BlackBox Laboratory Coordinator: Carla Fernandes

A collaborative platform to document performance composition: from conceptual structures in the backstage to customizable visualizations in the front-end.

BlackBox is an interdisciplinary ERC-funded project hosted by FCSH-UNL since September 2014, under the direction of Prof. Carla Fernandes as its Principal Investigator.

With a wide-breadth duration of 5 years, the BlackBox project aims at developing a cutting-edge model for a web-based collaborative platform, dedicated to the documentation of compositional processes by contemporary performing artists with a focus on dance and theatre. The platform will enable a robust representation of the implicit knowledge in performing practices while applying novel visualization technologies to support it.

Choreographer João Fiadeiro (Re.Al) was our first case study, Rui Lopes Graça is our current one and two other artists will be invited until the end of the project.

As an Arts&Cognition project, BlackBox aims at the analysis of the invited artists’ unique conceptual structures, by crossing the empirical insights of contemporary creators with research theories from Multimodal Communication (Human Interaction, Gesture Studies, Cognitive Science) and Computer Vision.

Website: http://blackbox.fcsh.unl.pt/