Here’s a really interesting talk that includes wirebending craft for Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival, captured as the Bailey-Derek grammar based on Stiny’s approach to shape.
A more recent and more in-depth talk that is really excellent (definitely worth staying for the q+a):
and a paper:
Noel, Vernelle A. A. ‘The Bailey-Derek Grammar: Recording the Craft of Wire-Bending in the Trinidad Carnival’. In ACM SIGGRAPH Art Papers, 357–65. SIGGRAPH ’15. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. https://doi.org/10/gn4dnj.
I think what makes this work so great is the multiple dimensions of rigour, the ethnographic approach, the grounding of shape grammar in foregrounding carnival as a cultural movement, the experimental approach to validating the usefulness of the grammar in communicating material culture, the blending of Noel’s practice (her artwork and speculative approach to software) in the research, and how she talks about making and her motivations are just super inspiring.