Intro to Media Synthesis

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Module 4 - Performing Media

Explore the Module

[Pathfinder](http://onformative.com/work/pathfinder), a visual language to generate choreography. 2014. [onformative](http://onformative.com) + [Christian Loclair](http://waltzbinaire.com)

Pathfinder, a visual language to generate choreography. 2014. onformative + Christian Loclair

About this Module

In this module, we’ll look at the relationship between performance, interactivity and media. Performance - be it theatre, dance or otherwise - has always had a strong relationship with technology and with media. This is similarly the case today where multimedia technologies have helped enhance or create new expressive potential for performance.

You’ll see how digital media can augment performance by researching, analyzing and exploring media-driven performance. But in particular, we’ll focus on emergence (or indeterminacy) as a key theme in this module. We’ll look the aesthetics of improvised, random, and generative approaches in performance. And by the end of the module you’ll put these ideas into practice by creating a that explores interplays between actor, audience, space and media.

Learning goals

Our objectives are as follows:

  1. Familiarity: become familiar with the world of media performance and influential artists, choreographers and performers;

  2. Analysis: experience their works and develop your ability to critically analyze the form and structure of the performance;

  3. Techniques: understand the styles, aesthetics, processes, techniques and contexts that inform media performance; and

  4. Application: prepare media performances based on these ideas;

Content and Methods

To begin, we’ll take a look at a wide range of media driven performances. We’ll start by exploring some of the ways that digital media offers a range of opportunities to augment performance. Namely:

Camille Utterback’s Text Rain

Pixel

Saatchi & Saatchi and Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Meet Your Creator

To examine these possibilities fully, each of you will research media-drive performances and report back. This will help you build familiarity and give us a catalog that we can all draw from (familiarity, techniques.). Using your research, you’ll unpack one of the performances, explore its structure, and create a notation for it. (application, analysis). To give more context, our first reading will provide a broad introduction to media performance and its history; while the second take’s an in depth look at emergent outcomes. (familiarity, analysis.)

Emergence, participation and interactivity will be the main way we examine ‘remix’ in this module. We’ll think about how these combine to give new and unpredictable outcomes in performance contexts. Our guest lecture will explore media performance and audience participation. Our screening will examine the extremes of performance art and participation (familiarity, techniques). Our discussion will dive into the ideas, opportunities and issues surrounding the potential for unpredictable outcomes.(familiarity) And finally, you’ll put it into practice in the end module project and create a mini-performance (application).

Schedule

Date Type Description
Tuesday, Nov 1 Intro Introduction to module (10-15 mins)
Thursday, Nov 3 Guest Larry Shea, School of Drama
Tuesday, Nov 8 Cases Interactive Performances
Thursday, Nov 10 Screening Clouds Documentary
Tuesday, Nov 15 Discussion Media Driven Performance
Thursday, Nov 17 Desk Crits Review and feedback for creative project development
Tuesday, Nov 22 Critique In class performance for creative project outcomes

Deliverables and Deadlines

Due Date Deliverable Details
Monday, Nov 7, 9pm Looking out Share your research/review of media-enabled performances and present in class.
Thursday, Nov 10, 9am Warm up Document your outcome for Performance Notation and post to the Gallery
Tuesday, Nov 15, 9am Readings Complete your reading reflections to prepare for in-class discussion
Thursday, Nov 17, 9am Proposal/First Cut Develop a first cut of your idea to discuss. Submit a summary of the proposed implementation for the creative project (200 words + illustrations) and share on the Gallery
Thursday, Nov 17, 9pm Tech Complete the tech rider and indicate any technical needs for the in-class performance
Tuesday, Nov 22, 9am Performance Perform in-class.
Tuesday, Nov 22, midnight Documentation Deliver documentation of your creative project
Wednesday, Nov 23, midnight Digital Crit Give feedback to 2 projects online.

Guest

Larry Shea, School of Drama, CMU

Larry Shea is an artist and educator working with a wide variety of digital & analog media, creating artworks and developing new media technologies for live events. Larry enjoys working in creative teams, merging technical possibilities with aesthetic and political concerns, creating layered and meaningful experiences. Some highlights include Julia Scher’s surveillance art installations in the late 90’s, Mary-Ellen Strom & Ann Carlson’s Montana train ride projection performance Geyserland, 2003; and recently The Builders Association’s Elements of Oz.

