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Module 4 - Creative Project

Generative Play

tl;dr: 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.

Due Date:

• Performance in class: Tuesday, Nov 22, 9am
• Documentation online: Tuesday, Nov 22, midnight
• Critique online: Wednesday, Nov 23, midnight (see full timeline)

Gallery Pool: Generative Play

• Brief and goals
• Learning Objectives
• Considerations and Constraints
• Deliverables
• Timeline and Process
• Approaches, Inspiration and Methods
• Documentation

Brief and Goals

Throughout this module, we’ve explored how digital media offers a range of opportunities to augment performance. New media is changing the face of performance and adding new means to create, participate, watch, engage, converse, explore, interact, collaborate and navigate in performative contexts. It also creates new considerations for how media engages with, challenges or enhances the narrative and intent behind the work; how performers respond to the presence of the media, particularly if that media is generated in real time as a result of their actions in the space; how the space is treated with media to evoke other spaces, ideas, concepts or environments and how media is assembled to construct new spaces; and how the audience responds to these new couplings of media, space, narrative and performer.

Interactivity is a style of concrete conversation with the media. It is the way you dance with the computer. … {The} visual is not important. What is important is the rhythm of interaction .. . that feeling is not easy. Certain people can do it, rather like artists…. It is a new art form… . We don’t entirely know what interactivity is yet.

Over the next two weeks, we’re going to look at bringing media beyond the screen by creating a performance that explores interplays between actor, audience, space and media. We’re going to continue to think about communication, expression and composition but in a very different context - you’re going to evoke media to create a short play or performance.

Brief: Working collaboratively, create a short 2-3 minute performance that will never be the same again. Use ideas of indeterminacy, emergence and generative performance, to develop a media-driven performance that if repeated would have a different outcome.

You’ll work collaboratively (in teams of 4). Teams will be paired to balance skills across sound and visual composition. It’s up to you to decide the format of your performance (theatre, movement, game, simulation, narrative).

As part of this project, all groups will perform their work in-class at the end of the module. This will require you to think about aspects of performance like staging and cueing, as well as, how to blend and interact with media in real-time performance contexts.

Learning Objectives

In this exercise you’ll explore media-driven performance. As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

1. Explore and integrate ideas of multimedia performance and theatre;
2. Study and investigate possibilities for emergence and indeterminacy in theatre and performance;
3. Study design considerations involved in real time performance (cuing, staging, etc.) and develop strategies for them;
4. Develop your skills in both editing, preparing and interacting with media in real-time and real-space.
5. Prepare a short performance which involves improvisation and media and perform your work in front of a live audience

Considerations and Constraints

Constraints:

• The performance must last no more than 3 minutes;
• If the performance is repeated the outcome would be different;
• At least two of the team members must be directly involved (on stage) during the performance;
• You must use media as part of the performance;
• You must be able to perform it in class; and
• You must work collaboratively.

Considerations:

• Define emergence: You’re able to work in any media context to create your performance (dance, recital, interactive cinema/theatre, etc.) but you should think carefully about how you implement emergence. There are lots of strategies - think through the options carefully! There’s some suggested approaches below

• As a collaborative assignment you should immediately delegate and define clear roles and responsibilities. For example, assigning someone to planning the technical implementation, someone on aesthetics and style, someone on documentation, etc.

• Think about your technology: What technology do you need to bring the media into place (speakers, projectors, etc.)? Don’t overlook power, cables, tripods, mounts, connectors and basic equipment when you complete the tech rider. Also don’t forget that there will be a large number of other groups interested in using the same technology. Make sure you have plenty of time to reherse and reserve any tech you need for performance in advance.

• Test it: The technical setup on the day will be tricky you’ll only have a few minutes to deploy and setup between performances. Make sure you’ve got this down to a fine art. Don’t forget to think about your staging and what conditions you need (low light, bright light, etc.)

• Rehearse it: Practice makes perfect. You should reherse your performance as many times as possible. This won’t be a traditional scripted performance. Instead there will be many many possible outcomes. Make sure you’re prepared to handle this.

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver five things for this exercise:

1. Performance: A working, site-specific deployed installation + documentation of it. Must include video of the installation.
2. Statement: An artist’s statement of the intent and ideas that drove the creation of the work (approx 100 words).
3. Narrative A description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used to translate the work
4. Reflection: A critical reflection on outcome and it’s success.

