Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation?

■ Digital technology and the Internet allow for a democratisation of the producer/audience member relationship, and increasingly, it is possible to think of a two-way communication which extends beyond polite applause within the theatre building.
■ Consideration :
a) the extent to which a new kind of audience involvement is created and the implications of these new levels of access
b) the ways in which these theatres are redefining their relationships with their audiences through digital technology and redefining with their public images
c) how effective the approach taken might be in developing a new generation of theatregoers and in creating an engaged debate about the role of the theatre in the twenty-first century
■ Stagework - National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
a) http://www.stagework.org.uk
b) Henry Ⅴ, His Dark Materials, Beasts and Beauties, The Crucible
c) interviews, extracts from rehearsal and performance, introduction,
a plot synopsis, rehearsal diary, lessons plans
d) an exciting array of materials that can be used in a variety of ways by a wide range of users. The flexibility of the approach offers users the ability to interact with the material in a non-linear way.
e) the audience model of a passive individual
f) the purpose of government-sponsored theatre, government-funded theatre's citizenship and religious lesson
g) extends the work of these theatres and gives access to their working practices but in a way that is entirely controlled both in content and in form by the project's creators
■ Exploring Shakespeare: Hamlet and Macbeth-The Royal Shakespeare Company
a) http://www.rsc.org.uk/learning/hamletandmacbeth/
b) interviews, video clips, particular themes, the guidance for teachers, the activities
c) While the Stagework project provides the students with an approach that is televisual, the Exploring Shakespeare project represents an approach that is far more influence by the publishing history of the texts and the performance history of the plays.
d) The audience member remains passive and at a distance.
e) very contained and controlled approach
■ 'Adopt an Actor' Scheme-Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
a) the participatory project of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
b) 'Adopt an Actor' Scheme : actors - internet - audiences
c) on-line communication : video conferencing, mail, blog,...
d) contents about an actor's experience, rehearsal notes, thought and ideas…
e) creative use of digital technology to engage students in the theatrical process
f) 'Practice-led resources for the study of Shakespeare'
g) The participatory, non-hierarchical nature of the communication : real power and simplicity of the technology
h) further information about AAA : http://www.globelink.org/adoptanactor/
i) http://www.globelink.org
j) examples of blogs : http://www.globelink.org/adoptanactor/blogs/

Addenda, Phenomenology, Embodiment: Cyborgs and Disability Perfomance

The sensationalized of 'addenda' of disabled people are as semiotic markers of difference and seductive performance invitations into a different form of embodiment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that visual representation is in a productive tension with a form of tactility, the physical extension of vision, that is, connection between tactility and visibility.

Aimee Mullins : Seduction and other beauty













Aimee Mullins is a disabled fashion model, athlete and activist who walks with leg prostheses. She embodies both the fascination of the ‘other’ – the exotic, strange and different, and at the same time, her representations seem to hover on the edge of inviting me into her living experience. She does not remain ‘other’, but comes closer. Through her photos and a TV commercials, we can stress the ruptures and tensions between the image of Mullins, and the phenomenologically accessible performance of that image.














Body spaces : A disability culture tech-performace














Body Spaces explores physicality and space, public access and intimacy, physical absence and digital presence. From ghostly video projections, stories and photographs emerge sensings of urban spaces inhabited in unfamiliar ways. Traces of previous habitations haunt the location, and motion-sensors invite the spectator to engage in the visual memory of dancing bodies. 3 site-specific installations, created by Petra Kuppers and collaborators, in a residency with young disabled people. Commissioned as part of Digital Summer 2000, presented October 2000, Manchester. Various screens were arranged around the Outpatient's Lobby, hung from the ceiling and from an old-fashioned medical screen. People could moved around and through the screens. The Geometries video was projected onto the screens. One of these projections was a Quicktime Movie, and a Director script on an i-Mac controlled a radio mouse sown into one of the screens (see photo) which moved the film when the mouse button was depressed. In addition to the screens, the installation created a pathway through the lounge - a continuous band tracing a wheelchair wheel around the space, and individual marks, tracing the footsteps of a walking person around the same circuit. During the installation, the enthusiastic workshop participants guided visitors around this circuit, proudly displaying their work. The pathway led to photos, shot by the residency participants, providing new angles on everyday objects in the lounge. Around these photos and objects, stories on coloured paper could be found, telling fantasy narratives inspired by these objects, imbuing them with a different and new life.The soundtrack for the installation was running as part of the video projections, but could also be manipulated via sensor pads, which would activate short soundbytes to weave into the soundscape.

