Design for Mediation Choreography Workshop Experience
What is Mediation choreography workshop?
Mediation choreography workshop is a practice and training session to improve bodily confidence, comfort, awareness and dialogue during social interactions focused on the self-presentation development in children and youngsters. The workshop teaches non-verbal mediation and dialogue: Body postures, Expressions and Form aggregations inspired from the museum sculptures. Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame at Strasbourg, France use to organise mediation choreography workshop in 2016. During the workshop, mediation choreography experts help young participants to improvise and feel the quality of our bodily perception, performance and presentation.
Disclaimer: The description of Mediation choreography is my understanding as a foreigner in the French city, Strasbourg. I participated in the workshop among native speakers. Of course, I took help of english speaking classmates and google translator to get the best immersive experience out of the workshop-:)
Observations at Workshop
For the public, the workshop generally takes place at the museum premises. It was assumed that general public visited the museum before signing up for the workshop. I had the opportunity to attend the workshop while I was student at Haute School Arts Du Rhin — Strasbourg. The workshop was a part of an elective design course that attracted 15+ students to sign up including me. Our Professors deliberately inter-weaved ethnographic research and fun at the workshop to give us first hand experience of the workshop format, training and technical outcomes.
Our brief was to design for a memorable mediation choreography workshop experience of the children and youngsters.
Initially, we spent time exploring the sculptures, layout, materials, pathways, resting places, mental overloads, behaviours as groups, behaviour as individuals at premise, ambience ,staff, and workshop schedules. Later, we enacted and improvised mediation to imitate Roman and gothic sculptures. We gathered back and reflected on our act. According to me, the Roman sculptures at the museum were close knit, existed within a form, less detailed and with animal representations. Whereas the Gothic sculptures were tall figures, layered, detail oriented, patterned and well defined postures. While practicing and improvising mediation at workshop, I distinctly felt that an elaborate mirror was missing to check upon my presentation and make corrections. Not only did I feel the lack of a full-fledged visual that reflects the mediation but also the other design students were excited to look at the photos and videos captured during the performance.
Connections with mirror and reflection
Indian dance forms: Bharatanatyam and Odissi has an expression which goes like — a dancer looking at the mirror. A Bharatanatyam dancer told, “Looking at mirror represents getting ready for something and can be used contextually based on the dance narrative and facial expressions”. In Odissi, the darpana pose(mirror pose) is seen everywhere.
Artist’s View: Josiah McElheny, a Brooklyn-based artist who works with mirrors told Smithsonian Magazine,“In the late 19th century, early 20th century, because of the concept of the mirror, you couldn’t call yourself an up-to-date person or a modern person unless you have examined yourself.”
Insta Repeat: An Instagram account, insta_repeat has few depictions showing how much we humans like to see ourselves in action among other stunning collection. This makes me wonder about the innate need we humans have to deconstruct, visually reflect or validate individual style of bodily mediation with photos and videos.
Coming back to the design brief…
“Design for a memorable mediation choreography workshop experience of the children and youngsters” — Fly on the wall observation of the workshop revealed that the majority of the below activities were consistent among all workshop participants.
- Checking out sculptures time to time as Reference
- Looking at face mirrors for Validation
- Likes to Touch the sculpture to feel the expression
- Taking advantage of the Arrangement of the sculpture curation
- Having fun and laughs on Improv with friends
- Sketching to understand the postures
Reference, improv, and validation kind of struck a chord in me.
Designing with computer vision and augmented reality
After systematic research, analysis and design exploration, I narrowed down on a design concept that uses Computer Vision and Augmented Reality.
Concept: Technology assisted mirror to help children and youngsters strike historic poses based on Roman and Gothic sculptures. The augmented reality mirror is designed to encourage the participants to playfully validate and improv their sculpture based postures. The participants are invited with dialogues as soon as the sensors detect the human figure approaching the mirror. The participant can start to engage with computer vision. The mirror detects the posture, matches with a closest alike and recommends a posture from the vast set of Roman and Gothic sculptures.
To start with, the recommendations are based on posture images from the museum and historically significant and later most liked, most popular, other museum sculptures, etc can be roped in. Following the recommendation, posture corrections are suggested. Ultimately, the participants are motivated to get the posture right in a playful way. As a reward and to satisfy instant gratification hormones, the nailed down posture can be captured and a computer generated art work can be displayed. The style and composition of the art work is inspired by glass painted windows from the museum’s architecture . The perfect pose art work can be a give-away to the participants in the memory of the mediation choreography workshop.
In 2017, I had left my student design work at the concept level. But now when I look at the advancements in technology, the concept can shape up into reality without much impediments soon.
Move Mirror — July 2018 | By Google Creative Lab
Real-time Human Pose Estimation in the Browser with TensorFlow.js — May 7, 2018