Process and Timeline

• Concept Development: Start by develping a statement on the work. This should include the major themes, ideas, message and meaning behind your intented work. Imagine how this is executed. This will form the basic for your proposal. Research multimedia performance and look at the ways in which theatre, dance, and artists use media in their work. Research the ways in which you can bring media into performance (improvisational, choreographed, scripted, etc.) Note: you must reference at least three works that influence your approach as part of the documentation.

• Proposal: Create a proposal for your creative project (200 words + illustrations) and share on the Gallery. Develop a proposal outline and a storyboard. Try some of the ideas out and refine them. Develop a list of the kinds of media or content that you’ll need to support your ideas.

• Digital Crit: You’ll receive feedback from your peers on the concept by 9pm that night.

• Development: You’ll have one week to prepare a first cut of your performance. Make sure you use this time to: meet with your group; collect, edit, refine, prepare and sequence your media content (see below); visit the IDeATe facilities to make sure you have what you need; and complete the tech rider for the project.

• Desk Crit: Bring in an early stage version of the work for discussion during the in-class desk crits. You’ll get feedback from instructors on peers. Use the in class time to rehearse, refine, and document.

• Iterate: After the class you’re expected to integrate feedback and advance the outcome. This should be documented as part of your process.

• In Class Presentation: All projects will be performed in class. Note: you should be prepared, set up and ready to perform by the start of class.

• Deliver: Deliver your final outcome and documentation (see below) by Tuesday, Nov 20, 9pm

• Digital Crit: You’ll give feedback to two projects based on the documentation and discussion.

Approaches, Inspiration and Methods

There’s lot of ways you could approach this assignment. To give a little guidance and some starting points, there’s a curated set of approaches. These are no means exhaustive so go beyond them.

Note that the examples mix improvisation, choreography and dance, narrative, theatre, music, cinema and other forms. You can choose to work in any of these mediums for the assingment.

Media Backdrop (Emergent Performative Agents)

Media is often used in performance as a backdrop to the main actions of the actors/performer (e.g. a projection that situates the narrative or gives context to it).

Much of this is discussed by Birringer in his paper After Choreography which looks at the use of ‘thinking images’ in performance settings. In particular he discusses his work Suna no Onna, “a dance installation that exempli es such transactions in its informational aesthetics, mixing autonomous behaviors in the programmed digital environment with real-time performance and live sound synthesis.”

This is similar to the work of OpenEndedGroup. In both Biped and Ghostcatching media is used to complement, extend and highlight the on-stage movement. Movement is captured, then simulated and rendered with custom software to ‘choreograph the extended agent’ and create performance graphics for dance theater.

Daito Manabe extends these ideas by making the human body in motion the canvas through projection mapping in a collaboration with Eleven Play.

Messa di Voce “is an audiovisual performance in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software.” Here the performer voice is transformed into objects placed in real-time into a playful projected landscape. As the performance unfolds, voice accumulates in this visual landscape representing the dialog over time.

Finally, Pow2045 by Raphael Hillebrand and Christian Mio Loclair is a performance that combines generative design with urban choreography. In addition to using generative visuals to create a unique audio-visual performance the effect is achieved with low cost interventions too

For Pow2045 the team used 6- 10 cm gauze bandage which is taut from bottom to ground and fixed with tape. The resulting installation is maximal 12m x 6m x 6m, fits in every pocket and costs about 20 Euro per installation. Another economic factor is the build up time, hence the team created an installation with not more then 9 mapped lines of gauze in space. They designed the curve of the mapped lines to melt into the backdrop of the stage and since it was mandatory to create a three dimensional playground with just one projector, the team mapped floor, backdrop and lines with different content all in one field of view. ^*

Emergent Choreography/Theatre (Rule Based Improvisation)

Structure and rules is often used in performance contexts to add ‘indeterminacy’ or the opportunity for change and emergent outcomes. We’ve already encountered this in a musical context in terms of Cage’s use of the aleatoric and Xenakis’s stochastic approaches.

While not emergent, on the stage Beckett’s QUAD is a great example of rule based theatre. It provides a structured sequence for four actors to enter, cross and exit the stage without encountering each other and avoiding the other.

We can see similar rule based structures in other contexts. In Lumibots, Mey Lean Kronemann reveals the emergent behaviors of robotic movement. Long-exposure photography and an LED mounted on each device captures the generative patterns, performances and interactions between multiple robots as the move through a room.