Intelligence, Interation, Reaction and Performance

Susan Broadhurst is a writer and practitioner in the creative arts. She is the Subject Leader of Drama Studies and has worked at Brunel since 1999. Prior to this she was based in Australia at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth. She is also co-editor of the Body, Space & Technology online journal and is currently working on a series of collaborative practice based research projects entitled, "Intelligence, Interaction, Reaction and Performance," which involve introducing various interactive digital technologies into live performance including, artificial intelligence, 3D film, modelling and animation, and motion tracking. The first of which was Blue Bloodshot Flowers. In this chapter, she discusses a series of performances that utilize new technologies. The first is Blue Bloodshot Flowers and the second is Dead East, Dead West. Through both of performances she wants to say about new liminal spaces, that is, tension-filled spaces where opportunities arise for new experimental forms and practices.
Blue Bloodshot Flowers is a movement-scripted piece. It involves the remembrance of a love affair. It performed at Brunel University, West London, and the 291 Gallery, London, in 2001. It consisted of the real time interaction between a human performer, Elodie Berland, and Jaremiah, an avatar(computer-generated image). Jeremiah is a head model based upon Geoface technology(DECface). Jeremiah consists of computerized artificial intelligence with the ability to track humans, objects, and other stimuli and to react to what's going on near him directly and in real time. Most people find him 'spooky' at first and then familiarity. From a technological perspective, Jeremiah is based around two subsystem: a graphics system, which constitutes the head; and a vision system that allows him to see.
Dead East, Dead West was an experimental sound- and movement-based piece with some fragmented script, and was fused with 3D interactive technology. It consisted of motion tracking, interactive pads, and miniature cameras. In addition, Dead East, Dead West was an intercultural and interracial performance that explored and exploded the margin between what is seen as dominant Western art practices and the 'exotic' performance of the 'other'.
She says that 'Intelligence, Interaction, Reaction and Performance' is an ongoing project of what is hoped will be a variety of performances which combine the physical and virtual in performance. In conclusion, she proposes that although much interest is directed towards new technologies, technology's most important contribution to art is the enhancement and reconfiguration of an aesthetic creative potential which consists of interaction with and reacting to a physical body, not an abandonment of that body.

Body Waves Sound Waves : Optik

Body Waves Sound Waves : Optik
Live Sound and Performance
Barry Edwards and Jarlett

1.
- Music and sound have always been key ingredients in Optik.
- 1981-1986 : live acoustic solo instruments
- 1992-2000 : specific acoustic sources, mainly percussion, with improvisation
- 2000 : Internet experiment, electronic sound → live electronic sound
2.
- The first approach : working with blocks of performance material
- The second cycle : working with wave-like transitions and emergent moments of event and action
- the dynamics of the human body in space and time
- the size, shape and acoustics of a space, and of the performers and spectators are all ingredients in the starting mix. There is connection.
- Theatre is a process of flux.
- eidetic intuition : a useful term to describe theatre is a process of flux, the immediate knowledge of the form of something, something that is vivid, and present
- eidetic : the Greek word eidos which refers to a mental image that has unusual vividness and detail
- intuition : immediate apprehension of something without reasoning
3.
- Movement and stillness : silent and sound
- dynamogenesis : what happens before you make an action
- In both music and action, repeating is a key technical building block for the Optik process.
4.
- The sound in recent Optik work is always 'diagetic'.
- That is the source of the sound is always present, not imported.
5.
- Jarlett's system
- A way of generation an electronic sound score that did not rely on using any ingredients produced in advance of the performance itself : to use a granular synthesiser called Granulab written by Rasmus Ekman
- Granular synthesis is a process first suggested by Iannis Xenakis and Curtis Roads.
･ Looping : a loop start, length and rate. This looping control simply defines where in the sound file a grain when produced is to start from-in computational terms it could be described as a pointer.
･ Rhythm : Barry Truax identifies that constant sound grains need to be less than 50ms in duration. The sound produced happens regularly, giving a rhythmic pattern for the performer to react to, but its content can change with every repeat.
･ Texture : altering the grain length, grain frequency and grain pitch → creating diverse timbres-from rumbling bass to high frequency distorted screeches, rhythmic patterns at various speeds → lush ambient drones
6.
- Artist-artist collaboration
- Collaboration as director and sound technologist has been based on interaction as artists.

