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The movement and gestures of the industrial robot and the mechatronic puppets and marionettes are choreographed in Motographicon, a software system for choreography initiated by Peter Rajka within the The Kineto-Auditory Communication Research (KACOR) group at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm in the early 1990s. The animation and movement control parts of Motographicon is programmed by Magnus Lundin and further developed in collaboration with Åsa Unander-Scharin in a series of custom built puppets and marionettes, The Lamentations of Orpheus (1998), Petrushka’s Cry (200), Olimpia (2010) and the coming up Callas/Medea-marionette (2020).

In Motographicon you can choreograph each body part separately. The program uses the Symbolic Notations System to define the choreography in a movement score. In the score the user places symbols that represent the direction, rotation degree (22°, 45°, 67°, 90° etc.) and duration of the movement in each joint, in between body parts. The movement score then generates a script-file that runs the movements of a human-like virtual dancer on the computer screen – as the swimmers in the antique movie Possente Spirto, given its premiere on the Internet already in 1997.

See movie:


The choreographic work with programming the movements of The Lamentations of Orpheus and Petrushka’s Cry is described in Moving Mechatronics, TeDance2 (2009):

The software “Motographicon” is decribed in How to Build a Multimedial Communication/ Creation System for Music and Human Motion, Chapter 12 in Multimedia: Systems, Interaction and Applications (1991) Springer Science and Bussines Media, page 154-166
https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783642773334

The work behind ROBOCYGNE is described in this article

Currently (2020) we are working on the Callas Medea marionette in collaboration with Magnus Lundin and Tobias Jaeger. Se enclosed photos

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