Grisha Coleman’s 36 Walk (a movement sequence part of echo::system actionstation.2 the desert). This one sequence of this performance is a composition that is built on algorithmic precepts. Performers’ movements are guided this ‘algorithm’. Six dancers, “begin stationary and positioned randomly on an imagined grid. They follow a rhythmic score, played aloud or through in-ear devices. Each dancer is asked to hold a ‘count’ in their head, which determines the points at which they can choose the next movement. At each count, the dancer may choose to continue in their current direction, choose a new path, or pause. They may also choose to exit the stage, but may only re-enter at the ‘1’ count.”

36 Anthem Rules [excerpt]
1. Walking - Change direction on 1
               90-degree angles, 
Wandering
2. Changes in tempo – slow or running
3. Pauses
4. Holding Hands
5. Holding Hands into small weight share
6. Exit at any time, only enter on the 1
 
36 Anthem 

Line 3: 3 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4
Line 4: 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 3 3 3
Line 1: 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 3 3
Line 2: 3 3 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 3
Chorus Decent: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chorus 6s: 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
Chorus Final: 6 3 3 6 3 3 6 3 3 6 3 3 6 3 3 6 3 3

But perhaps the best example of generative and rule based systems in performance is Onformative’s Pathfinder. Recently receiving an Honorary Mention in the 2016 Prix Ars Electronica, it’s “a generative approach for the conceptual choreographic research of body movements. Through a process of guidance, the work becomes a medium of communication and explores the boundaries between inspiration and improvisation.” Projected onto the ground are graphic patterns, the product of movement algorithms, which are designed to foster improvisation and to stimulate the creativity of dancers.

Emergent Relationships (Performer-Media Coordination)

Unlike the previous examples, in Camille Utterback’s Text Rain the audience is the performer. Through their bodies they interact with falling text to co-create the experience with the computer program. Text Rain also allows for emergent outcomes. Rulesets or computer programs, dynamic inputs and humans can work together to produce coordinated but evolving outcomes. Like an open-ended ‘Choose your Own Adventure’, each interaction can lead to new or unexpected places. We see this in Pixel where choreographed performer interacts with real-time sensing and projected environment. The way in which they respond to each other allows the outcome to emerge from a range of possibilities!

We see this in Pixel where choreographed performer interacts with real-time sensing and projected environment. The way in which they respond to each other allows the outcome to emerge from a range of possibilities! Pixel “transforms the physical stage into a living virtual environment with many surprising visual planes. For Pixel—entraits, above, they immerse a troupe of eleven dancers skilled in breakdancing, body-twisting circus movements, and hip-hop, in spectacular digital media, from showers of light to ice rinks. ^*”

Similarly in Tim Murray-Browne and Jan Lee’s This Floating World “dances in time to music while computer-generated visuals dance in time to her body ^*”. The visuals are rendered in real-time in response to her body. Movement is captured using a 3d camera while custom software generates visuals and adjusts the music based on this data. This creates a responsive performance where interactions between performer, visual and sound environments can emerge.

Finally in this genre, flow #1 from Waltz Binaire is described as a ‘duet of dance and interactive media’. Flow explores this hybridity using a simple infrastructure (kinect, openframeworks, VVVV and projection) applied to urban dance to reveal their flow through real-time graphics. This investigation best summarises the potential emergent relationships between performer and media:

Dancers follow their own flow. Beautiful enough. Till another dancer infiltrates this execution of ego. We have a duett ; and if done right – it can flow to everything and beyond. A duett is a partnership based upon exchange and communication leading to conflict or harmony. In the 20th century mankind asked the digital machine for a dance and didn’t wait for the answer. Both are now damned in a duet forever in complete – conflony.

But these kinds of media-performer relationships aren’t just present in movement and choreography. They equally apply in theatre and music too. A great example of this is the Heart Chamber Orchestra. It’s an audiovisual performance consisting of 12 classical trained musicians and a fully generative, emergent score that is dependent on the physiological state of the orchestra, namely their heartbeats.

The musicians are equipped with ECG (electrocardiogram) sensors. A computer monitors and analyzes the state of these 12 hearts in real time. The acquired information is used to compose a musical score with the aid of computer software. It is a living score dependent on the state of the hearts. While the musicians are playing, their heartbeats influence and change the composition and vice versa. The musicians and the electronic composition are linked via the hearts in a circular motion, a feedback structure. The emerging music evolves entirely during the performance. The resulting music is the expression of this process and of an organism forming itself from the circular interplay of the individual musicians and the machine.

