Dancing in the Streets: Interactive play and digital performance

In January 2005, performance academics at the University of Leeds and technologists at KMA Creative Technologies Ltd came together with an idea to get the people of York dancing in the streets.  The idea consisted of a projected light installation on a street corner that would encourage passers-by to ‘dance’, through physical interaction with the digitised projections.  The resulting experiment surpassed our original expectations, in achieving an installation that spanned both art and game aesthetics, and that became a regular stopping point for shoppers, clubbers and party-goers to engage in danced activities in the city streets.

Dancing in the Streets opened on March 11th 2005 with a performance by University of Leeds dance students which launched both the installation and the York Festival of Science and Technology. The installation took the form of a kinetic light sculpture, that continuously morphed as it responded to the positioning and movements of bodies within the space. The pavement became the canvas for this interactive urban scenography, which enticed passers-by into a hitherto deserted square off Davygate in York’s city centre. The heat from participant’s bodies in the space was detected through  an infrared camera (misappropriated military hardware) which provided the input for the digital images which.. were projected from above onto the pavement., A range of images were provided for the public to interact with and these included  swarms of butterflies which clustered and appeared to attach themselves to each person,, footprints that followed participants around the square and more abstract arrangements of shapes, lines and ribbons. Pierre Chassereau's 1750 map of York was also used so that participants could fleetingly uncover aspects of the historic city by leaving trails of light across the floor.  A game of ‘football’ using balls of light became one of the highlights of the installation and encouraged competitive team play The installation remained at the location from March to June 2005, where it was discovered and regularly revisited by York’s inhabitants.

The research focus of this project was two-fold.  We were seeking authentically interactive processes in both the design of the installation and the participants’ experiences of it. Notions of play heavily influenced both the way in which we worked, and the product that emerged. Beryl Graham suggests that interactive arts require skills ‘perhaps less like the traditional art skills, and more like the social interaction skills of “throwing a good party”’ (1996, p.171). These types of skills became apparent as we sought to involve artists, technologists and participants in playful activities of mutual exchange, arising from the intersection of aesthetic and social engagement. Games became part of the process almost by accident, as we played in the studio with ideas for how users might interact with digital projections on the floor.  A spontaneous movement where one person pretended to ‘kick’ the small round projection towards another evolved naturally within the design of the installation into a game of ‘football’, with scores on either side of the projection area. Jarvinen (2002, p.190) asserts that ‘games do foster […] moments when aesthetic dimensions of things rise to the surface’, but in this case the opposite occurred, and the moment of game arose from the aesthetic situation where artists were playing with interactive potential. Jarvinen goes on to propose games as ‘popular art’, and critically he describes how ‘one can play and consume them “wherever” and “whenever”, outside institutionalised practices’ (ibid).  In our aim to have people dancing in the streets, we were asking them to engage with the interactive artwork in a location that was neither institutionally associated with art nor even specifically identified as housing an artwork. There was a sense of playful discovery about the installation as it lay dormant in a small, unlit and neglected  yard adjacent to the main street. The location with its intriguing circling lights brought the casual passer-by into the role of participant in the game-related context of ‘learning’ what it was and exploring how the ‘rules’ of engagement worked. Jarvinen’s principles that games foster aesthetic dimensions then functioned as he suggests; as the participant discovered the rules, the aesthetic dimension became apparent through the interaction between physical movement and digital projection response.

