Combustible: an early retrospect

So here we are, just before the last performance. It has been 5 exciting performances so far. With all of them going ‘perfect’…

And of course nothing is never the perfect but those imperfections and the performers response to them make each night unique and different.

This is the nature of things.

Now let’s look at from another perspective. The Combustible program aims to bring the community of performative arts and technology arts together. Where the foci are on dance and interaction.

The interesting point is both are performances. Think about video games, there is always (some sort of) a script. There might even be ‘perfect runs’ but it is the player that makes the gameplay emerge and with its imperfections all the individual stories and nuances do appear. And similar is interactive art or generative systems.

The artist creates an entity (call it software, system, code etc…) and through the interaction of the user, player or dancer… the actual work begins to exist. And each time different than the other, how small or large the differences be…

And about the imperfections: that is just wrong naming… there are bad performances, systems, scripts (which are sad) and there are outside inputs that you can use as a performer.

(Photo of MÆ – Motion Aftereffect by Robbie Sweeny)