e-Dance: Shaping Internet Choreography

Amidst strong competition, a bid from the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) has emerged as only one in seven funded in an innovative, joint AHRC+EPRSC+JISC e-Science programme.

The two year e-Dance project started in September 2007. Under this project, KMi is working in collaboration with leading choreography researchers at the Universities of Bedfordshire and Leeds, and the national Access Grid Centre at the University of Manchester, to break new ground in the world of digital choreography. The project will provide new opportunities for exploring ways in which dance, the most ephemeral of art forms, might be documented.

Compendium, KMi’s visual hypermedia tool, will be extended for use by choreographers to plan and annotate video material, and to capture discussions and reviews. The project will create digital memory traces of sequences that can be archived, interrogated and re-used in a range of different contexts.

The Arts & Humanities e-Science initiative was conceived to bring human-centred e-Science tools, originally developed for the Sciences and Social Sciences, to the Arts and Humanities community. It is a unique collaboration between the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

For more information contact Dr Simon Buckingham Shum: s.buckingham.shum@open.ac.uk

Related links:

e-Dance Project: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/e-dance

AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science awards

JISC Memetic Project, whose tools will be extended in e-Dance: http://www.memetic-vre.net/