Poespin —— Wherever Your Body Reach, There is a Poetry
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Project Overview
PoeSpin-Wherever your body reaches, there is poetry’ is a human-AI co-creating system, an electronic ritual and Oulipo-inspired creative writing practice that aims to transform pole dance movements into poetry and liberate pole dancer's body from objectification and social prejudice.
Inspired by Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, who said: 'DANCE IS THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL', we present multiple strategies ranging from word vector space to agent interaction, actively revealing and exploring the various connections between dance and languages.
Now we may answer Yeats's question -- "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"And our possible answer is: the dancer speaks (in Yeats’s words).
Initial Concept
"HOW CAN WE KNOW THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?"- Yeatz (1865-1939)
By fusing W. B. Yeats’ poetry and Chinese poetic structures, PoleSpin creates a unique narrative that bridges cultures. It reimagines dance as a universal expression, and is projected into verses, which embodies both physical grace and cultural heritage.
This is also the 1st ‘dance to poetry’ art project to interpret pole dance through computational linguistic perspective.
Approaches
Our project uses three innovative approaches:
AI-driven poetry composition inspired by dance, incorporating the circular Chinese “Lianhuanshi” (连环诗) form / “Chinese ring poetry” to reflect pole-dance’s rotational nature.
The reduction of the dimensions of word vectors creating the space for dancers to experiment with ‘automatic writting’.
The expansion of the dimensions of the captured body movement as an exploration of semantic meanings
Team
Cory Yihua Li (Director,AI Writting System,CGI) & Wendy Li (Director, Poet on the pole, Choreographer)
Jiayi Li (Animator, Rigging, Cloth Design)--NYU ITP
Archy Hongyue Cheng (English Literature&Poetry Consultant)--Universität Freiburg English Literatures and Literary Theory
Reraner Yetong Xin (Curator,Art Director,3D Art CGI)--Harvard GSD
Mentor
Prof. Allison Parrish - NYU ITP/IMA: https://rwet.decontextualize.com/
Prof. Marcel Oliver-Rose Truxillo: https://linktr.ee/mrt439
Consultant & Main Reference
Cheesetalk(Yuqian Sun)--AI Nvshu https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610591.3616427,
Weidi Zhang--Cangjie's Poetry https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3465619
Recognition
Muse Awards 2024 Gold Winner
Conceptual Design - Artificial Intelligence (AI)
My Role
Director
Poet on the pole
Choreographer
Skills
Creative Direction
Project Management
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Performance Art and Choreography
Tools
Adobe Creative Suite
Unreal Engine 5
Motion Capture - Optitrak Prime 13
