of the platform they have designed and they are considering commercializing the technology as a means of funding Waterwheel.

The success of the platform is in the hands of the people who use it, so dive on in and splash around in the beautiful liquid world of Waterwheel.

Details of the Launch Event:

On Monday 22 August 2011, the new Waterwheel project and website will be launched at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane from 6pm, and online on the Waterwheel website with a program of free performances.

WATERWHEEL, a new online platform exploring ‘water’ as a topic and metaphor, will be launched on 22 August, in Brisbane (Australia) AND will take place live online on the TAP at 6.30pm – find your time here.

The TAP is an online, real-time venue and forum, workshop and stage for live networked performance and presentation. Here you can create and collaborate, rehearse and remix, present and exchange, participate and communicate—privately as a crew or publicly with an audience. The Tap provides tools for live networking and real-time media mixing.

Here is more info on how to use WATERWHEEL and view a guided tour of the TAP.

Here are two new dance companies based in Brooklyn that are at the cutting edge of this emerging paradigm.

DANCELEN(D)S is a non-profit production company that specializes in dance film. Artistic Director Jennifer Madison heads up a collective of artists to create movement-based films and documentaries as well as provide creative services for commercial productions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“manoeuvres” by DANCELEN(D)S, featuring Valentine Norton’s Project Valentine Dance Crew

Indelible Dance Company calls itself “a dance company in HD.” Mysterious and bold, their website is simply a page of their videos and photos to date. What is so innovative is not the quantity of their output, but the quality of what they make. Each video and photo project is exquisitely wrought, finely composed and emits sexy, smart, classiness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Check Out My Leggings” by Indelible Dance

Each of these companies has embraced collaboration at the core of their creative process, and they go for the best collaborators they can find. Thus DANCELEN(D)S created a video look book for fashion designer Rachel Roy in which dancers move in clothing from her new collection, and Indelible Dance created an entire evening length performance around a design concept by Mary Huang to create sound-sensitive costumes made of light to portray the Big Bang Theory.

For the longest time, only a handful of dance companies embraced technology and collaboration in such a fundamental way. To do so required huge sums of money or technical wizardry make your own gear, such as Troika Ranch’s Isadora software that enabled dancers to trigger sound and video with their muscles. Today high-end photography and video is cheap to make and can be distributed all around the world for free on the internet. Fundraising sites such as Kickstarter allow artists to find and cultivate supporters beyond their personal networks and capture many microdonations to reach their large financial goals. New generations of dancers who grew up with these tools have entered the field and they are beginning to show us how dance will evolve in the 21st Century. What is most surprising about their revelations is that dance may be naturally dying off as a separate and distinguishable art form, instead it is merging with everything else into one interconnected web of creative life.

To learn about more artists and companies embracing this new model check out:

Dance-tech.net

Dance On Camera on Vimeo

Enjoy!

Thursday, November 5th, 1:00-2:00pm (EST) Webinar fee: $18

Register here: http://pentacle.org/movement_media_artists_services.asp#workshops

Online fundraising doesn’t have to be hard.  Whether you’re raising money from hundreds of supporters or just friends and family, learning how to design and promote your dance or film project online lets you fundraise quickly and effectively.

Dancer and choreographer, Benjamin Ford Asriel (http://www.basriel.com) presents a Webinar designed to help dancers learn how to creatively utilize the Internet to raise money for their dance and dance film projects.

Benjamin’s ‘Project Paper Trail’ is a choreography project and fundraising blog that has currently raised over $9,000 through online donations.  The one hour Webinar will take place in real time, so that you will have ample time to ask questions and get feedback from Benjamin.

click here to register!

Benjamin will discuss his success with his fundraising project, ‘Project Paper Trail’ .  Hear about the different types of donors his project attracted, and how his funding project became so successful.

Learn how artists can build wider, more engaged audiences and new models to generate support.  Open discussion will be part of the Webinar, so you will have time to ask questions or discuss ideas about online fundraising campaigns for your artistic work!

We look forward to seeing you at the Webinar on November 5th.

Benjamin Ford Asriel posts 'Project Paper Trail' online for viewers

In order to celebrate the creativity and diversity of kinetic cinema in all its forms, from dance/film to gaming, from animation to mash-ups, we have extended the deadline for submissions for the following categories:

• Animation/Gaming – including digital animation, machinima, Second life, Virtual Reality games, motion capture.
• Cell phone – videos made using a cell phone, webcam, or Flip cam.
• Gone in 60 seconds – videos under one minute long

Please refer to our web site for details and rules for submission.

