Original Proposal: Project Structure

The work arises from independent initiatives in Frankfurt and New York City: Digital Movement Project, which explores the world of movement, and Digital Sound Project, which explores the world of sound. The projects employ strikingly similar approaches and technologies, which will allow us to combine them in the second stage of development.

Director James Bradburne recently reinvented The Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt as mak.frankfurt. As part of its Digital Craft project, mak.frankfurt has developed the kids.dance project. The project has 4 phases in which the children will:

1. work with dancers of the celebrated Ballett Frankfurt, under the visionary leadership of choreographer William Forsythe, and with digital artist and educator Paul Kaiser to explore the quality and nature of their own movements.

2. explore how to translate these movements into LOGO procedures - operations that can be performed by the LEGO Mindstorms building system (donated to the project by LEGO, which will also provide advanced programming assistance).

3. construct Mindstorms robots that combine these movements into sequences, exploiting the system's unique use of sensors to allow the robots to respond to touch, light, heat, and movement.

4. participate in dance expositions combining children and robot dancers. These will take place online and in local and international venues (see the Public Presentations section below).

The Computer Music Center of Columbia University (CMC), under the direction of professors Thanassis Rikakis and Brad Garton, has initiated the kids.sound project to allow children to explore and extend the computer music technologies developed at Columbia. In the project's first four phases, children will:

1. digitally record sounds from their environments that attract their attention: natural sounds, human-made sounds (e.g., their voices), machine-made sounds.

2. use software created specially for this project by the CMC to analyze the sampled sounds down to their primary elements (timbre, pitch, rhythm, etc).

3. employ the same software to then synthesize these primary elements and construct their own digital musical instruments (i.e., sequencers, synthesizers, processors, editors).

4. use their own digital instruments to create their own compositions, and then to present these compositions online and on stage, locally and internationally.

5. throughout the process the children will be assisted by a team of distinguished composers and performers from the Columbia University Music Department. The performers will also partici-pate in the final concert where they will interact with the real-time sounds created by the children.

In the fall of 2001 the Digital Movement and Digital Sound projects will start to be combined. The choreography and robotics of the Digital Movement project will interact with the sound environments and digital instruments of the Digital Sound Project to produce unprecedented kinds of performance.

For further information on the project creators and the originating institutions, please see Appendix A.

• Cooperative learning across multiple disciplines: children work with each other and with professionals in tight-knit teams that investigate key aspects of art and science.
  
  
• Understanding and experience of dance, music and performance: children participate in the age-old arts of dance and music, two surprisingly powerful tools for exploring complex physical, social, and mathematical relationships.
  
  
• Immersion in advanced computer science: children employ user-friendly tools geared to their developmental levels, but in a highly sophisticated context - a distributed or ubiquitous computing environment in which machine intelligence is not restricted to a fixed CPU and monitor, but is instead deployed in mobile formations throughout the learning environment. In such an environment, children see that organization can arise as a consequence of emergent structure (the unanticipated interaction of numerous interdependent elements) rather than from top-down design.
  
  
• Social and cognitive exploration of new human / machine relationships: children experiment with a new social interface between human and machine, in which they endow their computer agents with a certain degree of independence with which to carry out tasks on the children's behalf.
  
  
• Intercultural awareness: Since the project uses the universal languages of movement and sound, it is not constrained by language barriers. Given the project's international origins and its extensive use of long distance delivery technologies, children will gain a unique perspective on the emerging global village.