Searching for Euclid was a collaborative, algorithmic piece aiming at exploring the limits between algorithmic machines and the human body, as well as the frictions and the aesthetics the could emerge from those limits. It was developed as a satellite work for the Emovere project – a choreographic and sound enterprise – which was concerned with the human body as a source of energy and impulses that, via sensors and computation, would produce a sound landscape. Hence, we proposed a conversational piece where the dancing body would choreographically interact with an algorithm, interrupting, as it were, its centrality as the main source of the work. We used thus the Euclid algorithm as the operational base of an entity that, visually projected on a translucent canvas, proposed other patterns of movements to the human dancing body – movements that while inform the reactions of the human body, are at the same time informed by the movements and muscle contractions of that dancing body, revealing an inevitable loop.
Invited by Fran Morand (dancer) and Javier Jaimovich (sound artist) to collaborate with their Emovere project residency at NAVE, I worked in team with Cristián Canto to explore the body-machine relation in the context of a dance and sound experimentation. Invoking the old tradition of Euclid’s algorithm as an actual actor in the history of culture and technology, I developed a small program which – using the data provided by Javier after reading and parsing Fran’s movements through sensors – brought onto a semi-translucent canvas a visual – and somehow autonomous – configuration of the aforementioned entity. That latter aspect, the visual configuration, was developed by Cristián after studying key references from computer art and experimental machinic performances.