Composer, performer, roboticist and current artist in residence at the Studio, Sarah Angliss gave a fascinating work in progress demo in the Studio last Friday. Her project, Trace, is an exploration of poetic approaches to robotics on stage. She has been working with our Creative Technologist, David, to create a system to combine archaic automata technologies with cutting edge motion capture to try to evoke an acute sense of the ‘uncanny’.

Sarah began working with robots as a way of making her stage performance more multimodal; to lend an element of spectacle to her electronic music performances. Examples of her musical robotic companions include Hugo, the head of a ventriloquists’s doll, who mouths Sarah’s samples, Wolfgang, a mannequin who plays the drums, Edgar Allan, a crow with an interesting line in Jungian philosophy and the Ealing Feeder, a ‘polyphonic carillon’ set with 28 bells, that Sarah built to play riffs at lightning speed.

Sarah described her Studio project, Trace, as a way of taking time out of her performance to think ‘what is it that I would actually like to do?’. Sarah showed us the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. These pioneers of motion study, in an effort to discover the most efficient movements for factory work, attached flashing lights to workers and took long exposure photographs of them, revealing visible trails of movement. They then made 3D sculptures of these trails or ‘loci’ in order to determine ‘the one best way’ to move. Sarah then showed us a video of The Writer Boy, an 18th Century automata whose mechanics were so complex that it could write, in pen and ink, anything you ‘programmed’ it to.

Sarah told us that in this era of more intangible forms of motion capture, she is fascinated by the above examples of more tangible, solid manifestations of nuanced human motion. She is interested, predominately in cam technology (the bitten disks that enable The Writer Boy to write). She had the idea to capture the motion of people holding or using certain objects, and to re-animate those objects in those exact movements, without any human agency. This sparked the idea of combining 21st Century motion capture with 18th Century automata. She has been working with David to create software enabling them to take motion capture data, and turn it into cam blueprints, to be lasercut.

Sarah went to Falmouth’s motion capture lab to figure out the best way of capturing the movements of everyday objects. Using a mixture of Kinect Sensors and Accelerometers, they captured the movements of Sarah eating a bowl of soup. Sarah showed us the data and explained that she and David are aiming towards re-animating the bowl and spoon without her. Sarah told us that as soon as she gets the motion of these objects right, the sound of the objects (e.g. the sound of a spoon scraping a bowl) will take care of itself.

Sarah then demonstrated the potential for the use of accelerometers in puppetry with a device comprising of two forks. Using accelerometers and servos she was able to make one fork on puppet strings, mimic the movements of another she held in her hand.

Sarah told us that she is hoping as soon as she and David have created their first robust prototype, that watching an object moving as if it had some human agency will have an uncanny, peculiar feel to it. Watching Sarah’s magical and strangely unsettling fork demonstration gave us a taste of the wonderful, surprising and uncanny things to come from her residency here.