Motion Bank Web Systems now offer Collaboration and Sharing
About a month ago Motion Bank has updated its Web Systems and opened them up to support dance education and dance practice during COVID-19. Now, there is a second update.
The past weeks have not been easy for many and they have shown — not only in the field of dance and performing arts – how important it usually is to come together in the same place, to bodily assemble, to really look at each other, to touch, etc. Despite all the difficulties, it was and is also exciting to observe how many solutions were and still are developed in dance practice and education, which were not necessarily thought possible before. Of course, they are often (but not always) more short-term solutions than anything you would want to continue after the pandemic.
Our motivation for offering these systems is inspired partly, as we wrote before, by our wish to support our partners in dance education in shifting their courses on line. However, our research has always assumed bodies moving together in close proximity as the basis for the practical knowledge we seek to digitally document and explore. This living matter cannot be replaced digitally, something the current situation makes clear. This seems to call for a critical examination of networked technology. One that might take impetus from and continue beyond the current crisis.
At the same time we have seen some exciting and interesting use cases of video annotation by means of our systems in the last weeks. However, there was one thing that was missing in the updated systems, especially since it is one of the fundamental advantages of a web application: the ability to collaborate on the annotation of videos and to share the (annotated) content with others. It’s something that was already in place in the first versions of the software, but never before had it been technically implemented in a way that would have allowed for the ease of use we are used to from other tools. So we are all the more pleased to announce that it is now possible and properly implemented.
The current, updated version of the Motion Bank Web Systems allows one to create groups, invite other users to join the groups and share selected content with these groups at different levels (“view”, “contribute”, “free editing”). The software update is now online: app.motionbank.org
A new video on our tutorial page offers detailed instructions: tutorials.motionbank.org
We hope that by expanding the possibilities we can support even more people in the current situation. However, the size of our team has not changed since the opening of the systems about a month ago and we still can’t offer “a big green sign up button” on the start page, but if you are interested in using the systems, just drop us a line: office@motionbank.org
