The performance lasted 34 minutes–one minute for every additional electoral vote Biden received over Bush’s 271 electoral votes.
In California, Ray’s collar changed according to Florida tides–in Florida, Moe’s collar changed according to California tides.
The images of the collar will change in color (RGB) based on the date from their collaborator’s tides. Using the projection design program Isadora, the artists projected an image of Ginsberg’s “Dissent” collar on their own collarbones. On December 12th, artists Meghan Moe Beitiks and Ray Oppenheimer sat on opposite coastal states with significant electoral votes: Florida and California. RGB/GDR/RBG is a durational performance, a brutal engagement with time, and an opportunity to meditate on everything that has changed and been lost this year. It is also when Ruth Bader Ginsberg made her famous “dissent” statement, writing from the minority position “I dissent” rather than the traditional “I respectfully dissent,” in protest of the outcome. Gore, when the Supreme Court was made to make a definitive decision on the outcome of the 2000 election. Meghan Moe Beitiks and Ray Oppenheimer, December 2020ĭecember 12th, 2020 was the 20th anniversary of Bush vs. In this piece, the generated dancer expands upon the artist’s real choreographic impulses, creating gestural counterpoints out of subtle alternate realities. The title plays upon the role of imitation and repurposing in creative inspiration, as well as the common “mirror exercise” game to help pairs of dancers generate new material together, in which the goal is to move in tandem while obscuring which dancer is leading or following. By adding varying amounts of random noise to the encoded point representing each real sequence in the latent space, Pettee asks the model to deviate slightly or significantly from her original phrases in its generated outputs.
The VAE learns how to efficiently represent fixed-length sequences of movement of about 6 seconds at a time. This model was created alongside her collaborators Chase Shimmin, Douglas Duhaime, and Ilya Vidrin (arXiv:1907.05297 ). Real motion-capture data of the artist Mariel Pettee dancing is accompanied by those same movements imitated and distorted through the lens of a deep VAE model the artist has trained on her own movements. This allowed us to use bezier curves and segmenting to enhance our projection mapping accuracy.Mirror Exercise is an AI-generated duet. In the final documentation, we used Millumin to add further control over the warping of the projections, fitting the waterfall precisely to the water cooler tap and floor level. To create the projection mapping, we used the Keystone library for Processing to correct the perspective from the projector throw. We added some floating kids into the waterfall to create an unexpected sense of playfulness. We attempted to work with the physics engine, Box 2D, but we ended up creating our own particle system in Processing to generate the waterfall. We first discussed how we wanted to create a “flooded” water effect, as if the digital water was flowing from the tap. We chose to augment a common, often overlooked but frequently used object, the water cooler. For our last project, Kate and I both wanted to work with projections.