At the Function (I Shake My Ass)

DAE graduation work, cum laude
Interactive audiovisual performance created in Unreal Engine, 15’0”
Gijs Bakker Award Nominee
2022

Dance Dance Revolution, a dance-based rhythm game first popularized in Japan in the 1990s, challenges players to dance in time with rhythmic cues on the screen. Despite falling in popularity, in recent years a devoted group of dancer-hackers have revived the genre by reworking an open-source version of the game in order to play faster and longer. In this subgenre, known as stamina play, the dancer comes to resemble the machine, their bodies remaining mostly still except for the rapid, micro movements of their feet.

This research views the optimized, hyper-efficient movements of the dancers as an allegory for our contemporary technological culture organized around efficiency, standardization, and submission. At the function (I shake my ass) reappropriates the logic of the dance game in order to articulate an alternative relation to technology that is open, indeterminate, and playful. In this hybrid video game/performance, a performer interacts with a sensor-equipped dance pad, his movements translated to an audiovisual game environment using Unreal Engine. The game system incorporates randomness and emergence, ensuring that no performance is ever the same and that the performer must respond in realtime to the output of the machine. The project seeks to counter the naturalized despotism of technology by inhabiting it from within and proposing a speculative, collaborative relation with the machine oriented around queer, non-functional, affective modalities.