DAZZLE

DAZZLE

Immersive installation with live performance, sound and virtual reality.
Featuring eye-catching costumes inspired by WW1 naval camouflage, the VR experience invites audience members to be motion-captured and dance alongside performers, shifting between virtual and live choreographies. In the world of the dazzle ball, avatars meet against striking black and white backdrops. Each audience member wears a bespoke zero-waste costume to enhance the experience, complementing the dancers’ custom mocap suits. The original Dazzle Ball reflected the rise of Vorticism, Futurism, and Dadaism, as well as the birth of modernism.
— DAZZLE captures our post-internet, post-truth society, testing the boundaries of interactive performance.

 

…giddying perspectives, algorithmic choreography and psychedelic dancing figures – humanoid, geometric or entirely abstract – that can pass right through you like digital ectoplasm. It’s pure fantasy…

Sanjoy Roy The Guardian

An experience that stands out for its innovative experimentation capable of integrating immersion , fashion design , dance and art history.

                     Rosa Cinelli Cineforum

Exhibitions:

2024
DAZZLE: SOLO
IDAF Istanbul
Zed Festival, Turin

2022
DAZZLE: A Re-Assembly of Bodies
World Premiere 79th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia.
VRDays/Immersive Tech Week, DeDoelen, Rotterdam.

DAZZLE: SOLO
MEET Centre Milan, Milan.
Craft Week London, YKK Showroom.
Spectacles Vivants, Scènes Numériques, Avignon Festival. 

2021
QUILLS FEST, Museum of other Realities, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Real-IN Creative Europe Residency, Friche de la Belle de Mai, Marseille.

2020
DAZZLE: SOLO
World Premiere at British Film Institute: 64th London Film Festival Expanded.

CREDITS:
Concept & design: Gibson / Martelli + Peut-Porter
Dancers: Alice Tatge, Emily Coates, Francesa Orlando, Hannah George, Axelle de Groote, Harry Alexander, Hannah Burfield, William Byram, Kaitlin Dodds, Ifigeneia Christodoulou, Isidro Ridout Tavares, Jingyin Cai, Maria Inês Caldeira de Freitas, Alondra Galvan, Genevieve Shultz, Tessa Salomone, Ying Hu, Amy Mauvan, Chloe Saffores, Cleo Tabakian, Raoul Martin.
Unreal & VR Developer: Bruno Martelli
Graphic Designers: Oliver Wrobel & Piero Glina.
Music & sound designer: Paul Steinman
Costumier: Luz Mabel Flores.
Project Manager: Harry Lovstrom.

Funded by:
Digital Catapult CreativeXR / Arts Council England / EPIC Megagrant / C.Hafner

 

‘Live VR experience’ from DAZZLE

Agency

Dazzle offers attendees the chance to find their agency in virtual worlds uncovering and interacting with choreographed digital set-pieces and live improvisations. Procedurally generated costumes allow audiences to join the exhibition — coats, masks, capes and hats offer an introduction to the dazzling landscape. The visitor embarks on an expedition, fully prepared and supported to explore alternate realities — participants diving in and out of sensual and visual optical illusions, distinctive and part of the spectacle. Live dancers and audience members are modelled as animated dazzle characters, assembling in the virtual worlds.

Moving in Virtual Spaces

One of the main ingredients of DAZZLE is the dance, our choreographer Ruth Gibson began by researching social dancing of the time. The post WWI dance styles included Ragtime, Charleston, Waltz and Tango. We introduced our dancers to these styles and all of the dazzle concepts, influences and artwork, prompting them to create improvisations from these rich sources. Movement ‘flavours’ evolve from these interpretations — we work with expert dancers from well-established companies; Percussive sounds and rhythms help to piece together specific steps. For the tour, our dance captain Hannah will work with local companies to teach the material, accompanied by the principal dancer Harry, who will assist choreographing each scene. 

Pre-recorded movement data is collated via a motion capture process. (Mocap is a special effects system where a performer wears special markers which are recorded by the computer as points in space, typically for use in 3D animation or games).

