A word on these collaborations...

A word on these collaborations...

As an M.A. candidate in NYU's Gallatin School I am engaged in a course entitled Collaborative Projects in the Performing Arts: Multimedia Collaboration and Interactive Internet Distributed Performance. Stay tuned here as this dancer collaborates with artists in multiple media. More on my website at www.ericafrankel.com. Send tweets to @ericafrankel.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Last Week at This Time

Dear collaborators, friends, and browsers, allow me to take you on a photo journey of last week's class.

I arrived feeling fairly nervous, having missed the second class of the semester the week before to dance for a week on a farm in Pennsylvania with SINecdoche Dance. I'm not a tech-savvy person, and I knew that I'd missed some crucial instruction on how to wrap cables, set up tripods, and other tasks central to our work.

Little did I know that we'd be asked to rig up 6 cameras on tripods connected to two video mixers connected to two computers connected to two projectors....and have these two computers speak to each other while projecting on multiple walls in the room. Our professor looked to us expectantly, provided only the necessary instructions, and left us to our own devices to figure out the mechanics.

Being rather inexperienced (and totally overwhelmed by the request), I stuck myself to a couple of poor, unsuspecting Music Tech students who slung phrases like "pass me the BNC cable" and "I'll grab the S-video" with ease. The best part of the experience, hands down, came when I was escorted up to the 8th floor of the building, where important-looking connector cables live neatly in an impressive closet of totally intimidating techno-scramble.

At the end of the day, it looked something like this:





















































Although there is no way I could re-create (or help re-create) this setup at this point in my understanding, I did learn about analogue and digital and how they speak to each other (or don't). By the end of class we had just enough time to witness the delay between the video and sound, and wonder aloud about possible solutions.

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