🎻🧑‍💻 Exploring Movement, Sound and Technology in Royal College of Art Snap Visualisation Lab #Shorts

Why It Matters

Drawing Lines demonstrates a shift toward unobtrusive, adaptive performance tech that augments rather than overshadows human expression, potentially reshaping live arts production and audience engagement. Its expansion could spur cross-disciplinary innovation between music, dance and interaction design.

Summary

Drawing Lines is a collaborative project developed at the Royal College of Art’s Snap Visualisation Lab that pairs sensing technologies with live performers to create a responsive, low-profile interface for movement-driven sound and visuals. Partners include Kingston School of Art, Trinity Laban and London-based sound artist and violinist Sue In Kang. The team emphasizes systems that listen and evolve with performers rather than dominate them visually, and has staged eight live performances with audience interaction with the technology afterwards. The project is preparing to expand into new collaborations across different instruments and dance forms.

Original Description

Drawing Lines uses live dance, violin, motion tracking and AI listening and improvisation to ask not simply what technology can do in performance, but how it can listen, respond and make visible what is already present in the body.

Across eight live shows, the project invited guests from industry, design, the arts, dance, music and academia to experience the work as both performance and participatory research.

Each show unfolded as an improvised dialogue between dancer and violinist, with movement captured in real time and rendered on screen as trails of dots and lines. These visual traces became live residues of movement, fleeting marks shaped by kinaesthetic impulse and returned to the performers as material for further response.

At the close of each performance, the team opened up the technical system to the audience, bringing out the motion-tracking equipment, instruments and interactive tools used in the work.

Drawing Lines is led by a collaborative team bringing together Dr Ali Mohammed at the Royal College of Art’s School of Design; Dr Freddie Hong, visual artist and Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art; Giacomo Pini, dance artist and Lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and Sue In Kang, violinist and sound artist based in London. The dancers are Malachi Briant and Amanda Montheith .

The team are excited about where the project could go next with future collaborations and different art forms 👀

Thanks to our brilliant addition to the team Luchen Xi from MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering who supported with technical assistance 🙌

#Dance #Music #Technology