A library of dancers’ phrases and choreographies develop in the animation pipeline, and these formations in the game engine are loosely derivative of Busby Berkeley and his spectacular ensembles. Our performers re-learn the movement material from their avatar animations instead of from each other or video recordings. 

 

The animations consist of palindromic loops meaning that dancers recall and memorise the material playing both forwards and backwards. Through this process, the dance language becomes fragmented and different rhythmically, and the design of of the body avatar whether a mocap skeleton, or an abstract figure, or rendering, gives a different physicality. Perhaps ‘a new body’ emerges through this technology.

Zero – Waste

Peut-Porter craft costumes for both the Dazzle live performers and the audience – allowing visitors to fully join the costume ball. Dazzle clothing offers opportunities for selfies in mirror rooms before diving into VR worlds. Dressing-up in real-life introduces and physically recreates the virtual act of inhabiting an avatar in VR.  Costume and digital double begin joyfully influencing motion and self-perception, bodies distorted and reassembled, allowing an embodiment of the surrounding dazzle environments.

The team have procedurally generated ‘razzle-dazzle’ patterns which are digitally printed onto fabric. In workshops, attendees participate in creating costumes, cutting and assembling capes, shoes, masks and more. Reflecting the next-gen sustainable fashion practice, the zero-waste pattern cutting technique is used –  all parts of the cut fabric become part of the design. The workshops introduce the current trend of lending and renting clothes, the concept behind Dazzle fashion is to design for the experience age-old models of consumption rethought and presented to the public through this playful approach.

WARPAINT, WAR DANCE:

TOWARD THE DAZZLE BALL

David Surman 2021

What follows are some preliminary thoughts on an artistic project currently in development. The artist duo Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli (Gibson/Martelli) are collaborating with the designer-researcher Alexa Pollman and material specialist Bine Roth (Peut-Porter), bringing together expertise in dance choreography, virtual reality technology and motion capture, sustainable design, fashion and contemporary art. The title of their project is ‘Dazzle Ball’. Dazzle refers to the striking graphic treatment of discordant shapes applied to military vessels and structures during and since the first world war; it’s other meaning, dazzle as eye-catching spectacle, is appropriate too. But what is a Dazzle Ball? Is it the mirrored disco ball? The first such device, the ‘Myriad Reflector’ was patented in 1917, the same year that British naval vessels were receiving dazzle camouflage to confuse the eyes of the enemy. While this meaning is also useful, here “Ball” refers to the event, the formal occasion of people dancing. The Dazzle Ball is a complex of virtual reality experience, choreographed and captured dance, costumed participation and spatial organisation. It is an experience that exceeds easy categorisation, and as I will discuss, calls into question the usefulness of prevailing categories.

The project is still in development at time of writing, and was initiated before the Covid pandemic. Dazzle Ball has continued to be developed throughout the tremendous cultural changes that have taken place in response to lockdown protocols, and my thoughts proceed from the new reality.

I: MISE EN PLACE

Before we can go further I must describe the experience of the Dazzle Ball as it is currently conceived. The work is constructed for presentation in a gallery setting, to be experienced by consecutive spectator-users (I might be tempted to call them an ‘audience’, but that implies a collectivity that the experience disavows.) Members of the production team present the spectator-user with a special dazzle-patterned tunic or tabard designed by Peut-Porter, who once clothed is then crowned with the virtual reality headset (I say this because these is a deliberate element of ceremony and adornment here.) The computation required for this VR system is incorporated into a backpack that is worn by the spectator-user. So prepared, they can then move within a predetermined space that is carefully calibrated to correspond to the virtual environment presented through the headset. A series of ‘scenes’ are then experienced, in which motion-captured dancers are presented as 3d avatars for the spectator-user to encounter. Scenes progress according to a programmed timeframe. Into this is added a further uncanny element, a live motion captured dancer is added to the scene in realtime. To the spectator-user this realtime-captured dancer appears as a dynamic interlocutor. The final mix of these elements has yet to be defined, but the potential of their combination is profound. What I have described transcends any prescribed notion of the function of dancer-performer, audience, stage, and virtual reality, bringing them together in a manner that could only happen at this moment in time. 

