Asas (Wings) – Diego Mac

EIVV 2024
Filmmaking: Diego Mac, Brazil, 2022

“Wings” is a 3D dance piece created by mixing the language of dance with animation techniques and 3D simulation.

The work was inspired by the homonymous song by Luedji Luna, based on the verse “What do I want you for, wings? If I have wind inside”. But these wings aren’t just inspired by Luna. Helio Oiticica gains space and the inspiration in his Parangolés: pieces of cloth worn on the body and used to dance, to give movement to the air, to shake the structures of exaggerated intellectualization, to spread free expression through rhythm and color. Still, there is inspiration in the aesthetics that have been assembled by AI-mediated artistic creations. The challenge was to seek to mimic the visuality of the works generated by AI without using this technology, but working with colors, noise and textures to simulate this aesthetic.

Some techniques used: mocap animation, fabric physical simulation, fabric solidification, mirroring, noise for VR, gravity change to -20 m/s2.

“Wings” is currently in PЯФKФFIЭV’s private collection. The piece has already been shown in several festivals, projects and events, such as NFT.NYC, DANC3TECH Dance and Technology Seminar, RIVERA-CAGGIANO GALLERY, and was the winning piece of the Victoria West Digital Art Competition.

Director Biography – Diego Mac

Artist. Dance director. Choreographer. Dancer. Video artist. 3D artist. Producer and cultural manager. Doctoral Researcher in Performing Arts. Currently, he dedicates himself to artistic creation based on mixing the language of dance with animation and 3D simulation techniques, blockchains, metaverses and NFTs. He was selected to exhibit his work at the NFT.NYC event, received the 2022 Açorianos de Dança Award as Personality of the Year for his innovative 3D dance work, and was awarded the Cultural Trajectories Award for the development of his artistic work.

Working for 25 years in the cultural and entertainment field in artistic projects that move between dance, popular culture, images, technology, creativity, management and entrepreneurship. Director of Macarenando Dance Concept. Artistic director of Muovere Dance Company. Graduated in Dance. Master and specialist in Visual Poetics. Began professional career in 1997, having worked on more than 300 cultural projects. His work is recognized on the local and national scene, with more than 20 awards received.
Director Statement
I have been working with dance for 25 years, so the poetics, projects, practices, materials, and processes were multiple and diverse: from the relationship between dance and comedy, through the articulation with technology and videodance, to culminate today in the meeting of dance with 3D simulation and animation. One of my biggest goals as a dance artist is to discover creative strategies and formal solutions capable of revealing an expanded and democratic notion of dance, in which it occurs not only in the standard human-body, thin, hard and muscular, but also in other bodies, including non-human ones, establishing other and different perspectives for what dance and bodies that dance can be. In this sense, there were several results: from the video dance Pas de Corn (2006), whose dancers are popcorn, through the webdance O Colecionador de Movimentos, to the recently published work Sylphides 3.0, based on the creation of bodies and movements in simulation 3D.

With this approximation of dance and 3D, I keep asking: how to dance in Web 3.0? How to choreograph in the metaverse? How to reprocess the revolution brought about by the relationship between dance and 3D simulation? As a dance artist, I seek creative answers to these questions by articulating dance and 3D, NFTs, web3 and metaverses, provoking a dialogue between the classic and the contemporary and reflecting on the future of Art and Dance. When I create dances with digital materials, my whole body is involved in this process. In my body there is no distinction between physical performance and digital dance. I believe that this has to do with the future of relationships in the metaverses, with the conditions of existence and with the forms of coexistence mediated by digital technologies. Other bodies, other movements, other dances.