In the summer of 1999, together with Raymond le Gué, one of the pioneers in the area of virtual television, and the dance company Krizstina de Châtel, I have been building virtual environments. Four dancers were activating sensors by their movements. In this way the dancers were creating a constantly varying stage design, projected on a large screen. Image, light and sound was working interactively together.

The technologies:

We have used a MLD follow-spot-tracking system to generate MIDI events. The area of the stage was divided into "pieces of a cake". Primarily this was done within the provided MLD software interface. Then the stage itself had to be calibrated into correspondending segments. Four different dancers were equiped with an ultrasonic emitter and each of them could trigger a MIDI signal in the relative area. When a dancer was crossing a particular part of the stage, a certain MIDI event has been generated. These signals weere going through the MLD computer system into three more boxes: one for the light, one for the music and one for the visuals.

The visuals:

We have used three different technical stage designs to transform electric signals into visuals: In the first part of the dance show we had eight segments (picture No 1).
If a dancer was crossing a certain segment, the MIDI signal opened a virtual door just behind this correspondending section as part of the projected animations. Behind that door a picture became visible. When the dancer was leaving that area, the door was shut again. The displayed pictures behind the doors were mapped onto a revolving cylinder and were changing in predefined time steps. The second setup (picture No 2) was similar to the first, but here we had four doors only. Furthermore in this setup the timing of the opening and closing was slightly different. In the third setup we did not use sections at all. Instead we used the complete area and triggered the absolute position of the dancers in xyz. Then 3D objects were used to be put onto these pathes. The result was an interactive painting by dancing. A serial interface had to be set up to get the data into the animation software.

I used Houdini 3.1 to import, filter and transform the MIDI- respective serial data into interactive live visuals. I have used this software also for modeling, compositing, animating and rendering some short movies and texturemaps. Houdini was installed on an Intergraph box. It was equiped with a dual Xeon CPU with 600 MHz each, a gigabyte RAM and two Wildcat 64 MB graphic boards.
A special thanks to former Side Effects supporter Rob Bairos. Also to Greg Hermanovic, who supported me on the job during the last two nights before the premiere.