Making Meaning With Machines
After meeting on the downtown mall of Charlottesville, Virginia, Cat has worked with the lab on a host of projects and run many workshops for our students and collaborators over the past decade or so. This book is a reflection on that body of work and an attempt to bring those in-person experiences to others.
We aimed for the book to be small, soft, and accessible. We want you to roll around on the floor with it, crack the spine, underline, cross out, make notes, dog ear your favorite (and least favorite) pages. We want you to tuck it above your lab bench; we want you to sit in a studio with it; we want you to talk a walk with it. We want it to help you in your work; we want you to find the ways it fails to. We want you to use those holes to drive your own inquiries, and write more books. We want you to read the books it cites. We want you to cite it in your own writing. We want it to be part of the great flow of human intellect and embodiment. We want you to move with it and for it to move you. 👣
Citation: LaViers, Amy, and Catherine Maguire. Making Meaning with Machines: Somatic Strategies, Choreographic Technologies, and Notational Abstractions through a Laban/Bartenieff Lens. MIT Press, 2023.
A rigorous primer in movement studies for designers, engineers, and scientists that draws on the fields of dance and robotics.
How should a gestural interface react to a "flick" versus a "dab"? Versus a "punch"? Should robots reach out to a human counterpart with a direct, telescoping action or through a circuitous arc in space? Just as different movements express the different internal states of human movers, so too can the engineered systems behind robots. In Making Meaning with Machines, Amy LaViers and Catherine Maguire offer a refreshingly embodied approach to machine design that supports the growing need to make meaning with machines by using the field of movement studies, including choreography, somatics, and notation, to engage in the process of designing expressive robots.
Drawing upon the Laban/Bartenieff tradition, LaViers and Maguire sharpen the movement analysis methodology, expanding the material through their work with machines and putting forward new conventions, such as capitalization, naming, and notation schemes, that make the embodied work more legible for academic contexts. The book includes an overview of movement studies, exercises that define the presented taxonomy and principles of movement, case studies in movement analysis of both humans and robots, and state-of-the-art research at the intersection of robotics and dance.
Making Meaning with Machines is a much-needed primer for observing, describing, and creating a wide array of movement patterns, which ultimately can help facilitate broader and better design choices for roboticists, technologists, and designers.
Access Free or Purchase
The book is published by the MIT Press and sold through all major book sellers. It is also an open-access text (funded by the National Science Foundation) available through MITP's open-access platform.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546126/making-meaning-with-machines/
Electronic Resources
We've created a series of videos demonstrating some of the books many "embodied exercises" and offer all of the symbols for movement notation presented in the book for free download on the book's website.
