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On December 31, 2006, the Ecstatic Dance community gathered at Mojo Rising in Ashland to dance-in the new year on a grand wave of music, in the tradition of Gabrielle Roth. On a balcony overlooking the dance floor, I stood at my computer and danced my electronic pen across its electronic drawing tablet in response to the pulsing musical rhythms and the movements of the dancers below. The images from the computer passed through a video projector and appeared, as if by magic, on the wall above the heads of the dancers below.Using Adobe Photoshop™ and my Wacom tablet and pen, I was able to paint with colored light. The movements of my hand and the choices of colors while painting followed the five different rhythms of the music: flowing, staccato, chaotic, lyrical and still. These rhythms can be felt in the paintings as smooth circular lines, jittery wiggly lines, wild overlaying of lines and colors, to list a few. What is missing here is the element of TIME: the slowness of the snaky lines, the quickness of the jagged lines, the steady opening up of the spiral. The images in Dancing Pixels are like snapshots of the final stage of each painting. |