Touched

Touched is a performance research project that investigates the twin concepts of Creation and creativity. It features human beings and semiautonomous robotic systems as “performers” in a constructed environment. The work takes two popular images from two very different religious/philosophical traditions as its starting point. The first is a detail from Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Hands of God and Adam. This image symbolizes the transference of the spark of consciousness from the divine to the human in the Christian religious tradition. The second image is the dancing form of Lord Shiva in the Nataraj. Shiva, a key figure in Hindu religion, represents the source of all movement in the cosmos as (s)he dances the world into and out of existence.

Scientists Richard Vaughan (robotics) and Arthur Kirkpatrick (haptic interfaces) from Simon Fraser University’s School of Computing Science, and choreographer Henry Daniel from the School for the Contemporary Arts collaborate to bring this new work to the stage.