In the Name of Art, Umbrellas Light Up the Sky

More than 200 MIT community members armed with LED-enhanced umbrellas took to MIT’s Jack Barry Field on Sunday, May 19, 2013, for “UP: The Umbrella Project,” a collaboration between the MIT CSAIL Lab and the Pilobolus dance troupe.

During the UP live performance, each participant was provided with an umbrella equipped with red, green, and blue lights. Each participant used a CSAIL-designed controller to manually change the umbrella’s color throughout the performance and—guided by Pilobolus—walked throughout the field and created what CSAIL called “an ever-changing display of live art.”

A roving camera was located above the participants and images from the camera were projected onto a large inflatable screen. (Check out the Boston Globe’s video coverage of UP.)

Kyle Gilpen '06, MNG '06, PhD '12, a CSAIL post-doctoral associate, says that lab’s research goal is to monitor the "human-robot dance" and match the umbrellas’ robotic algorithms with the behavior of the attendees.

From CSAIL:

"Our work deals with developing algorithms that allow robots to operate independently within a large decentralized network so that the robots can coordinate and work together to accomplish a common task. Through UP, we can study the behaviors of large groups, which can be applied to our research in robotics."

UP marked CSAIL's second collaboration with Pilobolus, a renowned dance collaborative that has performed on the Academy Awards, Oprah Winfrey, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In 2012, the groups created Seraph, a performance piece involving human dancers and live robots.