The First Annual UMove Online Videodance Festival will run from October 1-31, 2009 on the web with a live screening and launch party in New York on October 4th. Additionally we plan to tour a curated selection of videos to national and international venues in 2009-10.

Please send us your media! We look forward to seeing your work!

The conference was a production of Kaltura (developers of the world’s first full open source online video platform), Yale Internet Society Project, Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the open source Miro internet TV player) and, in partnership with Mozilla, Red Hat, Creative Commons, Level3, Akamai, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and more.  In addition to talks from internet luminaries, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology, the event served as the inauguration of the Open Video Alliance, an umbrella coalition dedicated to furthering best practices in online video.

Yet as the medium matures, we face a crossroads. Will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Web video holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem.

The world of online video is pretty proprietary, but there are plenty of cool companies working toward widening the playing field and offering viewers more variety, flexibility and interactivity.  Amazing people spoke at the conference, including Clay Shirky, Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing, Yochai Benkler, Jonothan Zittrain and film producer Ted Hope, plus many others talking about the idea of Open Video – the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video, which would provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

Now that online video has gone supernova, will its future be shackled by intellectual property and copyright wars and other restrictions? Will it become television on the internet, owned and managed by the few and sold to the many (along with mind-numbing ads)? Or will it evolve to become a more participatory workspace, where suits, artists and surfers alike splice media into open-sourced masterpieces?

I attended a seminar by Ross Harley, “From Open Circuits to Open Video,” in which he argued that the “radical challenges to television, art and culture made by video artists in the 1960s and ’70s find their echo today in the principles of Open Source, Creative Commons, Open Content and other emerging principles of participatory culture.” Starting with quotes from Nam June Paik and moving on to a discussion of the online UbuWeb (“More than mere promotion of artists’ work, it is a global distribution outlet that increases the value of the work,” he said), that video artists can increase their audience by embracing the technological forces their creative ideologies presaged.

He quoted Lawrence Lessig (Founder of Creative Commons), saying, “The more you share something, the more valuable it becomes,” and while that dictum is indeed central to the thinking of many artists, there’s another group that believes differently. There wasn’t enough discussion of the role of scarcity in the creation of some video art’s value, the role of the viewing environment in constructing its meanings (most specifically with regards to site-specific work and videos intended to be viewed in gallery environments), and the way in which a mode of distribution can form part of its actual content. Harley seized on the stated political ideology of a generation of video artists without really examining their social practices, in some cases ingrained Ludditism, and, for some, their resistance to upending traditional support structures. On a more practical note, Harley advocated against YouTube and its corporate terms of use, saying “FLOSS platforms give artists more freedom” and “creators need to use the publishing services that work best for them.”

This report wouldn’t be complete without the mention of “Sita Sings the Blues” by Nina Paley

While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have thought at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

What kind of future does the Open Video Conference, and all of its bright minds, wish for?

“One where video is ubiquitous,” explained the Open Video Alliance’s media coordinator Adi Kamdar in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Everybody has access to low-cost, or even free, tools and software, and open standards allow all devices to be interoperable. It’s also a future where everybody knows how to manipulate video, and where video is freely created, edited, shared, remixed, quoted and archived. Participation is king and free expression is the norm.”

Whether it’s text, music or video, the future demands digital sharing.  If we have any hopes of success in bringing the general public an understanding of our views on the importance of openness and freedom, forming a larger community with like minded content creators is the next logical step and another piece of the puzzle.

Watch the closing remarks from the first day of the conference and share your thought with us.

Still from danceanywhere

REALITY DANCEVISION: An Intimate Screen Capture of Dance Vloggers

Join us for the last Kinetic Cinema of the season featuring Boris Willis, a dancer, choreographer, video-maker and blogger based in Washington DC. Willis will explore the phemonena of dance vlogs (video blogs about dance) and present works by of some of the most notable and prolific dance vloggers today. In 2007-08 Willis published the vlog “Dance-a-day” in which he made and posted a dance video every day for 365 days. From his first video shot in a parking lot demonstrating effeminate gestures, to an entire month of posts about important sites of Black history in Washington DC, as well as 43 collaborations with composer David Morneau (who also posted a composition a day on his blog 60×365.com) , Willis covered the entire range of styles, experiments, and types of improvisation one can do with dance and a video camera.