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Before I say more, I’d like you to imagine for a moment the set up as I have described it. One or two costumed persons ready to clothe and equip the spectator-user with the backpack and VR headset; the costumed dancer who will be motion captured live; the volume of the space that will be traversed by the spectator-user and dancer; the various technologies of motion capture, and furniture (supports, rails, stages, screens) to assist in the experience. This arrangement of human and technical actors constitutes a scene in itself. The experience begins with the apprehension of this set-up as something aesthetic that will incorporate the spectator-user into its objective properties. How might we talk about this?   

In the 19th century a French cook named Georges-Auguste Escoffier, who had apprenticed in several established restaurants, was drafted to serve in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. After returning to the world of gastronomy he brought a methodology for kitchen management inspired by his military experience that emphasised preparation, organisation, hierarchy and cleanliness. This “brigade technique” quickly became the international standard for modern cooking. The kitchen became more machine-like, more regimented. At the centre of Escoffier’s reimagining was an idea, ‘mise en place’, literally ‘everything in its place’. The mise en place is more than the placement of prepared ingredients, the readiness of personnel and cleanliness of utensils. It is a philosophy of space and action that brings into view the kitchen as a kind of system governed by aesthetic criteria in order to achieve a smooth service of high quality. 

Following on from the work of Weisberg et al. who proposed mise en place as a novel concept for use in cognitive psychology, I suggest we use it here to talk about the often frustrating material and organisational aspects of VR.

Seen from the outside, what is VR? We can consider the mise en place of Dazzle Ball, the particular arrangement of the human and technical actors, as the first crucial level of its aesthetic experience but also its function.

I am moved to propose such an idea, rather than talking from the inside out (as is the convention for so much VR discourse) in light of our changed milieu during lockdown. Working remotely, cameras, microphones, converted spare bedrooms, offices turned upside down, the interpenetration of work and life that has led to distinctly more technical subjective experience. Each of us creates a mise en place in order to meet the new requirements of life at a distance. Mise en place is the anticipation and focus that charges those elements that make up the experience. Whereas the theatrical and filmic notion of mise en scène concerns itself with those elements that appear on stage or in the final captured image, mise en place accounts for the staged technical and organisational elements that are in play in a novel project such as Dazzle Ball. 

My emphasis on mise en place is significant because in so many ways the development of VR artworks has been hindered by the obstructive, cumbersome and error-prone aspects of the technology which are so contrary to the desires of the audience who wish to move through the experience unencumbered and thus free to think, anonymously, as a pure subject-individual. We can observe that the audience experience remains relatively unchanged since the end of the 19th century in its flaneurish concern with looking without involvement. At the turn of the millennium, theory anticipated practice in speaking enthusiastically of the active spectatorship that would be characteristic of the new culture, but attempts to broker such direct engagement with technology fell flat. In recent years there has been momentum toward a different kind of engagement borne out of a familiarity with consumer VR technology. Aesthetic concerns about the encumbering physicality and overly technical values foregrounded in VR has been assuaged by the vastly increased presence of technology in people’s lives such as tablet and smart devices and VR/AR tech that now makes use of smartphones. 

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The VR headset blinds and deafens the spectator-user to the outside world of the real, and compensates by providing them with a virtual environment. By participating in the mise en place of the Dazzle Ball, in which the technicians and dancers are ambiguously both subjects and objects (objectified by the strictly demarcated roles in the ordered space of the work) the spectator-user becomes an object themselves. This willingness to become subject-as-object prevails in our late capitalist culture in which the subject is — from the outset — documented, quantified, nudged and controlled by technical and institutional processes, and further participates by willingly/unwillingly giving over data in exchange for social and cultural capital and technological efficiencies.

