TheDevelopingWorld+Technology+Motion

[Diego Maranan]

Hi everyone,

(I'm new to this site, so I'm still exploring what's on here... )

Can anyone share ideas or work they've done around linking technology, movement, and development work? (i'm thinking for example of "bridging divides", digital or otherwise)

I trained and studied dance and technology in Canada for ten years before returning to Manila, Philippines, where I now work as a faculty member at a public university. There are a lot of barriers in the Philippines to accessing, learning, and using the kind of tools that I have seen and worked with in the developed North, and I am constantly looking for ways to link art, technology, and human movement to addressing the needs of the many hundreds of thousands of my people who live below a conservatively-drawn poverty line. The Philippines is a perpetually decolonizing state of coming out from about 400 years of Spanish and then American occupation.

The Open Source movement is certainly changing a lot of things, so it's great that tools like Processing are freely available.

I was asked to develop (and am currently teaching) an undergrad, 100% online, introductory course on "multimedia studies". My students are mixed, to say the least. For this course, I've started compiling resources and writing about new media and advocacy. If you're interested in checking the course site, it's currently available publicly on http://sites.google.com/a/upou.edu.ph/mms100/

Oh, and this is something I've been working on for a while, but haven't gotten around to it lately!

www.opensourcedance.org

And this is the major contemporary dance festival in the Philippines:

http://guides.clickthecity.com/arts/?p=3119

Thanks.

Diego

[Doug Fox]

Hi Diego,

Nice course materials you've put together -- and good idea to link to excerpts on Google books.

I think I saw your opensource project awhile back and I meant to follow-up. How is that progressing? What's your goal for this project?

[Diego Maranan]

Thanks, Doug. :)

Goal for opensource dance is to create a searchable archive of choreography licensed under Creative Commons, and to create tools that can visualize the relationship between these choreographies. (Kind of like a "X begat Y begat Z".)

http://diegomaranan.com/opensourcedance/index.php/main/howitworks/

(Thought it should properly be called "How It Could Work")

I don't enough programming chops at this point to realize these goals but I'm working on it. I'm actively soliciting input, advice, comments, criticisms, and programming help (not to mention CC-licensed choreographies that I can use to populate the database!) :)

I have a bunch of suggestions that people have sent in over the past two years, and I need to work through those and figure them out.