Credits: DerLiebhaber Frontal by MarcoGoecke

TRACES is a multi-artist collaboration. It is part of the Interfaces project which bridges the world of dance and generative art. The interfaces team motion-captured dance choreography using ml5.js. All choreography where the converted into a json file which mapped all the limbs and movement from the dancers into javascript object. It's kind of a coordinate system.

Using this, I was able to use the data to paint on a digital canvas using a particle system but instead of having all the particles starting on a random place on the canvas, they’re divided into nodes. These nodes match the limbs of the dancers. For example I mostly uses the Head, Wrist,Shoulder, knees and feets as starting point for the particles. When I start generating an output, the particles start from these points.

I'm also using a MIDI controller where I mapped the size, hue, saturation and brightness on the 4 top knobs and mapped all the frames from the dance on each of the 4 sliders. So 1 slider is really 1/4th of the whole sequence. So using this I could influence what was happening on the screen but still left the particles free to do their thing while moving the dancer on the timeline.