In the Dance Studio: An Art and Engineering Exploration of Human Flocking

TL;DR

This paper explores how flocking models can be applied to human dancers to create choreographic tools and gain insights into collective motion, with implications for multi-agent systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interdisciplinary approach combining art and engineering to study and utilize flocking principles in dance and multi-agent systems.

Findings

Dancers follow simple flocking rules of cohesion and repulsion.

Emergence of leadership roles within the dance group.

Insights into group dynamics and response patterns.

Abstract

Flock Logic was developed as an art and engineering project to explore how the feedback laws used to model flocking translate when applied by dancers. The artistic goal was to create choreographic tools that leverage multi-agent system dynamics with designed feedback and interaction. The engineering goal was to provide insights and design principles for multi-agent systems, such as human crowds, animal groups and robotic networks, by examining what individual dancers do and what emerges at the group level. We describe our methods to create dance and investigate collective motion. We analyze video of an experiment in which dancers moved according to simple rules of cohesion and repulsion with their neighbors. Using the prescribed interaction protocol and tracked trajectories, we estimate the time-varying graph that defines who is responding to whom. We compute status of nodes in the graph and show the emergence of leaders. We discuss results and further directions.