The mise en place of Dazzle Ball evokes many precedents. Such an arrangement of actors brings to mind the Covid inoculation booths that occupy every community, with the medical instruments arranged with the necessary rigour, and into which we step willingly in order to receive the transformative vaccine. Might we say that for a moment before stepping in, we experience such an event as an image, staged according to a necessary mise en place, in which we will play a crucial role? As our consciousness continues to adapt to an increasingly systematic way of living, and we live and work alongside technical actors such as AI agents, robots and other autonomous elements, so we become another functional object in the greater mise en place that seeks further productivity and efficiency from its constituent elements.

Seen as a mise en place, the view of the spectator-user as they approach the work is a horizon of mixed expectations, wondering what role or function each person and object before them might play. Sensations of excitement and anticipation surround the certain knowledge that the mise en place exists to deliver to them an experience of the Dazzle Ball, and at the same time they will be transformed into a strange quasi-subject-object for those that see them, including the attendant crew.

 As such the VR headset experience is constituted of two parts, the virtual environment delivered to the senses, but also the knowledge of oneself in VR, objectified. The artistic potential of VR requires us to attend to both aspects, something that Dazzle Ball anticipates and develops.

What distinguishes Dazzle Ball from other VR artworks is the willingness to emphasise the experience of all involved and their attendant roles on both objective and subjective levels, in what I have called a distinct mise en place, everything in its place. These aspects are no longer forgettable inconveniences on the way to an immersive VR experience, but a material with aesthetic potential that remains functionally necessary. 

In film culture mise en scène refers to the use of setting, costuming, lighting and movement of actors and elements to compose the scene. One might say that such a term is more appropriate to describe what is happening in a work such as Dazzle Ball, but it is important to consider in film the separation of the scene from the behind-the-scenes; conventional film form relies on a disavowal of the technologies of production, in order to convey the reality of the film. While there are aspects of the virtual environment that are not demonstrated to the spectator-user of Dazzle Ball, the fundamental artifice is foregrounded by the mise en place.

It is clear then that the goal is not to simply lose oneself in the experience, as imagined in the pop culture image of VR, but rather to explore the productive tension of being in two places at once, the virtual and the real of the mise en place. The realtime motion captured presence of the dancer as a Charon-like seafarer between worlds emphasises this point. The work then draws attention to the pressure placed upon categories such as ‘real’ by the technological image culture which simultaneously operates as a means of expressing our individuation while also objectifying us, rendering us as data, mapping and tracking us as a data object within a larger system. Under such assaults the mise en place of the work emphasises our complicity in becoming objectified, but here in the Dazzle Ball we become art objects, shrouded in garments and technologies of vision.  

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II: THE CRAZY YEARS 

Having emphasised the particular set up of the work with the notion of mise en place, we can now move to talk more specifically about the content of the work, the costumes and ultimately the virtual environment and choreography contained there. It was necessary to precede this with a discussion of mise en place because Dazzle Ball involves many functional elements that cannot simply be passed over in favour of discussing the phenomenal world within the headset. This emphasis on function and utility is expressed within the mise en place through costume, and it is in those costume and jewellery elements created by Peut-Porter that the aesthetics of Dazzle are notably used. 

What is ‘Dazzle’? What we see is a vivid black and white pattern printed onto the textile that forms the basis for the costume. The pattern breaks up the silhouette, metabolising the main forms of the body into many smaller subsections. Edges become indistinct and body forms do not sit in space with the same clarity. In 1917, during the Great War, when German U-boats were attacking British sea vessels, an officer called Norman Wilkinson conceived of a solution centred on optics. By making British ships much harder to target in space through the use of Dazzle the effectiveness of the U-boats could be challenged. Many hundreds of ships were painted using distinctive patterns that resonated clearly with the stated goals of the Cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso — the destruction of spatial order, the conflation of foreground and background, a totally new planar system. In response to seeing military dazzle ‘camouflage’, Picasso stated ‘Yes, it is we who made it, that is cubism.’   

But why invoke his historic reference, so firmly linked to the early 20th century and the rapid escalation of war technology?

