Coming in to View: Explorations of Radical Shifts in Beauty Outdoors

Nature, and the world around us, is changing, evolving, rapidly, fluidly. Metamorphosing in front of our eyes with climate, political, social, economic and environmental upheaval. Our personal appreciation of landscapes encompasses all those places we may have touched, visited, or seen. Inevitably, a radical shift in our notions of beauty in the outdoors is underway across all types, from inner city to wilderness. Landscapes confront and influence our physiological, psychological, and aesthetic relationship with the natural world. We question what we see. How does the ambiguity of the present and future view relate to past appreciation? What does the future hold for our love of the outdoors? Environmental, artistic, design and planning realities are already conditioning responses across the planet’s amazing landscapes. This book’s narrative arc of 17 separate essays travels through landscapes from the National Mall in Washington DC to the remote highlands of Mongolia. Uncovering the strains and indications of change in what we now experience outdoors, anywhere, everywhere, whether familiar or unfamiliar, these essays seek to open our eyes to new prospects of landscape appreciation.

Time Garden is a suite of 3D dance animations imagining a cybernetic future in which bodies, minds, and identities become fragmented across physical and digital spaces. We speculate: what myths will our new chimeric intelligences tell? What gods will they worship? What rituals of movement will they perform in a joyful or funereal act of familiarizing and refamiliarizing themselves with sensation? The presentation details the project's technical workflow: integrating movement artist Scotty Hardwig's motion capture data into the Unity game engine; mapping that movement onto avatars navigating virtual environments built from human anatomy by Zach Duer; and transmitting the avatar data to Max/MSP, where composer Charles Nichols maps it to musical parameters to manipulate a vocal score.

Dances for Wormwood situates virtuality and artificial intelligence within live dance performance. At midnight, a dancer embarks upon a summoning using his webcam and witching herbs. He brings forth Wormwood, a creature-system that grows in power and desire, offering divine answers to the human condition. The piece tests the possibilities and limits of large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI) in movement performance. In this lecture, we detail how the system generates poetic and literary interpretations of the movement it observes, functioning as a witness, collaborator, manipulator, and unstable oracle.