ds1935’s blog

Someday, I will write this into a coherent explanation.

When playing with the paired heartbeat sensors at the show, my partner Zeke and Adam’s housemate Terry had a moment. It freaked Zeke out–he said it felt like they were lying in bed together, except of course they were standing a few feet apart touching some cardboard and plastic and barely know each other. It was disjointedly intimate, which is a nice reversal of the ways technology can sometimes take more-intimate experiences (such as conversation) and make them feel less intimate. or at least less embodied. Another friend said it felt like having sex.

It didn’t feel like having sex when we finally got the paired heartbeats working and tested them out–but on the other hand, working late into the night on a project is in its own way an intimate activity, so there wasn’t that total disjoint of suddenly and randomly connecting with someone else’s heartbeat.

There’s a germ of something going on here that ties into what I’ve been thinking about. I didn’t put as much into this project as it deserved, but at the end of it, I got some solid tech for reading heartbeats and (a bit after the fact) for sending the rhythm between locations. It can all use some tweaking, as well as some additional thought…

Oh man. I will fill the details in later.

* Conceptual piece playing with the idea of using a two-player game that, with successful play, results in a narrative performance unconnected to the narratives built into the game itself.

* Play takes place on a stage. Players’  foot positions are tracked with switches on the floor, and their hand positions are tracked by video tracking of colored lights.

* Players play a series of gesture-based micro-games. Each gesture is a gesture intended to show part of the story being acted out. The game has five levels, each of which corresponds to an act in the story.

*Supertitles give a brief description of what act of the story is being told, and what happens in the act.

***

* The technical parts all finally came together on Monday evening–for Sunday, the gesture part was sort of working, but the foot switches broke about 15 minutes before the show started. Monday morning we reworked the color tracking and fixed the feet. Unlike some other projects I’ve worked on, nothing was fundamentally broken about the tech; it was just a lot of work that needed to get done, with the usual crop of last-minute problems.

* In the context of the show, it would be impossible for even an ideal combination of choreography and gesture tracking to reveal a clean narrative, because users’ interactions were about learning the game, rather than successfully performing the game.  And the choreography, intended gesture vocabulary, and coded gesture recognition were far from perfect. So the specific experiment of creating an unintended cherent narrative remains unrealized.

* However, a lot of interesting stuff happened. One of the most striking elements was the distinct difference between the outside view of the stage, and the inside view of the game space. We very distinctly made the game board look like a small proscenium stage (although we never did get to the golden cherubs), but (from my own experience and based on watching how people played), giving people little toys, putting the screen in the middle of the stage, and keeping the on-stage lighting dim (other reasons?) caused the stage to feel nothing like a stage from the inside. I love this interaction. We did that with the photo booth, too–we set up an exceedingly performative physical space and then used video displays and interactions to make the user forget that they were in a performative space.

* Hand tracking, foot tracking, and different instructions for each player make a high cognitive load. Some of this was our less-than-perfectly-intuitive graphic design, but I think part of it is that people are used to technological interactions being about only one small subset of their body. A few experienced gamers who’ve played more recent gesture-based games had a quicker learning curve. There was also something weird in that many people’s first impulse was to flail their arms about wildly.

* In all of this, there are three things that continue to interest me:

1. Computer as choreographer.  Thinking about the ways that interacting with technologies leads to specific body movements. Technology as incantation, the word being embodied. How that can be manipulated, how that already *is* manipulated, what it might look like to be more aware of that.

2. The computer is your friend. People are remarkably obedient when they are told they are playing a game, and when a computer screen tells them to do something. Good computer games give instant feedback when people follow instructions correctly, which tends to train people to be willing–in a very immediate and literal sense–to obey computer screens. Again, both manipulation and what it might look like to be more aware of that.

3. Using these things for good and using these things for evil. A good or at least benign aspect is the task of creating performative spaces in which people who don’t think of themselves as performers can be relaxed and engaged and perform and express themselves. These sorts of spaces could be important in the context of a world where increasing numbers of people have the tools to create and disseminate media–it could be a way that people can use technology to help them be better performers without being Performers. I’m interested in playing with how to make people more aware of this process of incantation, movement, and obedience while engaged in interactions with technologies. Need to think more on other related aspects.

That was longer than I intended.

I went to 2 1/4 performances but never had the spare moment to write the reviews. Here are some reviews in brief:

1. Jamie Allen’s performance about Nikola Tesla at Exit Art. Video and live performance about the life of Nikola Tesla, told via a mash-up of a number of existing pieces–movies, animated cat-anchored news programs, bands, and the like. The story of Tesla himself unfolded through a layered iterative process, where switching between pieces of media sometimes retold the same pieces of the story, sometimes revealed a new piece, and sometimes went back to allow for a new reflection on a piece previously seen. Never have I seen an elephant electrocuted so many times. In class, Jamie explained that one of the things he was interested in is the way that the (rather compelling) story of Tesla’s life both is little known yet gets discovered (and obsessed over) time and again by different people, each of whom seems to feel that they are discovering it for the first time. That came across well, also touching on larger issues of what stories we as a culture deem important and what we let fall by the wayside, as well as issues of who feels ownership over a particular story.

There were certain visual choices that I don’t remember well, but that I remember felt gratuitous, and I’m not convinced that the whole thing needed to be a combination of video and live performance. I think it would have been as successful if it were only a video, and for the live performance to add something meaningful, the spoken parts should have added something that couldn’t have been done in video.

2. Time Booth. Adam and I saw this installation of a photo booth with props that were used to make mini comic strips from a page of photo booth photos. The artists had prepared a number of painted backdrops (often with strategic areas cut out), puppets, costumes, and other props, and installed a photo booth in a room. They also (importantly) prepared a number of storyboard sketches of ideas of what a page of photos could look like. The photos from the photo booth were arranged in two columns of three photos, and the storyboards illustrated ways to make different comic-strip arrangements of photos–many either across&down across three rows, some moving down&across the columns, and a few treating the page as one spatial unit, with each photo acting as a window to view a piece of a larger composition arranged on the page as a whole.

So basically a user/performer would look at the folder of storyboards and either select what they wanted to do from there or make it up on their own. They’d then tell the artists/curators what they wanted to do and pick out the props they wanted. Then the artists/curators would, if needed, tell them what to do for each photo.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that the order that the photos are actually taken were neither down&across or across&down, but in a different order (up&across? i forget). So to produce a coherent narrative on the page, the user had to act out each scene/panel out of time order. (The artists/curators had this part down pat, so they directed users easily and competently.) Thus, the experience of taking the photos was not a linear performance of a narrative. In some ways this made the experience less coherent, and in others it made the result feel more surprising and emergent.

The piece spoke to a lot of elements of performance that interest me, in particular the ways that interacting with a piece of technology can allow people who don’t necessarily view themselves as performers engage in a performance without feeling overly awkward. However, the space and the esthetic swere set up in a way that made a substantial barrier to entry. It was a small photo booth in a big room, and using it required deciding to stand out from the crowd, establishing your place in line, and having a extended conversation with the artists. Also, the props were rather messily scattered about, and since it was in a gallery space it felt like you shouldn’t touch the artwork. These are all nitpicky little things, but they didn’t ease the way for strangers to feel comfortable diving into it. (I thought it was theoretically, temporally and spatially interesting, but I didn’t want to participate.)

Overall, the piece was more interesting in theory than in practice.

3. The Breathing City. This one doesn’t count because it was neither live nor interactive (which didn’t become clear until we got there), but we went hoping it would be something interesting to write about. A set of four video screens showed the same scene of a close-up cityscape, taken at different times but synched up in terms of zooming and panning, so that it looked like you were looking at the same image through four slightly different lenses. A low ambient sound, made of human voices and sounding mostly like white noise, formed a background. There were some mildly interesting edge effects that played with the sense of time and space, but I didn’t find the piece as a whole particularly compelling. Technically very well done, but a bit thin.