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.
Read
about the Digital Movement Project,
and the Digital Sound Project.
Read
about the current state of the individual
projects.
For
further information on the project creators and the originating
institutions, please see Appendix
A.
Integration
In
the spring of 2002 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.
Learning
The project
infuses the development of technology with the imagination of children,
and it offers innovative approaches to preparing children to face
a rapidly changing world. Benefits to children (and to the society
around them) include:
-
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.
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