European projects

WHOLODANCE (2016-2019)

Whole-Body Interaction Learning for Dance Education

Instituto Stocos is a benefiaciary partner in this Europen ICT Project which aiming at both researching and innovating contemporary learning theories of embodied cognition and dance education, building on advances on neuroscience, pedagogical and learning theories, educational psychology together with new technologies in artificial intelligence and knowledge management.

Dance is a diverse and heterogeneous practice and WhoLoDance will develop a protocol for the creation and/or selection of dance sequences drawn from different dance styles and appropriate for different teaching and learning
modalities that can provide the base content for the capture, cataloguing and analysis of dance movement for the creation of different interactive and immersive learning tools.

WhoLoDance will support learning the essential components of dance, enhancing movement skills, and creating solutions for supporting the composition, re-use, and distribution of interactive educational content and services, with assessment and feedback functionalities making use of immersive real-time tools to learn dance choreographies. WhoLoDance will explore smart learning environments for providing dance students with adaptive and personalised learning and assessment, through multi-modal/multi-sensory interaction technologies and advanced immersive realtime training interfaces.

WhoLoDance will create and deliver the proof-of-concept of a motion capture repository of dance motions built in a method allowing interpolations, extrapolations and synthesis through similarity search to enable new and powerful dance teaching paradigms.

Finally WhoLoDance aim is to create a digital environment that will provide dance educators and students, as well as creators (choreographers) the opportunity for capacity building and networking, bringing together practitioners from different physical spaces, and will allow them to communicate chorographical ideas and movement concepts online and work collaboratively.

CONSORTIUM:
Lynkeus – IT – Project Coordinator, ATHENA RC – GR, MOTEK ENTERTAINMENT – NL, Politecnico di Milano – IT, Università di Genova – IT, Peachnote GmbH – DE, Coventry University: Centre for Dance Research – UK, INSTITUTO STOCOS – SP, K. Danse – FR, Lykeion ton Hellinidon (Lyceum Club of Greek Women) – GR.

METABODY (2013-2016)

Instituto Stocos is a co-organiser partner in this European Culture project, with the support of the European Commis- sion. This initiative deals with the development of creative technologies and artistic productions that exemplify strategies for promoting cultural diversity and idiosyncrasies. New technologies of non verbal Communication, including gesture, tactile, spatial, aural and other forms of sensation and perception, transcending the current limitations of information technologies, which hardly involve non verbal communication.

In the context of this project Instituto Stocos has developed artificial extensions to the human body that function as mul- timodal instruments that allow the dancers to produce music and light structures directly connected in real time with their body parts, thus modifying their morphological appearance and expanding their behavioral capabilities. As part of this project, a set of technical tools such have been designed. A software environment consisting of several applications for sound synthesis, simulations of natural phenomena, video tracking, visual rendering, video mapping, and audio spa- tialization.

As an artistic form of dissemination a series of major stage works have been produced: Neural Narratives1: Phantom Limb, Neural Narratives2: Polytopya and Neural Narratives3: Clinament.

D.AN.C.E (DANCING IN THE DARK) (2015-2018)

Instituto Stocos collaborate with Università degli Studi di Genova (UNIGE), Casa Paganini – InfoMus lab in this ICT European Project providing a real time auditory display of several high level body movement expressive features extracted by the Infomus team using the eyesWeb programming environment. The main goal of these interactive sonifications, is to be able to supersede the visual perception of the dance movements with the auditory feedback.

INSTITUTO STOCOS has developed several sonifications of movement qualities for this project that have been presented in events like SONAR festiva among others.

DANCE dimensions, strongly integrated and interacting, are the following:

1. Inclusion and rehabilitation. Interactive sonification and musicalization of choreutic movement (processing of sound spaces and ways of using affective music content in relation to the quality of gestures) investigates forms of sensory substitution: to see through listening. Testing new perceptual experiences of body movement in the dark implies the possibility of rapprochement and sharing (of spaces and emotions) between visually impaired and sighted people.
2. Scientific and technological research. Neuroscience studies on brain plasticity in sensory substitution at University of Maastricht will be combined with studies at Casa Paganini-InfoMus on technologies capable of seeing emotional qualities and social indicators of movement, interpreting them as techniques for searching data in digital archives (e.g. sound, music, visual archives), and with research on interactive sonification at KTH.
3. Artistic research and production. The choreography itself creates the music: dance can be conceived as musical composition (or re-composition, interpretation), changing its traditional dimension into an eminently or exclusively listening experience: Gesture, as an aesthetic object, is experienced as a sounding object.

CONSORTIUM:
Università degli Studi di Genova (UNIGE), University of Maastricht (UM), Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (KTH).