Popat has proposed elsewhere that ‘in a truly interactive work nobody, not even the designer or the performer, can predict the outcome’ (2002, p.221). Interactivity is the product of communication where mutual engagement results in unpredictability, often arising out of playful spontaneity. This was evident in the creative process for this installation, which began with a general idea of animated digital projections on the pavement reacting to physical motion of participants, sensed through an infrared camera. Nothing was fixed, and the artists and technologists experimented freely with possibilities and ideas. Kit Monkman, Director of KMA, described this process as ‘creative freedom’ and ‘an extraordinary, valuable way of collaborating on projects’ that was usually unavailable in the commercial world due to the pressures to produce.  Here was a clear sense of intersection between different fields of knowledge that led to the devising of something that grew iteratively out of dialogue and exchange.
The product that emerged from this interactive process was reliant upon digital technologies that produced a framework of possibilities, with which the participant could interact. Was it therefore, by default, a less interactive experience? Robert Wechsler of Palindrome argues that digital interactivity is often characterised by ‘automation, not interaction’.  He explains that:
Interaction implies a back-and-forth of energy and impulse between artists or between artist, artwork and audience – not simply one isolated action triggering another. (http://www.palindrome.de/)

We were envisaging an artwork in which the audience would be the performers, without even realising it.  The images were selected and modified to establish key ways in which they would respond to human interaction. They were fixed in terms of their behavioural response, range of colour, and the order in which they appeared to the audience, but each image had a fluidity as it was constantly responding to the input from participants.  The overall aesthetic of the artwork was therefore carefully controlled providing artistic cohesion and form. However, crucially the ways in which the audience could interact with these images were not fully prescribed, but existed within a framework that included potential for significant variability and even surprise within the rules of engagement. KMA describe how their work is ‘rooted in the modelling of the physics of nature, using the mathematics of swarm behaviours, springs and masses, cellular automata and chaos.’ (http://www.kma.co.uk) The chaotic elements existed within the clearly defined broad framework that enabled the existence of rules within which to play, but it brought a level of fluidity and spontaneity that made the piece inter-active rather than automatically re-active.  The butterflies that flocked around participants’ feet would fly away out of the projection if they were unable to keep up with the participant’s movement. The ghostly feet, whilst following the participants’ pathways, would dictate their own routes to a degree.  Equally, participants brought their own independent choices and modes of engagement to the work, as they discovered the rules and worked out how they wished to interact with them. Participants could step in and out of the light source, selecting the images with which they wished to interact.  (A few people even worked out the length of time between cycles of the ‘football’ game and would leave and come back to participate in that element again.)  Importantly, the installation was most effective when more than one person was interacting within it. The square space in which the light was projected, and the nature of the projections, encouraged social interaction. One of the images used purple ribbons of light to link everyone standing in the space. As participants moved into the space then the ribbons immediately included them in the web changing the projected geometric shape to accommodate the new body This instant, dynamic response promoted a sense of connection that was fundamental to the work. The ‘football’ game was the most obvious form of group engagement, with the potential to have either individual players or multiple participants engaged in team play. The social side of the installation underpinned the early intention to have people not only dancing in the streets, but dancing together in the streets.

As mentioned previously, this project challenged the concept of institutionalisation, appropriating a public space for the purpose of producing an artwork but critically failing to inform the public that this was what it was. The installation had been commissioned as part of the York Renaissance Project, with the two-fold requirement that it address perception of behaviour induced by urban living, and respond to the specific regeneration need of energising York city centre at night. The little square had been a dead space, both literally and figuratively, as it sat empty between two buildings and was the site of an old graveyard. This installation filled the space with light and activity, having a transformative impact at a local and regional level. Lefebvre suggests that ‘space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes, and distances to be covered’ (1974, trans Nicholson-Smith, 1991, p.143). By (mis)appropriating the space and changing its perception for its users, the installation overcame the prescription that Lefebvre describes and energized an otherwise transitional shopping/walking thoroughfare as a place of meeting and dancing. The installation became an exterior extension of the pub, club and party environments of York, providing an aesthetically oriented diversion – a free entertainment that entranced night time revellers on their various journeys through the city,  bringing life to the otherwise empty historic streets. Dancing in the Streets became for some an important regular detour from their main social activity of the evening and was particularly popular around the time that the bars and public houses closed. This transitional identity was reflected in its limited life, as the installation was dismantled in June 2005.