introduction

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.
structure
kids.dance
kids.sound
integration
presentations
first performance
Project Updates
First Steps
A Walk Through Harlem
Kids in (Sound) Space
Wind Symphony
biographies
biographies
images from the project
Contact information