He is currently developing a series of geolocational experiences exploring the social, political, economic, industrial, and cultural development of Pittsburgh PA called, Ghosts in the Machine. Psychogeographic in ethos, these experiences weave publically available data and deep research into art interpretations or “story-events,” connected by location and meaning, that are both stand-alone experiences as well as doorways to further avenues for exploration. This is a mobile device-based AR system for “temporal wayfinding,” allowing users to gain a deeper sense of place as they go about their daily lives.

Larry holds an MFA from The Massachusetts College of Art, a BA from the University of Virginia. From 2003-2005 he was Executive Director of the internationally acclaimed, MIX: the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival in New York. Shea is currently an Associate Professor of Video & Media Design in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he founded and runs the Video & Media Design MFA program.

Looking out

Media Performances: Discover, research and report two distinctly different performances (stage, dance, etc.) that rely on media. Read the full description.

Warm up Exercise

Performance notation: Create a beautiful diagramatic score for a performance. Choose a performance from this week’s pool of case studies and examine in detail. Analyze and develop a notation to describe and communicate it’s structure (or some part of it) as a diagram. Read the full description.

Creative Project

Generative Play: Working collaboratively, create a short 2-3 minute performance that will never be the same. Use ideas of indeterminacy, emergence and generative performance, to develop a media-driven performance that if repeated would have a different outcome. Perform it in-class. Read the full description.

Readings

Required

Framing Questions

  1. What are the relationships between technology and performance? How has this relationship evolved over time?
  2. What are the levels and categories of interactivity in media art and performance? Provide an example of each. How are they distinguished?
  3. What are the ways that audience members can be active participants and co-creators in a interactive performance or artworks? How is this related or different from more traditional contexts?
  4. The conclusion the author notes “In drawing up this hierarchy, however, we are conscious that it could be argued that one essential element and category is missing - play.”. Why based on the text and in your opinion is play an essential element in media performance and artwork?

Framing Questions

  1. What are the differences and similarities between aleatoric (Cage) and stochastic (Xenakis) approaches to generative music?
  2. What are the strategies for creating generative, emergent or interdeminate outcomes in perfomative works?
  3. What roles to creative toolkits and code play in advancing generative performance?
  4. Why are simulations and models of natural systems like Conway’s Game of Life regularly used in generative performance?
  5. The article surveys many many artists that have explored the use of generative techniques in performative settings. Why? What do indeterminate approaches offer over deterministic performances? That is to say, when, where and why might you want to create a generative performance?

Also great:

Further Reading:

Screening

Clouds Documentary

Site

Synposis:

A generation of artists and hackers have emerged on the internet using open source technologies for experiments in art and design. CLOUDS is an interactive documentary and a portrait of this community of digital pioneers, explored through the lens of code. The project asks questions about the future of creativity at a time when algorithms play an important role in shaping culture. In its revolutionary hybrid format, somewhere between a documentary, a videogame, and data visualization, CLOUDS allows viewers to navigate a web of ideas. It uses a data-driven Story Engine to present an endless ever-changing conversation, where artists co-exist with their code, presented through real-time interactive visual systems and lush 3D environments.

Extra Credit

You can earn an extra 2.5% credit as part of this module by engaging in and documenting an performance experience. To earn this credit:

Attend the The Rover before December 3rd.

Performances are on November 17-19 and November 29-3 inclusive, typically from 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm in the The Philip Chosky Theater in Purnell. Tickets are free.

Document your experience as a short 200 word write up. Include some ‘evidence’ you attended - a selfie in the gallery, a photo of your ticket, etc. Submit your experience report on Slack as a post as a DM (direct message) to the course instructors and TAs.

While there: think about staging, cueing, lighting, media, props, costumes, etc. and all the mechanics that go into producing a performance. Reflect on these aspects and incorporate it into your reflection.

Resources

Aggregators

Emergent Performances

Motion Banks

People

New media

Techniques

Groups & Companies

Conferences

Sites

Documentaries on Movement and Performance

Talks worth watching

A lot of content from EyeO, Resonate and Inst-Int is really relevant. Check them out. Here are a handful of talks on media installations that I think you’ll get a lot from: