About Jason Brickman, Founder of MoveMind
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When I graduated from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I knew that I wanted to work with dance and technology. Dance was my primary focus of study in college, and now I am well-educated in dance history, technique, pedagogy, choreography, and performance. While at school, I also had the serendipitous pleasure of meeting and working with John Toenjes. He introduced me to his dance technology research and encouraged me to pursue research of my own. At this time, I was also intensely jealous of musicians, who seemed to have every gizmo and gadget imaginable to aid in their compositional process. Drawing on my creativity as well as my background in science and mathematics, I began experimenting with digital compositional tools for dance.
Once I began innovating, I could not stop! I was equally surprised by both my own capacity for innovative thinking, and the extent to which my ideas were previously unexplored. Ideas would come to me while waking and asleep. My head was filled with dreams and schemes of this dance device or that, each one having the promise to become the next big thing. My projects ended up being very successful; I won awards for my research, got lots of positive feedback from audience members in performance, and one of my projects, The MIXMASTER 9000, was accepted as my BFA thesis.
Eventually, the proliferation of ideas became too much, and I decided to write them all out, rank order them, and choose where to focus my efforts. I wanted to focus on potentially profitable ideas that had the promise to give people more access to their own creativity and expand dance's reach to a wider, less traditional audience. At the top of the list, the idea with the most potential for adoption and proliferation was as follows: a general purpose software program where users can compose a dance in virtual space. So MoveMind was born, and I have been at it ever since. I still have new ideas for dance innovations, but now, I am aware that they will have to wait until this chapter, the MoveMind chapter, of my life has run its course.