ShowCase: International Dance Party

ShowCase is a new feature on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies. We are accepting nominations for upcoming ShowCase features - if you would like to suggest a project, please send us a message. About the machine The interactive machine International Dance Party is a complete plug 'n' play party in a box. The machine comes as a large, non-suspicious looking flightcase. Internally, it is equipped with cutting edge radar sensing technology, an ear blasting state of the art 600W sound system, tons of psychedelic light and laser effects, and even a professional grade fog machine. Through its dance activity radar, the International Dance Party detects and evaluates motion input from surrounding people in realtime. Several sophisticated transforming mechanisms let the flightcase turn into a powerful and boosting party machine, once the visitors start to dance within the machine's range of perception. The audience controls the complexity of the generated music and the intensity of the light effects directly by the energy of its dance action. When there is no audience, or when the audience is not active enough, the machine stops its performance and transforms back into a transport crate. Adad Hannah and Niklas Roy Montreal based video artist Adad Hannah and Berlin based machine artist Niklas Roy met each other for the first time in Wroclaw, Poland in 2005, where they decided over a beer to build this machine together. After quite a time of planning and discussing the project's details, Roy prepared the hardware parts and the machine's software in his workshop in Berlin, while Hannah organized the funding for the project. In October 2007, both met again in Hannah's studio in Montreal to assemble the device within one month. David Cheong aka Baddd Spellah joined them both in late 2007 to produce the generative music which booms out of the IDP. Niklas Roy, * 1974 in Nuremberg, Germany, is a Berlin based artist, designer and engineer who builds entertaining electro-mechanical sculptures, machines and devices. His work has been shown at Siggraph (USA), Microwave (Hongkong), Transmediale (Germany), VIPER (Switzerland), Emergences (France), LABoral (Spain), *.artlabs (Romania) and many other festivals and museums around the world, often winning prizes for its inspired inventiveness. Roy holds a degree in visual communications from the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is founder of Royrobotiks, a single member collective, which focusses on building artistic robots and he is member of the "Gruppe für Servicekunst und Dekorationsgestaltung". Currently, he develops "Gallerydrive", a fully automatic futuristic art exhibition and reception system (a collaboration between Royrobotiks and the artist collective //////////fur////). Adad Hannah, *1971 in New York, is a Montreal based video artist. His work primarily focuses on the intersection between photography, performance, and video, usually in the form of video-recorded tableaux vivants. His works have been exhibited around the world including Zendai MoMA in Shanghai (2008), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2007), the National Gallery of Canada (2006), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham 2006), the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (2006), Casa Encendida (Madrid 2006), Viper Basel (2004). In 2004 he won the Toronto Images Festival Installation/New Media Award, and the Bogdanka Poznanovic Award at Videomedeja 8. He recently completed the six-projector installation Cuba Still (Remake) – a deconstruction of an unknown movie still from the middle of the 20th century and its subsequent reconstruction in video. Adad Hannah is represented by Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain – www.pfoac.com Baddd Spellah finds it very hard to write convincingly about himself in the 3rd person and not sound insincere or pretentious. He had hoped that inspiration would strike and bestow upon him some wry and witty words for this personal account but instead he copped out with this evasive literal obfuscation. Its an obvious tactic to obscure his identity and hide behind a mask of anonymity. While he'd like to think this creates a certain mystique its probably more accurate to say that his real life is not interesting enough to warrant summing up in this block of text.