The New Original MINI Dance Floor is a living, breathing organism

There’s no denying we’re living in the age of collaboration, and while some projects simply slap on a new logo, others take the opportunity to create something completely new and original. An example of the latter is The New Original MINI Dance Floor, a collaboration to celebrate the new MINI hatch by combining acclaimed Melbourne artist Darren Sylvester and award winning design practice ENESS. The process involved taking cues from the new MINI and integrating it with Darren’s work “For You” a light up dance floor sculpture you can get involved with yourself. The result, thanks to some interactive twists, is the coolest advancement in dance technology since Dance Dance Revolution.

The dance floor is touring the country next month so we spoke to some of the parties behind the party, Darren and ENESS co-founder, Nimrod Weis.

Essentially this is a collaboration between Darren, ENESS, and MINI. How have you found collaborating to evolve the work?
Nimrod: Yeah it was cool, and challenging really. It’s a circle dance floor and the only ones we’ve seen are pretty rigid and grid like. There’s been a whole bunch of challenges to make this thing circular and modular. It’s been crazy.
Darren: It’s been really great! The one thing everyone loved with the car was this response dash ring concept; so one of the first ideas was let’s turn this ring in to a circular dance floor. Straight away that seemed to be the most obvious, but also best solution. I’d never seen one of those before, I don’t even know if there is circular light up dance floors. This ring is responsive and works with the engine, stereo and more— it had all of this new technology. It was a matter of how can we make this idea of the ring do two things: One is be interactive so that when the public is dancing it evokes an emotion in itself, almost like it’s a living breathing dance floor. And two when the music goes it would also react. I really liked the idea that this dance floor isn’t a passive object like “For You”, which is a sculpture that went on 24 hours a day and could go on for infinity. But this dance floor when the night is over it sort of turns itself off to a degree. It’s more organic, it lives and breathes, and it responds to what’s going to happen when people get on it. I found that quite interesting and exciting.

With all of the components that are going in to it, obviously it takes a lot of technology to get to the end point of the idea?
Nimrod: Yeah it seems simple but there’s a whole bunch of technology. When I say technology, to be able to control LED lights in real time, responding to the visuals. It’s kind of like a kaleidoscopic monitor in a sense, like plugging in a round monitor rather than square in a way. I was thinking wouldn’t it be cool if we had a laptop with a round screen, why is everything so square?

Yeah and then the prominence of that rectangle has defined images everywhere now hasn’t it?
Nimrod: Yeah exactly.

So you’ve mentioned motion sensors and the LEDs in the floor itself, and then there must be software as well?
Nimrod: Well it’s our own proprietary software that we’ve written over years, what it allows us to do is create content on the fly. In real time the content could be particle based, like 3D particles that are floating in space, responding to the sound. And that then needs a way to output on to this dance floor so there’s this controller that’s been custom built that talks to our software in order to output the right colours in that circular pattern. It’s kind of like an LED screen but it’s not, because the LED screen is highly customised. It’s not just an LED screen that’s behind it, each one of those panels of light is a unique shape so we couldn’t use something off the shelf. We’ve had to fabricate the LED strip to fit inside those wells. There are 270 odd individual lights that can be triggered.

The actual piece itself is really interactive and response?
Nimrod: We’re motion tracking people from above, but at this stage we don’t know how it’s going to respond with lots of people dancing away. So it’s still a bit up in the air but we’re excited to see how it’ll behave. It’s a six-meter diameter, so a lot of people could kind of be on it at once.

Darren was that a natural progression for you to take elements from MINI like you you’ve done in your previous work that has taken inspiration from cosmetic companies?
Darren: It was a natural process, I’d kind of done it before with that, it’s just a different context of putting it in. Before it was for the National Gallery, this one’s being made for a party. Essentially the concepts of that object, of the dance floor are quite similar. Maybe this one’s more organic and responsive but then it’s going to have elements of a pure dance floor.

How do you think people will react to it?
Nimrod: I hope they dance on it. It could be like just staring at it from the outskirts, like kangaroos in the headlights just stunned by round light. It might have that capacity to just stun people dead still, but hopefully not.
Darren: I can’t imagine it being a thing where people will want to get off it. It’ll be almost like a fire that’s about to go out and people don’t want it to go out. You want to keep it alive. That kind of people getting together, dancing, having a good time, that kind of feeds to not only the dance floor but also feeds to the experience of the event.

RSVP for your chance to attend the New Original Dance Floor events in your city.

May 8 in Melbourne with Animals Dancing and Pleasure Planet DJs

May 29 with Astral DJs and Pelvis

June 5 with Mitzi DJs and Jad & The Lady Boy

Follow Mitch on Twitter: @MitchMaxxParker