Trained as an architect at Bath University and UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, Justin Goodyer’s Adaptive Bloom is a matrix of servo- controlled mechanical flowers driven by a computer vision system. The patterns produced in the screen constantly evolve in an attempt to draw in observers and engage them. Once in close proximity the observer is able to trigger each flower individually using gestures.

Adaptive Bloom is a responsive screen speculatively proposed as a stage set. Blooming mechanical flowers are used as pixels in a grid formation responding to movement. It draws on the balletic tradition of a choreographic poem combining narrative, choreography and score. The work is conceived as the backdrop to a holistic improvised performance featuring an aleatoric score (from the Latin word alea meaning ‘dice’), with the dreamlike behaviour of the screen responding to the interplay of a male/female dance pair. It is framed from a narrative taken from the song ‘Busby Berkeley dreams’.

The pieces are laser-sintered prototypes activated by servo-control motors controlled via a PC from a live camera feed. The prototype here shown is purely reactive. It gets “bored” if no one has interacted with it for a while, from 10-60 seconds, and performs a random display to entice people, once engaged each flower moves in response to the viewer. Thus the system does not create a single performance but a space of possible dances for the viewers to explore.

Typically the artist constructs a space of possibilities based on the constraints of his materials and an exploratory apparatus to navigate it. Together they produce a space of manifestations, a number of designs or in this case a number of bodily movements. This is achieved through algorithmic processes and is the main application of technology and computing in Goodyer’s work. The dance is thus a revelation and celebration of these ideas as well as a very beautiful and poetic spectacle in its own right.