01.
02.
03.
04.
06.
07.
08.
09.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
References
Week 1/2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Week 14
Week 15
Project summary:
Flux sees the dance floor as a single living system, where the crowd's movement dictates the sounds and images around them in real time.
There was a time when nightlife merged high art, music, performance, and visual arts together. Today, this merge no longer exists. The dancer remains stationary & disconnected from what they are watching; the performer can't interpret the energy of the room. Flux attempts to re-establish the synthesis of the original experience for an audience under the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. Gesamtkunstwerk translates to Total Art Work or a complete work of art that unites all artistic disciplines - in this case, sound, lighting, images, and movement - into a singular experience.
Above the crowd is a camera that doesn’t record video. Instead, it measures pixel displacement between frames. The measure of those displaced pixels becomes two metrics, immediate and accumulated energy. Immediate energy shifts up and down as dancers move. Accumulated energy stores this movement; it only ever climbs throughout the night. This camera frame-by-frame analysis is projected and fed back into itself, allowing audience members to dance along with their image and create ephemeral trails. This lets them see their impact on the room, adding to the engagement. Both energy values are fed into Ableton Live, which then creates ambiance, textures, and other effects on the sound of the dance floor. Additionally, the values are also sent to Max MSP, where video is synthesized and manipulated in real time. When all is combined, the dancefloor becomes something that is alive, responsive, and breathing.
Influences and research:
The project began with a question rooted in electronic music performance: what kinds of self-designed systems allow an electronic artist to improvise with the embodied fluency of a jazz musician, where the instrument feels like an extension of the body? Early research drew on phenomenological writing about improvisation; anticipation, emotive communication, flow, feedback, repertoire; and especially on Mazierska's work on Vienna electronica, which distinguishes hands-on improvisation from menu-diving and frames idiomatic improvisation as a craft built from constraint. Artist precedents shaped it further: Steina Vasulka's self-built MIDI-driven video systems, Rrose's psychoacoustic sound design, and Peryl's rule-based live sets, where a single sine wave becomes an entire performance.
I returned to the literature on flow, particularly Gadir's writing on dance music, where the dancer's absorption is the work; to Gabriel's neuroscience of live performance, which finds that physical co-presence amplifies emotional response in ways screens cannot reproduce; to Alpañés on crowd synchrony, where bodies in a club lock into coupled rhythms like flocking starlings; and to Kaiser's earlier work on collaborative, audience-driven visuals in club contexts.
The feedback also lets dancers dance with their own image, looping back into the flow state Gadir describes, where absorption in the music becomes the work itself.
Process:
I built the first version around that frame. Eurorack for the hands-on, improvisational layer; an Octatrack for prepared structure; a Max/MSP video instrument running alongside. By Week 6, I had extended it outward, using MediaPipe and OSC to track a volunteer's hand and map finger spread, distance, and rotation to a drone machine and live visuals. The prototype worked. The audience could enter the piece.
The Week 12 critique dismantled it. The "media arts pose," the open palm, the gestural performance for the camera, carries a legacy that reads as a tech demo rather than an artwork. It is not how a body behaves on a dancefloor. The interaction was visible in the wrong way: the participant performed the system instead of disappearing into it.
The conceptual ground shifted: the instrument was not a single participant but the room. I rebuilt the tracking layer in OpenCV around frame-difference motion energy. No pose. No instruction. Just movement.
That is when Flux arrived. The two-energy model, immediate and accumulated, came from a desire to hold both the room's present state and what it had built up over the night. In Week 11, the visual system moved to camera feedback: recursive loops that mirror the audio's own feedback-driven sound design, and that read, finally, as visually serious.
Two open questions still drive the work. First, how much of the system's responsiveness should be legible to the crowd before legibility tips into self-consciousness; the central tension flagged at midterm, and still treated as an artistic rather than technical decision. Second, how to keep the camera feedback unstable. Standing patterns emerge within seconds; the work depends on never letting them settle.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/REFERENCES