dance with me // google glass

Sarah set up her Google Glass yesterday.

Here’s one of my favorite ribbon dance moves as seen by other people: https://plus.google.com/106689835670274491358/posts/4EaaLXWKKgs

And here it is as seen by me: https://plus.google.com/106689835670274491358/posts/aUWg5YAafke

The move that I’m referring to is the sequence that I repeat twice: two circles waving my arms upwards and reaching up while kicking my left leg back, skipping forward, and then two circles waving my arms downwards and skipping backwards, and then one bounce of the ribbons at the bottom, and then ending with a big flourish upward again, holding the ribbons mid-flight so they float for a beat. I love it so much because of the ecstasy of reaching up, like I’m reaching for the sun, like my chest can’t possibly contain my heart, like my ribbons are an expression of everything inside me rushing out to meet the day.

I remember working so hard on that move in dance class. I remember our dance teacher barking at us to reach up higher, to jump higher, to kick back higher. I remember her admonishing us to bend down lower, and when I bent down lower, my sweat would fly off of my forehead and smack on the floor. I remember how good it felt to jump as high as I could, and then hear my teacher’s voice, and then jump higher, somehow, on the next round. I remember flying. I remember the afternoon sunlight spilling across the wooden floor through the door, the warm rhomboid glow reflected in the mirror. I remember when class ended and we were sweaty and red-faced and panting, and it was so hot, the south bay in mid-summer, and our teacher pulled out her giant fan and we got tiny cups of water from the water jug in the tiny hallway and went to the fan and lolled. I remember feeling alive.

Imagine twelve people doing that move in a circle, facing inward. The result is a pulsing amorphous flower that flashes impossibly into existence and scatters apart just as suddenly. It’s a swirling vortex, and it’s a heart beating, and it’s unbridled joy and creation and I remember watching home videos of our performances on VHS, breathless. I know now that I don’t have to wait for instructions from anyone else to make that happen again. Will you make a giant flower with me? Will you dance with me? I can start calling around and seeing if I can order more of these ribbons, or we could figure out how to make more. I think it’s silk, but I’m not sure.

=D

Glass is fun! I know it’s really early, and I know I could achieve the same effect by strapping my phone to my forehead, but it’s still kind of dazzling to try on.

I really want to see first-person views of all kinds of dancing! I want to see 32 fouettés en tournant. Someone please get my favorite ballerina, Maria Kochetkova, a pair of Glass!!! How can we conspire to make this happen?! I love her Instagram posts, so we know she loves social media… maybe we can ask if she’d wear Glass for a day? Has this already happened in the world?? We live in San Francisco, so surely someone has already done this. Right?

Sarah wants to make lip-reading software that subtitles people speaking to you in real time. I want to make all kinds of things, things like twitter handles (or league of legends names!) showing up on top of peoples’ heads (one of the things I miss most about WoW is how easy it is to stay in touch with someone: their name is above their head, and if you danced on the Ironforge bridge together for no reason other than you were both wearing ridiculous outfits, you could just add them).

But I also want to make something that traces peoples’ hands as they wave them around, of course. More ribbons. It won’t be the same unless I find some kind of amazing physics engine and learn about wind and fluid dynamics (since in real life the ribbon doesn’t do exactly what your hand traces–there’s gravity and momentum and flinging the ribbon out to catch in the air and such) … but I should at least start with tracing people’s hands. Maybe lots of Glass apps already do that (many of the early Kinect apps did that).

And maybe waving your arms around to learn to write Chinese, which was always a dream of mine for the Kinect.

There’s a lot.

Also I went to Burning Man. I need to write a lot about it.

I am not the same.