Kinaesthetic Traces Across Material Forms : Stretching the Screen's Stage

This chapter explores the body screenographies of performer Loie Fuller, the movement mapping by Scientist Etienne Jules Marey, and the art form of cinedance emerging from both. In trajets, the screens and visiting public together alter patterns in the installation space, which affect the screens' direction, velocity and rotation, and the visitors' pathways or movement trajectories. These interactions, which also include projected images collectively, constitute the choreography of the installation. Loie Fuller and French scientist Etienne Jules Marey created techniques that mediated and materialised bodily movement beyond its ephemeral ever-changing nature. Both of them sought to expand the scientific and artistic scope of movement perception and transformation. Marey isolated the body into a controlled environment to capture quantitative shifts of movement over time with 'movement-mapping' techniques. Fuller, on the other hand, created an expressive 'body-screen', which transformed her body and its surrounding space into animalistic and elemental metaphors. They both contributed to what constitutes movement and kinaesthetic knowledge, on by framing, amplifying and converting movement into linear, sequential, two-dimensional representations, and the other by creating performances which transfigure the expressive materiality of bodily movement. The installation trajets uses mutually constitutive processes of bodily movement techniques to map feedback encouraging the visitor to feel movement vs simply looking movement. The screen is not only a projection surface, but also a dynamic participant in the screenography. Cinedance is an art form that extends both what is cinema and what is dance. This art form extends the body-medium of the audience through movement empathy and haptic perception with cinematic techniques of shifts in point of view, referential framing, decor, montage, compositing and so on. The choreographic interaction still depends on the physical participation of the general non-specialised public, but unlike trajets 2000 it no longer uses computer vision to track the movement of visitors in the instrallation. In order to capture more people simultaneously and with more accuracy, the team pursued the design of a pressure-sensing floor. Movement mapping, body screenographies and cinedance principles contribute to the choreographic research. The artistic research also indirectly reflects the microcosm of a larger, technically mediated socio-kinaesthetic condition we experience in daily routines.

Materials vs Content in digitally Mediated performance

Mark Coniglio refers to Two mediated works: Apparitions by Klaus Obermaier(2004) and 16[R]evolutions by Troika Ranch(2005). He says that both works use motion-tracking systems to interactively generate three-dimensional visuals that respond to movements of the dancers, and both rely on a unified methodology for using those tracked movements to manipulate the media. However, he thinks a work like Apparitions is, in essence, about the materials themselves. On the other hand, the work of Troika Ranch is content-driven. He also thinks that the term materials-content is changeable with these terms: materials-driven and content-driven camps, abstraction and narrative, dance and theater. He proposes that those creating content-driven work must forge ahead in parallel with those who are creating materials driven work. Only if there two camps pay careful attention to each other and audiences are able to experience both models, we have the opportunity to go beyond the historical model as we holistically and simultaneously develop theory, technique, and content.

Artistic Considerations in the Use of Motion Tracking with Live Performers : A Practical Guide

In this paper Robert Wechsler concerns motion tracking, especially its practical uses and artistic implications. He thinks "Motion Tracking" is very popular like 'Motion Capture' and 'Motion Sensing'. 'Motion Capture' means the recording of movement data for later processing. 'Motion Sensing' was coined by Frieder WeiᏰ in 2002 to describe EyeCon and systems like it. While these three terms are interchangeable, there's one distinction: some systems lend themselves more easily than others to realtime media manipulation. He says that in terms of 'Interaction' it is what we are not doing now. He thinks that interactivity depends on a certain degree of looseness, or openness in the artistic material. It is interaction that you can achieve in a performance setting and relates to spontaneity, openness and communication. He also introduces the EyeCon system and several input and output parameters applicable to the system. In the Artistic implications section, he explains mapping and other relevant issues. He says that three aspects to mapping are input, output and compliance which refers to the nature of the casual relationship. Also he thinks there are situations where multiple mappings can be extremely effective, but it causes a diffusion which increases with the number of simultaneous mappings. Then he points out the pitfall of position tracking. From the technical side camera doesn't see the entire stage from above because of the low ceiling of theatres, so the computer will see one person instead of two. From the artistical side the movement takes time, and this time frame defeats a convincing interactive effect. Second, position tracking tends to fail is that it is rarely a physical experience. Finally, location in a space is simply of little interest to us compared to parameters such as shape, acceleration, height, and so on. In the last section, he refers several things that make interactive art interesting: amplification of gesture, communication with an unseen player, visual or acoustic accompaniment and that make interaction convincing: education, timing, repetition, interaction by implication and intuitive logic. In conclusion, he thinks that the central challenge that this field faces is not one of improving the technology, but rather one of developing an understanding of its implications-the changes in the mindset and sensibility of artists as they put it to use.