Digital Art Museum
 
A. Michael NOLL    
 

Practice

 

This is an archive of the Digital Art Museum for historical reference.
See dam.org for the current site.

   

Choreography and Computers

The above image is taken from the article 'Choreography and Computers' published by A. Michael Noll in 1966 (see publications section). It shows the typical equipment of the time, often rigged together from a mixture of proprietary hardware, custom-made electronics, and specially written software. This equipment was designed to allow the user to create basic choreographic sequences, anticipating the highly sophisticated systems used today by dancers such as Merce Cunningham. At the time this research was carried out it was not even possible to articulate the figures, due to the processing overheads that this would have imposed on a real-time system.

This is just one example of the many seminal experiments carried out by Noll and other at Bell Labs in the 1960s.