Choreographies

With this new project, titled Choreographies, Cassiel aims to explore the specific—and previously unexplored—intersection of choreography and generative art.

Choreography—although it can be defined in various ways—will be used here to refer to the practice of writing the movements of an ensemble of dancing bodies. This definition of the term reflects its etymology: khoreia, the dance of the chorus in ancient Greece, and graphein, to write.

Generative art is a way of making art in which the artist—rather than directly producing a work of art themselves—writes an algorithm that, when run on a computer, will produce a work of art shaped by the aesthetic constraints the artist specified when coding the algorithm. While the practice of writing algorithms that can generate artworks has existed since the early 1960s, most of these experiments to date have focused on producing visual artworks. And as far as I know, no attempt has been made to build an algorithm that can compose choreographic works.