Choreographer and Media artist Pablo Ventura has been working with technology and with computer software for dance choreography since 1997. Numerous dance and media productions using the possibilities of modern technology come about in collaboration with software programmers, video artists, composers and with robot artists. These works create an area of tension between the traditional means of dance, and the expression of computer-aided dance in interaction with new media.

MACHINE CHOREOGRAPHY

In 1996, Pablo Ventura turns his attention to the choreography software Life Forms to find out whether the at the time revolutionary new tool for the creation of dance movements can lead to new possibilities of expression in contemporary dance. During the next 2 decades, he devised choreographic techniques and custom software to create dance works that highlight the operational logic of computers, accompanied by computer- generated dance and media elements.

Prior to the reorientation of his choreographic methods, he became increasingly frustrated by the limitations of his own body and his preconditioning via internalized habits and compositional methods. This seemed to trap him in a vicious circle that limited his creative output, leading him to produce the same type of movements over and over again. This frustration led him to experiment with computers as a means of delegating aspects of creative decision making to neutral and abstract principles that are oblivious to any bodily, stylistic and historical authority.

THE WORKS

In his work MADGOD 2.001 (2000), a total of five different transformation principles were devised. Three of these principles applied to the transformation of poses; the other two served to modify movement sequences:

• The disjoint principle was used to randomize the rotation of joints in an existing pose.

• The deconstruct principle exchanged groups of joint angles either between different poses or between different joints within the same pose. For example, this principle allowed exchanging upper and lower body joint orientations in a pose.

• The pi principle mapped digits of the number pi to joint orientations.

• The permutation principle applied digits of the number pi to reshuffle the sequence of poses in a movement.

• The reversed principle inverted the sequence of poses in a movement.

In ZONE (2001), a further development, a novel choreography technique was developed. Numerical sequences, such as a Turing Chain, provided the organization principles for introducing rhythmic structures when creating sequences of poses. Here, each number in the numerical sequences determined the selection of a pose from a pose palette. Repeated numbers resulted in equally repeated poses leading to the creation of rhythmic intervals in the dancers’ movements. A further novelty was the introduction and adaptation of musical counterpoint techniques to choreography. These counterpoints permitted the creation of complex but coherent group movements.

In CORPORIS / CLUSTER II (2003), the issue concerning the manipulability of the human genotype informed the choreographic decision to use existing DNA nucleotide sequences to derive pose sequences. This derivation was based on the establishment of a mapping between nucleotide types and pose types. Because DNA sequences consists of only four unique nucleotides, this organization principle gave rise to highly repetitive movement patterns.

SUMMARY

The initial motivation for Ventura to experiment with software was triggered by his desire to create novel movements for dancers that were as removed as possible from internalized bodily and stylistic habits. The fact that software-based simulations of the human body constitute formal and disembodied abstractions opens up the possibility for introducing algorithmic and computational methods into the choreographic process of working with the human body.

DIGITAL ART AND NFTS

With the advent of Digital Art and NFTs in particular, Pablo Ventura is making available his original algorithmic sequences as exclusive works of art (1/1) through Foundation. These sequences are all originals created by the choreographer and used to choreograph all of his pieces described in detail in the paper Algorithmic Reflections on Choreography but adapted to this new medium. There will be various Collections, each based on one choreography from his repertoire. Below is a preview of one of these sequences used in 2047 (2009):

Foundation: @VenturaMedia Twitter: @ventura_dance Instagram: @ventura_dance Web: www.ventura-dance.com

— Pablo Ventura