#pandaice

This post is a documentation of my student internship over the semester break this June with the Lasalle Media Lab, under the direction of Andreas Schlegel. The internship was to create a reiteration of Shifting Interactions, which was a multi disciplinary project conceived by Andreas Schlegel, Brian O’Reilly, Melissa Quek and Muhammad Dhiya. This iteration featured the similar theme of combining art and science together, taking a step further from having the usual dancers reacting to electronic sensors and light structures and brought in the star piece of the show which was a robotic arm dance duet. The robot arm would be controlled via OSC messages sent from a phone to an arduino computer chip.

Joining me in this internship were fellow electronic music students Chong Ming En and Deon Chan. Together we took a relatively hands on approach to the project, coordinating rehearsals with dancers Cheryl Chin, Lim Xin Ping and Dada Pichmutta and liaising with the Esplanade programmers and audio team to make sure our clearances for bumping in and out of the festival were made smoothly.

Working on a sound art installation was a new experience for myself as it was slightly different to having a regular live musical performance. There were other aspects like aesthetics and technicality that we had to think about to make visitors to the installation be intrigued and wanting to stay for the music and dance performance.

On top of that we had to learn how every part of the installation worked in order to troubleshoot any issues with the computer codes and wiring/signal flow of the electronic components. This made me feel slightly overwhelmed at the beginning as we had only a year’s of introduction to coding so the learning curve was steep initially. Thankfully because of the modules Andreas had taught us in previous semesters, we were able to make sense of the latest version of the codes given to us and build upon it.

I’d definitely say this internship experience was overall very successful for me. I had a chance to learn things that I had learnt in school and apply them to actual projects that would be displayed publicly. This project also allowed me to collaborate with students from the school of dance, forging new relationships with them for any future projects.  Below will just showcase a few more highlights from the rehearsals to the actual performances at the Esplanade.