 As we will see, Dazzle Ball calls upon a host of references back to a century ago, with the goal of drawing parallels between that time and our present fractious moment. One major difference exists of course in the consciousness connected to modernity, and the grand narratives of progress and history that no longer characterise our culture. As a context to this, we can draw a distinction between two worlds, First the world of the disciplinary society as Foucault has described it of the early-to-mid 20th century, with its emphasis on enclosed institutional values, so perfectly encapsulated in Escoffier’s “brigade technique” kitchen, or the strict regimens of submariners who function like organs in a machine. The second is the world of the society of control, as conceived by Gilles Deleuze, that has emerged over the past thirty years, with its emphasis on the quantified self as it exists in constant unstable transformation between never ending demands. The observational prerogatives of the disciplinary society triggered an internal behavioural reflex, good behaviour, regardless of whether the camera was manned. In the society of control the camera extracts information, and you are ‘free’ to perform in front of the camera as a kind of object that sheds data and is controlled by way of access to that and other data. For example: ‘I went over my overdraft, and the machine ate my card.’ 

In societies of control the primary axis of conflict is digital, between states who wage hidden cyberwar against one another, and between the state and its citizens who constantly struggle to meet the ever changing demands of late-stage stakeholder capitalism that constantly tinker with the parameters of money, work, recreation and welfare to leverage greater informational control. As the management of the society of control is handed from governments to financial and corporate institutions, the extractive imperative grows ever stronger, and we are encouraged to circulate and exercise our ‘freedom’. 

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Dazzle in the context of the control society is not simply a nostalgic aesthetic turn in the centenary years after the Great War, but a weapon in our imaginative war with the systems that encompass us. Just as forms of make-up have been used to interfere with the facial recognition software installed throughout various city infrastructures, so the Dazzle costume announces itself as a means of hiding-without-hiding, but rather hiding by thwarting a machine. Just as with Wilkinson’s invention, the goal is not to disappear, but rather to be vividly there, just problematically so from the perspective of machine optics. While the performers within Dada happenings conflated art with leisure and nonsensical play in order to thumb their noses at the institutional demands of the disciplinary society in which they found themselves, these artists adopt different strategies, drawing attention to the mise en place of our tech-heavy experience economy, its sensory pleasures and objectifications. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries critics of modernity cited the transformative effects of mechanisation on the mind, body and environment, of the subordination of the human to the machine in a master/slave inversion. In the control society such tensions remain but no longer fixate on the suppression of human vitality, since the performing body is so necessary in the relentless ego formation at the core of the information economy. 

III: ORNAMENTAL DISGUISE

The spectator-user of the Dazzle Ball approaches to take their place in the mise en place. They’re helped into their costume, swathed in dazzle patterns — adorned for the experience that is about to take place. They’re now dressed like the crew, a kind of uniform that speaks of being seen but also refuting machine vision. The spectator-user then receives the VR headset and backpack.

At this moment they begin a period of transition in which one becomes simultaneously aware of the requirements of the technology, the terms of engagement, but also a reserve of thought remains dedicated to being in the mise en place as a quasi-subject-object. Where can I go? Can I leave? Will I bump or break something or someone? These thoughts are allayed by the VR experience itself, that puts forth rhythms and ranges of movement that ultimately control to some degree the spectator-user. Again, it is important to highlight the distinction between this and prior forms of engagement with art, with the exception of certain instances of performance happenings and so on. The spectator is burdened, objectified and incorporated into a dynamic mise en place in ways that do not apologetically disavow these factors. 

The spectator-user is finally inside the VR headset, and the Dazzle Ball experience is revealed. A series of scenes is enacted before them, in which dancing figures engage with architectural spaces reminiscent of the dance sets of Busby Berkeley, deco buildings of the 1920s and brutalist facades. 

The virtual environment is one in which the human is at home, whereas in the real world of nature man is always an intruder. To borrow an analogy from Vilem Flusser, in the forest a branch becomes a stick when we tear it from the tree; we produce the stick (culture) from the branch (nature). Branch in hand, we can go about striking other branches from the tree, producing more sticks. If sticks are valued, we produce value, and overcome a certain alienation that man feels in nature. And yet, once we have made a great many sticks, and are burdened by their value, does culture not oppress us just as nature did before we set out against it?

