Some students are luckier than others -- or have more fun. For example, this Stanford University report says that some of the students there may have some hard and physical work to do: dancing. But in exchange, they're working with sensors, cameras and computers to study how a dancer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is moving. This must be exhilarating, especially after finding -- and confirming -- that he acts as a 'biomechanical rebel.'
Here is the experience of Jonah Bokaer, a dancer from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, who was enrolled in the program.
The test subject danced wearing only blue shorts and the 50 silver balls the size of marbles that stuck to his skin, mapping out his physique.
"I know what I think my body is doing. But is it really doing that? I don't really know, but I'd like to," he said during a break in the afternoon session at the Motion and Gait Analysis Laboratory at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.
A member of the Merce Cunningham modern dance company, Jonah Bokaer said he couldn't wait to see the results -- a digital record of his skeleton's behavior as it undulates, spins and leaps.
Here is a photograph of Jonah Bokaer equipped with reflective markers for the cameras tracking his dance moves (Credit: Amy Ladd, Stanford University).
His moves are monitored by students of the Anatomy of Movement class which is now in its second year.
"We're looking upside down, inside out, at the human body," said course director Amy Ladd, MD, professor of orthopedic surgery. "It's not the way any single discipline would frame the study of movement."
Be a doctor! Be a lawyer! Be a leper missionary!
—Diane Ladd (b. 1932)
Ladd added, "Each project reflects an integration of disciplines spanning the humanities and sciences to portray human movement." The exercise was part of an extensive series of interdisciplinary art projects that were tied to Cunningham's performances on campus last week.
So what methods are using these students to analyze a dancer's movements?
Eight cameras in the lab tracked the motion of the silvery balls on their test subjects: Cunningham dancers Frank and Bokaer and course director Ladd, who also happens to be a trained ballet dancer.
"We thought that the study needed a comparison, and analyzing someone in pointe shoes would be a good contrast," said Ladd, who has studied ballet for years. "So I reluctantly agreed."
The cameras sent the data to a computer, operated by motion analysis lab's engineer Erin Butler. The output includes motion capture of dancers as well as quantitative information.
But what do you learn from such interdisciplinary projects?
Projects like this, mixing science with art, are challenging to conceptualize, said Ladd. "We're looking for projects that merge science and art. No one really knows how to do this well yet. It's a difficult mix. It calls for a philosophical paradigm shift for people who have been trained to think in one realm or the other."
Here is a link to the other projects at the Anatomy of Movement.
And as a conclusion, it's not the first time that Stanford University is mixing several disciplines, such as arts, sports and science. Check for example this article from Technology Research News, "Sensors track martial arts blows."
Sources: Rosanne Spector, Stanford University Report, March 16, 2005; and various websites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Arts
Computers
Education
Human Computer Interface
Sensors.