“Thinker in Residence” – it’s an impressive title. But what does it actually mean?
Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre ADT is currently Thinker in Residence at Deakin University’s Motion.Lab. The Deakin Motion.Lab is described on the university’s website as “a motion capture and performance technology studio”. For those who are not familiar with the term “motion capture”, it refers to the process of recording movement. It has a number of applications, including computer animation. Stewart explains his role in this very cool sounding facility.
“The Thinker in Residence at the Motion.Lab at Deakin University is over a two year period,” says Stewart. “Half of my time there is involved purely with theoretical research primarily into new ideas on cognition and corporeality - the interrelations between thinking and the body. This dimension of the residency also involves participation in a reading group with the lecturers within the dance department. I have also initiated a Transmedia Discussion Group - a round table discussion with leading Melbourne-based new media practitioners, producers and researchers to discuss current trends in technology and the arts.”
New ideas, discussions… it sounds heavy on theory, but there’s a practical side to Stewart’s role as well. “The remainder of my time at Deakin will be devoted toward working with Motion.Lab team, headed by Dr Kim Vincs, in developing projects that incorporate new technologies into dance,” he reports. “I am about to commence work on a project titled Mulitverse which experiments with the conjunction of live dance and 3D animation. This will require the audience to watch the live performance while wearing 3D glasses. The Motion.Lab team have already been playing with the combination of 3D and live dance but we are going to see if we can take the idea further.”
Listening to Stewart describe Multiverse, the project sounds like the ultimate marriage between artistic and scientific research. “Multiverse is based on ideas from theoretical physics, primarily String Theory,” elaborates Stewart. “So I'll working with a Professor Andrew Melatos, a theoretic physicist from Melbourne University who will act as a consultant on the project in developing the ideas that underpin the work.”
It must be a challenging role but Stewart is relishing every moment, particularly the intellectual aspects. “One of the most enjoyable aspects of the residency is that I'm given time to just read and reflect and then discuss ideas with the academics at Deakin,” he says with a smile. “Usually I have to somehow cram any reading into my very busy schedule so it feels like such an extraordinary luxury to be given the opportunity to spend several weeks each year just to do read. I love it!”
See: http://www.adt.org.au/deakin
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Main image: Garry Stewart, Stewart at the Motion.Lab
Second image: Stewart with researcher John McCormick at Centre for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR). John works at the Motion.Lab and is researching computer based gesture recognition and neural networking.