Lark Ascending In collaboration with Paul Elsberg

Project Description

Lark Ascending is a static representation of dynamic forms of movement. Throughout history, dance has been recorded in various methods and mediums, many of which have conveyed its beauty, expression, and grace. Only recently has dance been abstracted through technology to create new and interesting movement driven visual media. The work intends to condense the complexity of choreography into ceramic form. The cone-like shape represents the ascent of a dancer’s movement, which parallels with the meaning behind The Lark Ascending, a song composed in relation to a poem written about the skylark.

Lark Ascending is developed from generating 3 dimensional forms by tracing the elegant twists of a dancer from overhead. The Microsoft Kinect’s motion tracking was repurposed to create an XY coordinate of the dancer. The end result is a static form developed from a selected duration of video to represent an entire dance. The movements are analyzed in Processing, a programming language that uses code to find and draw the position of the dancer. The closer the dancer is to the center of the room, the higher the sketch draws on the z-axis, thus producing the height of the work. The kaleidoscope-looking form conveys the repetition found throughout the expression of the movement.