Lights! Dance! Freeze!

An interactive film installation

Since the first movie musical back in 1927, film audiences have delighted in seeing bodies in motion on the big screen. Movements etched into our minds. Scenes like Liza Minelli’s cabaret performance with a chair, Gene Kelly swinging joyously in the rain,  the iconic lift scene in Dirty Dancing. Thousands of poses, all contained within our minds and our bodies, now accessible in an interactive artwork.

Using advanced machine learning technology and a camera, this interactive installation tracks the participant's movements and finds, in real-time, matching dance poses among thousands of scenes from famous musicals. When the participant stops moving, the clip from the matching scene from the musical starts playing, immersing the participant in the music and dance from musicals of different eras.

Technology: MediaPipe pose detection // webcam // openFrameworks // speakers

Credits: Fiilm consulting by Phoenix Fry

Press: Written about by CreativeApplications.Net

Presented at SIGGRAPH 2023 (Los Angeles, USA): Download full paper here

Exhibited at DRHA 2023 (Turin, Italy)

Exhibited at VINCI 2023 (Guangzhou, China)