Design and manufacturing of an interactive-robotic installation part of a contemporary dance show
The HU-robot project is a research that Aiep has continued for several years on dance in relation to interactive and robotic systems. The HU-robot project explores augmented reality and robotics, presenting a choreographic that opens up the stage to new perceptive possibilities. The dancers dematerialize and multiply, replicated in virtual images, projected by the robot on stage. The dance modifies the set in a synaesthetic and multi-sensorial experience that literally "projects" the viewer on the backdrops.
Studio GISTO has collaborated on the project working on robot design, a robotic set design that interacts with the dancers and thanks to the technology placed in the upper end, gives the possibilities to expand the scenography. Our intervention was to rethink the presence of the robot on stage. The intervention focused on its lower end, the base, and its upper end, containing a projector and a kinect for 3D scanning.
HU-robot explores augmented reality and robotics, presenting a choreographic experience that opens the stage space to novel perceptual possibilities. In a non-Euclidean geometry, dancers dematerialize and multiply, replicated in virtual, photorealistic images projected by an onstage robot. In a pas de deux between the human and its double, between man and machine, the perturbing experience of our contemporaneity is realized, strained between fascination with scientific progress and fear of estrangement from the organic. In an abstract dramaturgy, dance transforms events into a synaesthetic and multi-sensory experience that literally "projects" the spectator onto the backdrops of the stage, engaging him or her in a close confrontation with otherness.
For this project, we tried from the outset to maintain a balance between the functionality necessary for such a device and its stage presence, as the only object present in the scenography
His elements that we designed then: the base and the head were to contain the technology, to mask it, to make this presence when as sharp and clean as possible within the 'scene
A very important aspect that guided us in the initial phases was the search for an aesthetic and a language that brought this device closer to the world of machines, and clearly distinguished it from dancers
The base is a tripod which supports the arm, contains the necessary technology in the center and which allows the robotic arm to move around the scene through three ball mechanisms. The upper part of the device instead contains a projector and a kinect therefore has the need to "read the space" through a system of sensors contained in the latter and to project into space thanks to the projector
Alessandro Mason
Claudio Prati, Ariella Vidach
Michela di Savino