Member Profile: Benjamin Pierce and Kemi Oguntona

Jamie and Kemi created a multimedia dance composition including live dance and video projections for the 2016 Temps d’Afrique annual dance showcase. Their intention was to create a digital dance team. To get this effect, they combined pre-recorded graphics and a live dancer whose careful choreography interacted with the graphics in a life-like way.

Approaching the project was interdisciplinary; the dancer is a civil engineer who used her spatial awareness to play with shadows and perspective while the graphics artist used his experience from majoring in writing to tell a story with a dancer and light. The end result is a piece, set to the beat of “H.S.K.T” by Sylvan Esso, about a robot that is activated and runs through an automated program simulating her consciousness. The robot breaks free, causing her to be shut down.

Both students look forward to creating more performances that incorporate art and technology and are extremely grateful to the DMC for supplying the projector through a Digital DaVinci Award.