Techno-choreography and the embodiment of cultural objects

This practice-based research examines interactive and immersive technologies from the perspective of choreography. The specific choreographing of cultural objects, including chopsticks, gaoqiao, handkerchiefs, fans and red silks, contributes to the research on dance and technology as well as current debates on cultural transexperience. The hypotheses are cultural objects as instruments can affect the generation of movement sequences and virtual reality provides new possibilities for cultural objects in digital environments. The methodology of techno-choreography in this research draws on the theories of interactivity and immersion developed by Johannes Birringer, Steve Dixon, Scott deLahunta and David Rokeby. This methodology focuses on dancing bodies and objects as interfaces during the process of dance composition within computational system environments. In addition, I primarily use Emily Wilcox and Xu Rui’s studies on Chinese dance to support my arguments on Chineseness. 'Unexpected Bodies', the title of the third creation of this research, signals that the embodiments of dancing bodies under techno-choreography are not predictable. While they cannot be anticipated, the choreographic research promises a sensitivity of dancing bodies in unstable digital environments, so that unpredictable scenarios can yield unexpected gains. 'Unexpected Bodies' also entails further evolutions, marking the fact how my dancing body changed over the past three years of working on my research with new technologies and intercultural environments. I am slowly becoming other. The outcome of the research is the generation of interactive performance frameworks which enable embodiments of cultural objects and dancing bodies in digital performance. This study not only contributes to aspects of choreography and dance research in the contemporary global and transcultural contexts in which I have worked, but also to cultural studies and computer science studies that engage body-worn technologies or develop human-computer interfaces