SMART MATTER
Smart Matter (2018) offers a poetic vision of how people might one day interact with programmable nanomaterials that reshape themselves, based on our instructions. It is hard to envisage, but Smart Matter takes a stab at imagining a future where gadgets assemble themselves on demand and drip away when not in use. Smart Matter is a series of speculative design films that explores the relationship between technology hype and its effect upon us.
THE RESPONSE
Smart Matter plays with ideas of bodies, space and topologies and our interactions with the technology around us. Kate Sicchio explores these themes reflecting on her own work and beyond. Kate uses the term “Choreotopology” in her own practice and argues that in Smart Matter it is the movement itself that is more important than the humanoids, it is the space that is created that is the main feature of the choreography.
Kate is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real time video systems.
SMART MATTER DETAIL
Smart Matter is part of Universal Everything’s Hype Cycle film series. The series was inspired by the Hype Cycle trend graphs produced by Gartner Research. The Hype Cycle’s look at the trends of the use of the latest technologies and predict when certain technologies will be at their peaks in terms of use and mainstream adoption by the public which is then usually followed by a “trough of disillusionment” when first users loose interest in the technology and move onto the next big thing.
Smart Matter looks at how we interact with these new technologies and builds on previous studies that Universal Everything has done with motion tracking. These films were made in collaboration with dancers who were filmed with reflective markers on their clothing and a series of cameras which tracked their movements in a 3D space. These films take the dancers movement to another level allowing their digital representations to push and pull the modelling code between them.
CREDITS
Title: Smart Matter (2018)
Creative Director: Matt Pyke
Animation: Joe Street
Sound Design: Simon Pyke (Freefarm)
Senior Producer: Greg Povey
Motion Capture: Nick Dulake, Ursula Ankeny (Sheffield Hallam University)
Dancer: Tamar Draper
Choreographer: TC Howard