Vogame

Follow the steps of a fierce vogue dancer

My roles: Creative Direction, Filming, Programming

Date: Fall 2014

Vogame is an experimental project that brings a human-machine interaction to the popular dance battle Voguing.

With this project I was interested in exploring the idea of body movement analysis in a fun and participatory way. A dance game seemed a good direction to start the exploration, and after seeing a Voguing dancer in a club in New York, I decided to research further this style of dance.

Originally born in New York City´s drag balls scene of the 80’s, the Voguing movement has influenced music for over three decades. With its straight line patterns of movements, references to posing in fashion magazines, hieroglyphic forms and gymnastics, this dance style has its own set of rules, which facilitate what the game rules should be as well.

Process:

First, I filmed a professional Vogue dancer. Using the Kinect, I tracked the position of the dancer´s joints. The data was saved to be used as a reference later to compare with the players' participation and to calculate and assign a score.

Later I wrote a program using Processing to overlay each player's silhouette on top of the professional dancer’s one. This provided a guide regarding what steps each player should perform.

The interactive installation was created as part of the course Introduction to Computational Media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program.