Choreographing Digital Water for Interactive Water Performance

This paper documents explorations into an alternative platform for creating live synesthetic imagery. Synesthetic imagery is created to help one embody the emotions that musical messages are intended to convey. The created imagery is typically abstract and generated according to some predefined rules. In this project, we explore the possibility of using virtual dancers for synesthesia and the piano as an interface for choreographing and performing/improvising the digitally created beings. In this case, digitally created water is explored as a metaphoric extension of the virtual dancers' arms and hands. The non-abstract physically-based digital water's movements are choreographed and performed/improvised by a human performer using the piano as the interface for directing the digital beings. This work suggests that the non-abstract representational visual elements directed by the musical instrument have potential to be used as an alternative live synesthetic imagery generative method.