Ananke | Interactive Dance Performance in OpenFrameworks

Ananke is a C++ library. Ananke has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

Interactive Dance Performance in OpenFrameworks (Made In Collaboration with Mari Calderon and Erica Wu). Ananke, a reference to the greek personification of inevitability, compulsion, and necessity, deals with the double-edged nature of technology, in the midst of a society where the lines between technology, surveillance, and data privacy get increasingly blurred. The piece deals with the interactions between a dancer and a mysterious dodecahedron hanging from the stage ceiling, triggering sounds and visuals throughout the performance. The performance starts serene and playful as the dancer gets used to the seemingly innocent dodecahedron (which represents technology and social media). However, as she focus on it and bends its powers to her will, a hidden figure emerges, suggesting that what initially seem harmless might not actually be so. This interactive performance uses live tracking of an infrared light using a PS3Eye Camera. Using a ring of bright infrared LEDs inside the semi-opaque dodecahedron allowed this to be possible. Apart from the infrared lights inside the dodecahedron, we also decided to use a neopixel ring. We added this to make the dodecahedron appear like something alive, changing colors twice during the performance. We made this possible by enabling the Neopixel ring to be remotely via a Bluetooth LE and the Adafruit application. Erica Wu performed as our dancer. The visuals were all programmed in C++ using OpenFrameworks with some prototyping done in Processing. We decided to use particle animations since we believed this would be the most flexible throughout the performance, allowing us to vary their movement and color depending on the stage of the story.