Pikapika

PIKAPIKA
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Meet Pikapika--a character influenced by anime and manga; Japanese pop animation and comics. Pikapika embodies movements from bunraku (puppet theater), a movement vocabulary Tomie Hahn studied while learning nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance) pieces derived from the puppet theater. The concept of the sonic punctuation of Pikapika's movements is drawn directly from the bunraku musical tradition. However, the actual sounds are not drawn from bunraku musical vocabulary. Pikapika dons a new wireless interactive dance system, "SSpeaPer," the Sensor/Speaker Performance interface, created by Curtis Bahn. SSpeaPer naturally locates and spacializes the electronic sounds to emanate from the speakers mounted on her body. As Pikapika moves her gestural information is sent by radio to an interactive computer music system. The sounds are then broadcast back to her body, creating a new sort of audio "alias" for her character; a sonic mask.