Body Language Interactive Music Experience

For our semester-long Project, we were assigned to create an interactive dance experience installed in the local Rochester queer dance venue called ‘süperfun’ home of the DJ collective “Body Language”. The venue was created to be an intimate social space for particularly femme, BIPOC, and Queers focused on human interaction and the human body. This is something we wanted to focus on for our project and we chose 3 attributes to focus on, Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Emotion. To capture these emotions we are using three methods of video capture that will be converted into live visuals, for anatomy we are going to be using a heat camera to capture a thermal video of the body, for physiology, we are using an Xbox Kinect to create point cloud mapping of people and for human emotion we will be using filtered, live feed video. These three things will interface with the venue in a few ways and each one of the three aspects will have an interactive portion of the venue. These will consist of boxes that are projection-mapped with interactive visuals so that people can interact with a mirrored version of themself. The second method of integration will be immersive projection mapping around the entire venue that will be able to pull from the projection boxes and throw the images up onto the large wall of the venue. Together all of this will help create an intimate interaction between the human body and the entire venue itself. The night of our experience we will also be video documenting the whole experience. We will be making a video that captures the behind-the-scenes of the installation that will cinematically capture the experience. This footage will also be used to create a high-quality promo video for the venue. For our Imagine exhibit, we want to be able to bring a part of the venue to campus, this will involve bringing 1-2 of our projection boxes to campus and setting them up in a way that people can come up to them and interact with them just as people would in the real venue. We will also have a TV running the video that we shot the night of the event on a loop so that people can get a better idea of how our system is integrated with the real venue.