Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is an intermedia performance art/installation work that uses a range of sensors alongside artists acting as wetware to create a dynamic multi-modal data feedback loop between the movement of two dancers, a surround sound diffusion system and video projection.
This work explores the theme of “dynamic difficulty adjustment” (DDA) that Andrew Glassner has used to describe aspects of gaming. Glassner explains, “Games should not ask players to select a difficulty level. Games should adapt themselves during gameplay to offer the player a consistent degree of challenge based on his changing abilities at different tasks.” With this work the two dancers dynamically adjust to spatialised sonic “difficulties” and visuals that develop from the gathered data of the dancers’ previous movements. The work explores the evolving world of digital humanities as data is transmuted, projected, re-interpreted and resonated around the room in a cybernetic game of cat and mouse that in evolving, starts to question who or what is the creator and who or what is the created, metaphorically pointing to ethical questions relating to abiogenesis. Moreover, in a Marshall McLuhan sense the two dancer’s nervous systems are extended through this electronic media, but in this case transformed, deconstructed and turned in on themselves, as the two dancers endeavor to find their way through this dynamic, game like, multi-modal labyrinth.