From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies - Mapping Festival Geneva

A bunch of curious visuals from the nice media art exhibit at the Mapping Festival in Geneva. A festival dedicated to VJing practices, Mapping combines various events ranging from VJ sets to workshops, conferences and art installation.

In this context, I'll be moderating a conference session called "From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies" on Wednesday 25, at 4:30pm (BAC):

"Recent advances in body-tracking technologies have lead to the emergence of mass-market products that can be repurposed for live visuals and music. The Nintendo Wii, Sony Move and Microsoft Kinect are the most recent ones but other platforms has been used for VJing and live performances. This session will give an overview of the opportunities they enable.

Speakers: Douglas Edric Stanley, Abstract Machine/ HEAD-Genève (FR/US), Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Bell-Labs (FR), James Cui, VJ Fader (US)"

Why do I blog this? Working on the user experience of gestural interfaces for quite sometime, I am curious to see a different pespective here. More specifically, I'm intrigued by how a community such as VJs repurposed gaming platforms for their own goals. Certainly a good domain to see détournement and bricolage for a peculiar angle.