Compagnie Thor : dance in information space

Release date

June 14th, 2001

Type of work

flash, interaction design, LAb[au], website

Full description

Thierry Smits’ contemporary Dance Compagnie Thor contracted LAb[au] for their expertise in innovative interfaces. They wanted something different.

(update: website has now been changed. Visit Thor’s website archived version on lab-au.com).

The concept

(Original text by LAb[au])

Dance is movement organized in representational space. Movement relates body/objects to time and space.

1. An image is a frozen moment. The organization of images in a temporal structure creates movement. The compression of images is the compression of time.
2. The articulated line is a line in time. The traces of the line visualize a movement, according to the user interactions on the surface of the screen.
3. A navigation system is a graphic representation of information. It is a space , an “infoscape“. The user navigation is movement through inFORMation, on the representational space of the screen.
4. The user’s navigation relates its movements to representation and expression; it is the result of the collaboration of the dance company Thor and the information architects LAb[au]: a dance through/within information.

Dance is movement in space. Internet is movement in information space. The website represents the user’s movement in Compagnie Thor’s content by a line that links 3 temporal navigation systems: the years of existence, the performances created, the videos available.

As the user navigates through the website, the line updates its position accordingly on these three time scales. Taking on the ideas introduced by Étienne-Jules Marey, the videos are presented by their frames organized as a horizontal sequence, thus expressing their temporality. The user controls their playback through the position of its mouse on the screen (leftwards to fast forward the frame strip, rightward to rewind).

Finally, such frame per frame decomposition is reassembled in a stilt image representing the performance’s occupation of space through time.