Event Title
No Place Like Home; From Score to Film
Location
CB1-105
Start Date
4-11-2017 1:45 PM
End Date
4-11-2017 3:00 PM
Description
No Place Like Home (Kristin Miller)
No Place Like Home is both a community-initiated and student-engaged research endeavor and a web-based digital humanities/social sciences project; we seek to expand the possibilities of visualizing results, communicating framing ideas, and using narrative and animation in our exploration of the meaning of home and community. No Place Like Home emerged out of two ongoing research initiatives at the University of California Santa Cruz: Critical Sustainabilities, led by Miriam Greenberg, and Working for Dignity, led by Steve McKay. These projects arrived at the importance of affordable housing via issues of sustainability and labor, respectively. The university's surrounding community of Santa Cruz has the highest cost of living of any city of its size in the US, and growing pressure on its housing market from the rapid gentrification of the neighboring Bay Area and Silicon Valley, as well as from the lingering effects of the financial crisis. With significant student, immigrant, transient, and homeless populations, Santa Cruz serves as a microcosm of the national crises of rent, eviction, and urban change; the survey results and oral histories gathered locally by teams of student researchers address questions of belonging and the maintenance of community. No Place Like Home launched in Fall 2015 to research and represent these experiences and impacts, as well as to explore potential responses. Beginning in Summer 2016, I joined the research team as Web Project Lead, helping to conceptualize and design a platform that would be public-facing and capable of presenting our results to a variety of audiences. One of the foremost considerations at this stage was that the project be entirely bilingual in English and Spanish, to properly serve as a resource to Santa Cruz residents most affected by the crisis. This first stage also includes data visualization of crucial survey findings, intended to convey the level of rent burden, overcrowding, and other issues facing tenants in Santa Cruz. Later phases of the project will add photo and video histories, animation, and multiple paths of navigation that interweave in a rich consideration of what "home" means in a community in crisis. noplacelikehomeucsc.org critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu workingfordignity.ucsc.edu
From Score to Film: Reimagining the Dance of Irmgard Bartenieff (Susan Wiesner, Rommie Stalnaker, Stephen Ramsay and Brian Pytlik Zillig)
https://youtu.be/1XFSIWEmEHo This proposed performative event (a filmed performance of Schrifttanz zwei/Chinese Ballad) combines archival research, dance choreography, music composition, animation creation, and video production with the goal to highlight the place of the Arts in the archive and digital world. Four researchers across three time zones and 3000 miles, have collaborated using social media and the negotiation of four personal processes in order to reconstruct/re-imagine a dance score created in 1927 (see image) by Irmgard Bartenieff, founder of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and a rare text by Rudolf Laban published in 1926: Choreographie. Schrifttanz Zwei builds upon two previous Digital Humanities projects conducted by the collaborators: ARTeFACT (which strives to enable the automatic recognition, tagging, and retrieval of movement-based data) and Indigo (a program developed to perform command-line stop-motion animation using Scalable Vector Graphics). Yet although Schrifttanz Zwei began as a digital humanities exercise, the reconstruction/reimagining of the 1927 score also supports the creative possibilities inherent in archival research. Thus, score, translation, transmission, and traces can be integral elements in encountering dance through its artifacts. Schrifttanz zwei is admittedly an interdisciplinary artistic collaboration, but we would argue that the production of a work of art does not preclude the use of the digital; and indeed, Schrifttanz zwei includes born-digital elements (music and animation) intertwined with the born-human components of choreography and the hard copy written/archived texts. Also, this collaboration between Digital Humanities scholars is possible because of the prior work of the collaborators as it reflects the early phases of the ARTeFACT Project and research on the production of animation from digitized musical scores (Indigo). This project is intended to create a Whole, where all voices and art forms share equal value with the supporting technologies, without privileging any one element. To accomplish this, we must negotiate within Digital Humanities AND the Arts. In fact, through this collaboration we have been made even more aware of the conversations surrounding definitions of the Digital Humanities, a topic we keep returning to during our collaboration. To wit: what is the place of the Arts in the Digital Humanities and what is required of a project to be aligned with the Digital Humanities? As DH artists as well as producers and users of digital technologies (e.g. Indigo, ARTeFACT, IDMove, etc.), we hope this performance will provoke discussion and perhaps inspire others to find ways to access other ‘outlier' disciplines through collaborative activities. Finally, as this collaboration constantly reminds us: "As technology and machines consume more and more of life, perhaps theater [read: dance] can help us remember what it means to act like a human." (http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Theater-Majors-Are-Vital/235925?cid=cp79).
No Place Like Home; From Score to Film
CB1-105
No Place Like Home (Kristin Miller) From Score to Film: Reimagining the Dance of Irmgard Bartenieff (Susan Wiesner, Rommie Stalnaker, Stephen Ramsay and Brian Pytlik Zillig)
