Gloving |
What is Gloving?
Gloving is a more recent art form that combines hand and finger dance with optical illusion.¹ Each glover has his or her unique style of dance that may include concepts like morphing, conjuring, whips, dials, or more.² Just as important as a glover's style are the glove sets that contribute to the light performance. "Light shows" are essentially done by moving fingers and hands to the rhythm of music while wearing LED tipped gloves that accentuate those movements.³ Comprised of cotton white gloves and microlight chips, these gloves add an important layer of uniqueness to each show as performers make use of custom visual effects like colors, strobe, ribbons, etc.⁴ |
Popularly seen among the crowds of raves or EDM events, glovers immerse their audience with up-close light shows that integrate musicality and improvised dance in taking viewers on a personal journey. The extent of the gloving movement is ever-increasing with the latest innovations of microlights, the new developments of styles, and the growing trend in gloving competitions like Emazing's Boss and IGC.
Benefits of Gloving |
Gloving can help bring out a few positive effects through its emphasis on gesticulation, or hand movements.
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History of Gloving⁸ |
While the exact timeline behind gloving is vaguely known, the origins of the art form began with styles picked up from earlier generations. The popularity of breakdancing, funkstyle, and popping inspired liquid dancing in the mid 70's, which ultimately became quite a popular dance at raves in the 90's. The liquid quickly expanded to include props like glow sticks and white gloves that glowed under blacklights.
Eventually, Hermes, the so-called original glover (OG), brought gloving to the forefront in 2006 when he taped Inovas to his fingers and recorded his first public performance. Intrigued, ravers soon began learning and evolving the dance until figures like Gummy began revolutionizing the style with more sophisticated LED's and moves like tutting, conjuring, and figure 8's. Teams of glovers began coalescing, like Ayo? ("Are you okay?"), and the complexity of the scene grew into companies like EmazingLights, who are now one of the leading developers of programmable microlights. Despite the growing trend in gloving, it has faced disapproval from public eyes, such as being officially banned from events like Insomniac in 2011 for "reflecting poorly on the electronic music scene."⁹ While the gloving scene has been stigmatized by associating drug use, artists of the movement look beyond this image and highlight the innate beauty of the dance by performing in venues other than raves, such as college gloving clubs and gloving competitions. The movement continues to grow and excites newcomers to join this art of self expression. |
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Microlight Technology |
The LED microlight is the primary element in separating a light show from a finger dance. Essentially, it is an LED component that is enclosed in a plastic casing and rests below or above each finger within a glove. The microlight is comprised of an RGB LED bulb connected to a button and microcontroller chip via circuit board.¹¹ Click here for a diagram.
The highlight feature of microlights is that the wide array of microlight options allows for varied light shows among glovers who customize unique sets of colors and effects. Microlights range from very simple on/off lights with preprogrammed colors to highly sophisticated lights that are customizable for colors, modes, and even motion sensitivity.¹² The brain behind the complex features and interface is the microcontroller chip. It retains the software necessary to navigate among customizable options. The software on it is the major component within each microlight that sets apart each vendor's glove set.¹³ However, most important is the development in LED technology in allowing these nighttime performances. The bulbs in microlights contain Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) LEDs that blend each color at different intensities in producing visible light.¹⁴ Each color palette is programmed into the microcontroller, which adjusts the intensities of R, G, and B via pulse width modulation (PWM).¹⁴ In essence, PWM alters the frequency at which LEDs pulse on and off to reveal either a dim or bright intensity of color.¹¹ This very technique is also crucial in distinguishing visual effects like strobe, ribbons, and hyper flash. Due to an LEDs extremely fast refresh rate, an effect like strobe can be made by pulsing the light on for a duration of time (typically in the .5 - 20 millisecond range) and off for a similar time sequence.¹⁴ To learn more about LED Technology and to interact with an RGB color simulator, click here. |
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Microlight Vendors |
Here is a list of vendors. Please note this may be incomplete with so many microlights out there.
EmazingLights Futuristic Lights LED Gloves Open Source Microlight (OSM) Kande Kreations For an in-depth beginner's guide to microlights, check out this link. |
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