Merritt Moore a distinguished ballet dancer who has participated in the Norwegian National Ballet, the Boston Ballet, and the English National Ballet. She also studied quantum physics at the University of Oxford obtaining a doctorate.
Knowledge that during the pandemic allowed the design of a solution to be able to comply with social distancing and at the same time to continue developing her ballet routines, she acquired a new robotic companion called “Baryshnibot”.
For this new artistic experiment she chose to use a collaborative robot or cobot. The initiative arose after taking a course at Harvard ArtLab that dealt with the incorporation of robots in dance.
This is how the dancer and quantum physicist Merritt contacted the manufacturer of the collaborative robots “Universal Robots”, and the shipment of the robot, “Baryshnibot” (named after the dancer Baryshnikov) who sent the robot directly to his home in London.
From that moment on, Moore’s challenge began to program a robot that she will dance fluently for 15 seconds to pop music. Which took almost 5 hours of programming work.
Little by little a greater advance was reached where the times were minimized achieving a more fluid choreography.
Merritt explains: “My partner may not look impressive, but he has a lot of potential as a dancer,” and explains that the “Baryshnibot” scheduling for normal days makes him and his friends perform routine tasks and heavy lines. productive, improving the quality of life of operators. “The challenge was how to get him to move like someone with a head, arms, legs and body.”
In November, Moore worked with director Conor Gorman and cinematographer Howard Mills to film her pas de deux with Baryshnibot called “Merritt + Robot.”
Merritt commented in an interview. “Artificial intelligence, technology and robots can be used as a tool to inspire new creative ideas for us humans, allowing us to be more creative.”
This is how it is demonstrated once again that the use of new technologies breaks the schemes between art and science, bringing new perspectives for the future. Proposing a new vision of science, art and technology requires a creative and artistic point to break the mold.
