Hello and welcome to my Drone Duet blog! As mentioned in the description I am researching the potential of robot autonomy in choreography, hoping to create, as the title suggests, a duet between human and machine. During this practice as research project I am utilising theories on phenomenology, particularly referring to the work of Susan Kozel and Ben Spatz's theories on embodiment and how embodied methods generate knowledge into practice.
I met Ben Spatz on a recent Practice as Research Symposium at the University of Bedfordshire, in which he gave a lecture and a workshop on embodied research and documentation. His workshop on documentation provided me with the inspiration on how I would like to document my research and how through documentation further ideas are generated. In his workshop he instructed to establish three roles, the Practitioner who works with a particular idea, the Director who contributes suggestions towards the Practitioner and the Videographer who videos the process. Therefore within my process, and as I am working with technology, I have allocated these roles to myself, other technology or Andrew, my collaborator. In the most common scenario, I imagine that I will be the Practitioner, as I have the idea of what I'd like to work with, the drone will be the Director, which will ultimately decide on how the piece pans out due to its different opportunities and limits and the Videographer role will simply be my iPad set to record video.
 |
| Andrew in the studio working with the drone. |
Today I first met Dr Andrew Hood to begin discussing my hopes for this project and my desires for the resulting piece. As expected, when approaching a collaboration project, there is always a slight apprehension regarding how well you will work together, especially in my case, seen as Andrew has other priorities such as his family and a full time career. Andrew is just working with me as a favour, whereas for me, my dissertation seems like the most important thing in my life at the moment! Therefore, there may be a slight conflict in commitments. Andrew was keen to mention that this is my project and not his, therefore he will not be stressing about it as he has other things that take precedent. However, I understand that this was Andrew's way of trying to keep things in perspective for me.
I explained to Andrew that my hope was to be able to programme the drone to do a set routine in order for me to perform next to it. Right from the off Andrew was again keen for me to not set my expectations too high, warning that programming will take a long time and that I may discover that the project goes back and forth a lot. No doubt this blog will allow me to document all the problems I inevitably will have and provide a reflective outlet for me to look back in order to move forward.
I hope you enjoy following whatever journey the drone decides to take me on!
