I went to the Resonate art/tech conference in Belgrade in 2017 and signed up for Kate Sicchio’s Hacking Choreography workshop which, broadly, explored using coding, and coding models of thinking, to work with dance and movement. In the limited time available we produced a t-SNE piece using a piece of dance Kate performed in the space but also covered lots of interesting ideas around scoring dance and the overlap of instruction for movement and coding computers.
A lot of the things I learned in this workshop fed into Instructions for Humans, specifically the piece Data Cult with Emily Warner and Aleks Wojtulewicz, via the Echo Edit experimental piece.
t-SNE Kate
t-SNE is sorting algorithm that can be coupled with image classification to map images according to their similarity. We all created a t-SNE cloud of Kate’s movements. Here are mine. (Click for bigger.)
Animations
The t-SNE was made with PNG files with transparent backgrounds, which when put into an animation (such as a GIF) will stack on top of each other, creating time-trails. This wasn’t part of the workshop - just a fun thing I did in the evening.
