John McCormick

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Most Recent Affiliation:


  • Swinburne University of Technology

Location:


  • Melbourne, AU

Bio:

  • John McCormick is a technology based artist with a major interest in human movement. John has collaborated on works worldwide, including at peak festivals ZERO1SJ, SIGGRAPH, Melbourne Festival, Venice Biennale, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London, Ars Electronica and Monaco Dance Forum. John was a founding member of Company In Space, Dancehouse, Squaretangle and Wild System. John is currently leading research at Deakin Motion.Lab. John’s current research centres on intelligent agents that can learn to dance from human dancers and use this learned behaviour to create collaborative performances with human performers.

Writings and Presentations:


  • Title: Touching Space: Using Motion Capture and Stereo Projection to Create a "Virtual Haptics" of Dance
    Writing Type: Paper
    Author(s):
    Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
    Abstract Summary:

    This paper describes the work of a group of artists in Australia who used real-time motion capture and 3D stereo projection to create a large-scale performance environment in which dancers seemed to “touch” the volume. This project re-versions Suzanne Langer’s 1950s philosophy of dance as “virtual force” to realize the idea of a “virtual haptics” of dance that extends the dancer’s physical agency literally across and through the surrounding spatial volume. The project presents a vision of interactive dance performance that “touches” space by visualizing kinematics as intentionality and agency. In doing so, we suggest the possibility of new kinds of human-computer interfaces that emphasize touch as embodied, nuanced agency that is mediated by the subtle qualities of whole-body movement, in addition to more goal-oriented, task-based gestures such as pointing or clicking.

    Title: Convolution by Wild System
    Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
    Author(s):
    Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2016: Mediated Aesthetics
    Abstract Summary:

    A child-sized robot sits immersed in a full-room projection of an evolving audiovisual virtual environment. The robot ‘talks’ to the virtual environment, telling of its impressions and what it would like to see and hear. People come and go, talking with the robot about the virtual environment, and showing it pictures on their phones. The robot learns these impressions and talks of them to the virtual environment, which evolves in response. Convolution by Wild System is a unique artwork where a robot collaborates with humans to create an ever-evolving immersive audiovisual virtual environment. The resulting artwork dissolves the boundaries between computational and physical phenomena, displaying an aesthetic that is a real hybrid of the physical and the digital, of human and machine learning, of natural and artificial intelligence, and of real and synthetic

    Role(s):