Vanessa  Lam (Dang-Lam)

Konnected

Konnected is a collaborated piece created with two dance graduate students Maria (Gillian) Avila and Raine Kearns. Konnected is an abstract performance centered around the investigation of the duality, complexity, and contrasts of a love story between the brain and the heart. It shows the connection of the different body parts enacting in a person, with the contrast of two performers enacting the heart and the brain with the dancer and the live singer. We decided to mash up two pop songs All of the Lights [Interlude] by Kanye West and Want to Want Me by Jason Derulo, because pop songs are usually created based on romance. We tried to accomplish an abstractive performance that equally shared material and content, where the material would help express the story of the content. The T-shirt is created with a 16 by 16 neopixel matrix, an Arduino Mega 2560, a Lilypad accelerometer sensor, a 4000mAh portable battery, a 10K resistor, and a small 2- pin push button. The T-shirt is set to light up based on the movement of the dancer and the push button is set to turn off the lights. The Vuo program is set to play Kanye West’s All of the Lights [Interlude], when the performer triggers the Kinect with her right-arm above her head and the QLab program is set to disarm the song at the end. The left-arm above the head would trigger the recorded audio file of Maria’s singing, which plays with the idea of reality and fantasy, of live singing versus recorded audio.