Featuring the work of: Ashley A. Friend, danceanywhere, Gesel Mason, Liz Roncka, lee atwell, and Boris Willis, among others.

Kinetic Cinema

Wednesday, June 10th at 7pm

Tickets: $10 (purchase at the door)

Chez Bushwick

304 Boerum St., Buzzer #11
Brooklyn, NY 11206
718.418.4405
Directions
Google Map

Boris Willis

Boris Willis by Paul Emerson

Boris Willis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Game Design at George Mason University and the Chief Artistic Officer of Boris Willis Moves, a movement and media based performance company. He has performed with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, Streb, Jacob’s Pillow’s Men Dancers and the Theatre of the First Amendment.  He recently completed work on Dance-A-Day, (www.danceaday.com) a year long daily video dance project. He has an MFA in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University, a BFA in Dance from George Mason University and a Diploma in Contemporary Dance from the NC School of the Arts.

About Kinetic Cinema

Kinetic Cinema is a co-presentation of Chez Bushwick and Pentacle’s Movement Media project, and happens on the second Wednesday of each month as part of a weekly dance, visual & media arts series at Chez Bushwick. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist from the fields of dance and media arts to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. These could be works for screen that feature dance, are kinetic-based, or have been influential on their work in some way. The guest curators come from a range of backgrounds as performers, choreographers, critics, video artists, and film-makers.

For more info on Pentacle’s Movement Media project and news about the next Kinetic Cinema season, please visit our website: http://pentacle.org/movement_media.asp

(“Maybe we all dream to be………?” by T.A.G.San Francisco, shown at the March 25th Artist Salon with Jaki Levy)

At the last Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, a media artist and new media consultant, discussed dance work created specifically for the web. The question of the evening was: Why should artists make dance films specifically for the web? In short, making dance videos for the web is convenient, inexpensive, and relatively easy to do.  For dance works in progress, posting videos on the web allows artists to conduct “audience test screenings”  and get feedback.  Web videos also offer artists the ability to communicate and mix media in different ways.

Jaki Levy compiled a few videos that gave us a peek into the present + future of dance, art, and technology on the web.  Some of the work was completely choreographed, others were more improvisational.  Jaki shared how videos are created for different purposes, and gave examples of what a digital performance world looks like, including live web casts, web series, and site specific performances.

For example, Tendu.TV is looking for a mass market for dance by offering high quality broadband content of dance concerts and dance for camera works. Jaki showed an example of a show produced for Tendu.TV by Marlon Barrios-Solano entitled “Dance-tech Ep. 1“. In this episode Marlon interviewed various international choreographers talking about their work and intercut the footage with excerpts from their New York performance seasons.

Troika Ranch was exploring a process of editing for their up-coming multi-media show, “Loop Diver”and shared it with their MySpace friends.  This process is called “Algorithmic editing” and it assaults the senses. In this experiment (a collaboration between Troika Ranch and Street Pictures), a simple phrase of movement is fractured into thousands of shots in various locations all over Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3rd Rail Projects & Julie Fotheringham both used web video  to share their site specific performances with wider audiences. 3rd Rail Projects fully integrated  web activities into their recent month long performance series at the World Financial Center by posting videos online and writing about each day’s performance on their blog. In this way, the work had both an online life and a physical life that co-existed and supported each other.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Julia Fotheringham makes guerilla-style dances that interrupt normal routines and cause people to stop and observe. The video is both a document and a voyeuristic view of the performer’s journey through the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“A Facet of the Real” explored how performance in “first” life and Second Life can intersect, creating a trippy situation in which a live performance is viewed in real time by online avatars in a virtual venue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some artists make web videos for artistic purposes, others for marketing purposes, and some have both in mind.  The intention of web videos can be to develop audiences by hooking viewers online and enticing them to come to live shows or screenings, or to simply to post a personal video diary from the studio. The web space allows for both anonymous and public modalities and is as broad and rich as the physical world. What is exciting is how dance artists are starting to embrace the web for all its potential. It feels increasingly apparent that we are all media-makers now.

To see all the clips from the screening and read more commentary go to Jaki’s blog post at: http://www.arrowrootmedia.com

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse

Click here to view the embedded video.

He just posted an online version of his fabulous videodance series “GRAPHIC.GLORY” that is also for sale as a DVD (Track 2 is shown above). He mentioned that his concept is to make great albums, like pop music albums but with dance. The result is so sexy, fun, and tasty you just can’t get enough. Rock on Richert! We love you!!!