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We are conditioned or challenged by the results of our labour more than by the nature from which it came. Why do I speak of this? In the virtual environment, everything is already culture, but it is spatialised and placed as if in nature, hijacking the properties of our binocular vision. The value of everything has already been transformed from light and movement via digital tools into virtual substance. That is not to say that virtual environments cannot be oppressive akin to nature in its raw form, but rather that we experience them as culture, that is, already transformed as art with an organised value system. 

We do not invade virtual worlds, we step into them, where transformations have already taken place. This point is expressed practically in the scenes that comprise Dazzle Ball. The virtual dancers, choreographed and captured by Gibson/Martelli, are not presented as realist depictions of the human form. Instead they are metabolised, given forms that maximise their vitality, expressive of the idea of Dazzle taken to a logical extreme. Bodies of pure shape, contoured according to their place in the virtual mise en scène. One dancer, duplicated many times, performs a kind of line formation, reminiscent of the can-can danced by the Folies Bergere, Rockettes, or Tiller Girls. This virtual dancer is animated by motion capture data, duplicated many times, thus realising virtually the ambitions of the choreographers of the 1920s and 30s who, as Siegfried Kracauer has discussed, sought to create rhythmic, ornamental dances without the distracting distinctiveness of dancer identity. By motion capturing the performance and using that motion data to drive a virtual dancer, only the motion is an index of individuality, and even then such motion data is cleaned and manipulated. In this scene other movements come into play, it is not simply an homage or parody of the screen dance cultures of the 1920s and 30s.

 The virtual costume of this set of avatar-dancer-clones recalls the stage costume designs of Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie, with the particular semi-circle leg motif allowed to dictate the character from head to toe. Throughout the choreography and scene constructions metamorphosis, change and mutation are emphasised, the work remains an open structure in which new motion capture files and dancer avatar models can be added, even generated. 

The team making Dazzle Ball now speak tentatively about the ability to include multiple spectator-users in these spatialised virtual scenes. As such it would be of interest to give the spectator-users virtual bodies in order to locate one another in the world. Bruno Martelli has suggested that a person’s date of birth, a series of eight digits, might act as a numerical seed in the generation of a unique avatar. The person is welcome at this point in the mise en place to input a different number, a birthdate from the far future or the distant past, the system simply uses this numerical seed to generate a form. Here the work speaks to the precise conditions of contemporary life, in which the society of control invites you to give over data in order to process and categorise you and construct an image of some partial aspect of you useful to a system. But here it remains performative and reflective, inviting us to contemplate the various digital immersions we go through in order to function in the technological society of the present.

Dazzle Ball is in development. The combined efforts of Gibson/Martelli, Peut-Porter and their other collaborators are building a work that crosses many thresholds, from version to version, increasing in both ambition and implication. The work is already full of beauty and vitality — the dancers allude to the mass-formation movements of the early twentieth century in one scene, but then break into solemn and richly articulated movement in another.

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The architectural atmosphere of the spaces likewise establishes an idea only to carefully change it as the work moves on. In this way we are kept thinking about ourselves as bodies in both real and virtual space, about the nature of the Dazzle Ball as an ambiguous lively-yet-haunted sort of thing. The monochromatic palette throughout reminds us that this isn’t nature, that we are in the world of art, which is also the world of technology, the world of history and culture. Our immersion begins as we approach the mise en place, as we step in and receive our costume and the VR headset. Where it ends is not so easily defined.

REFERENCES

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7. Accessed June 19, 2021.

Flusser, Vilem. “On Being Subjects to Objects.” http://flusserbrasil.com/arte119.pdf. Accessed June 19, 2021

Kracauer, Siegfried, and Thomas Y. Levin. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Weisberg DS, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM, McCandliss BD. “Mise en place: setting the stage for thought and action.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2014 Jun;18(6):276-278. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.02.012.

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