DANCE²

MEDIA DESIGNER

PRAx, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, JAN 2025

ABOUT

DANCE² is a multidisciplinary research and immersive performance project in which audience members answer questions via their smartphones to interact with the performance. Their answers determine the choreography of human and robotic dancers as well as the media, lights, and sound design environment. Audience answers are also fed into Stable Diffusion alongside a live camera feed of the performance to synthesize unique real-time AI graphics.

Through their choices, the project explores the audience’s relationship to emerging technology and how much agency they feel they have over its future impact on society.

THE TEAM

Director:  Jonathan David Martin

Choreographer: Adriane Fang

Interface Designer & Systems Architect: Bill Kules

Technical Lead: Huaishu Peng

Sound Designer: Samuel Crawford

Media Designer: Tim Kelly

Costume Designer: Tori Niemic

Lighting Designer: Scott Monin

Scenic Designer: Margarita Syrocheva

Dancers: Patricia Mullaney-Loss, Amber Chabus, Zoe Cushman Walders, Angela Smith, Adriane Fang, Bill Kules, Anna Adhikari

Production & Stage Manager: Tori Schuchmann

Robot & UI Engineer: Anup Sathya Kumar

Robot Engineer: Jiasheng Li

Communications Engineer: Christopher Maxey

Associate Media Designer: Paul Deziel

Website Designer/Data Researcher: Kriti Singh

Data Visualization Researcher: Arshnoor Bhutani

AI and Media Consultants: Safety Third

Choreo & Robotics Assistant: Julie Zalalutdinov​

Media and Systems Contributor: Mark Williams

Created through the generous support of an Arts for All Arts AMP Collaborative Faculty Grant, UMD Immersive Media Design program, UMD School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UMD College of Information Studies, UMD Department of Art, and UMD Department of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences.

PHOTOS

Photos by Emily Pan