The WindDancers

Imitating the Animate

        A series of outdoor sculptures created by Harry Mountain in the late 1970’s form the basis for exploration with new technology.   The project aims to translate the contour of natural forces for integration into sonic and gestural artistic expression.  Each sculpture has its own unique dance according to the wind’s activity.  The combination of the visual structure (“costume”) and the movement tend to suggest human personalities & gestures.  The project investigates which aspects of shape and movement trigger such associations, and to what extent the shapes and movements can be further abstracted without losing these associations.  By using sensors and video motion-capturing systems, the complex motions produced by different wind conditions on various sculptures will be collected.  These will be then applied in different ways – real-time, time-lapse, and compressed – as controlling the parameters of sound.  They will also be explored by dancers so that the humans will imitate the human-like.

Each sculpture is composed of an abstract structure (almost all made of steel) welded onto a car or truck coil spring which is attached to a base fastened into the ground with long stakes.  The sculptures move in the wind (as well as from birds landing on them and squirrels climbing on them), each in a particular way, but all with the three types of movement typical of a coil spring (rotating horizontally, bouncing vertically, and bending with gravity).  The difference of the movement is due to the shape and weight of the main structure (the costume) and the relative strength and nature of the spring used. The characteristics of the sculptures became increasingly familiar to us, due to the way in which they responded to the various levels of wind in conjunction with the visual information already incorporated (shape, colour, size) and the names chosen for each to reflect their “personalities” (the General, Pagoda, Spider, The Gentleman, etc.)

        We are currently working with Dr. Wanderley and two graduate students at McGill on the selection and building of sensors; then, we will proceed to:

        (a) map the data onto sound in a variety of ways, creating electroacoustic études.

        (b) provide the same data to other artists: composers, video artists, installation artists, and then compare the results.

        (c) test (with the Multimedia Thesaurus) perception of similarity between different sonic and visual products made with the same data.

        (d) test (with the MMT) association of mood/ character of the sonic & visual excerpts.

We will also test (through verbal questionnaires and the Multimedia Thesaurus tool) people’s association of mood, character, and personality with the Wind Dancers and compare these with the derived examples, to see whether any correspondence is apparent.

       Mapping Strategies

The time scale will always be mapped to time, though this

may be done in one of three ways:

real-time - virtually continuous data for a specific duration

“time-lapse" periodic samples from sensors,

compressed  (e.g. 12 hrs/2 min:  360:1)

For more extended artworks, it is possible to combine the time mappings such as using a superpositioning of real-time and compression, but this is expected to be too complex for the purpose of comparison studies of perception.

(a) short sounds at zero - long sounds, less silence at extremes