Chose your Own Adventure: Interaction and Participation (Audience Driven Emergence)

Choose your own adventure is the precursor to interactive cinema and participatory forms of emergence. And the structure isn’t too different either. Like the books, interactive cinema creates a ‘branching structure’ for the narrative that takes place. It introduces a series of decision points where someone (or a group) can choose what happens next from a fixed number of options. Then it continues until the next decision point and so on and so forth.

The same structure is applied in interactive cinema. Kinoautomat (1967) was the world’s first interactive movie, conceived by Radúz Činčera. At nine points during the film the action stops, and a moderator appears on stage to ask the audience to choose between two scenes; following an audience vote, the chosen scene is played.

Facade takes a similar approach to interactive drama through a game based environment. It’s features “AI-based, real-time rendered 3D virtual characters” to deliver a first-person one-act play where you assume the role of a friend of two of the primary characters, Grace and Trip. The game can be played and replayed to explore the effect of your choices on the outcomes and the characters interactions over the course of an evening dinner.

CLOUDs Documentary pushes this kind of interaction even further. It’s an interactive documentary featuring over 40 artists, designers and hackers who participate in the co-creation of free tools for creative expression. The documentary is entirely interactive and is somewhere between a documentary, a videogame, and data visualization. The themes, ideas and concepts create a complex, cross-linked network of conversations that the viewer can explore and navigate.

Recent work by USC’s ICT takes a similar approach and applies it to first-person documentary. In New Dimensions of Testimony you can talk to a Holocaust Survivor. For New Dimensions in Testimony, Pinchas Gutter records his life story through an array of 50 cameras, answering thousands of questions over the course of a week. The result is a 3D AI-hologram version of Gutter that uses natural language processing to answer questions in real time.

Blast Theory has made use of this technique too. In Day Of The Figurines they created a mixed-media massively multiplayer game where players made decisions by text message to advance their characters interaction in an imagined world. “The game unfolds over a total of 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town as it shifts from the mundane to the cataclysmic… Day Of The Figurines continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into the nature of public participation within artworks and within electronic spaces (here, through SMS). It uses emergent behaviour and social dynamics as a means of structuring a live event. It invites players to establish their own codes of behaviour and morality within a parallel world. It plays on the tension between the intimacy and anonymity of text messages.”

Their other work continues these themes. In Karen you interact with a life coach through an app. It unfolds based on your responses to psychological profiling questions and develops an intimate performance between you and ‘Karen’. While in Kidnap winners of a lottery are kidnapped and put under surveillance. The process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. The performance is unscripted, unfolds entirely from their response to the situation, to explore themes of control and consent.

Experimental Performance (Performance with new interfaces)

In this section, I wanted to call out a few experimental approaches to performance, but note that they mightn’t be at all about generative, indeterminate or emergent outcomes.

• Virtual Performance: Renata Sheppard and Klara Nahrstedt explore ‘telematic dance‘. These experiments allow performers distributed around the world to come together in a shared virtual space. Their movements in real-space are captured through motion tracking, translated into a 3-d representation and placed in a virtual environment where they can interact with and perform alongside other remote performers.

• Drone Performance: As part of Cannes in 2012 Satchi and Satchi created a spectacular opening to the New Directors’ Showcase: a live audio-visual show performed entirely by drones. A troupe of 16 quadrotors dance to and manipulate sound and light. It was orchestrated by Marshmallow Laser Feast and highlighted the potential of drones to be tightly choreographed on stage. Since then drones have cropped up more and more in performance and theatre. One of the more stunning recent example’s is Eleven Play and Daito Manabe’s piece ‘24 drones’ where human performers and quadrocopters interact in beautifully choreographed sequences. Watch video

• VR Performance: There’s lots happening in VR drama and performance like Kalpana an interactive drama which tackles race relations and bias. But Scatter are making some incredible work. For example Exquisite City a collaborative 3D drawing of one such imaginary neighborhood. Our city is built of cubic tiles – an ornate street corner, a window with drooping shutters, a patch of cobblestones – each one a 3D scanned object derived from photographs collected during the Exquisite City Workshop. The result is a videogame, a surreal walking tour of the area around Belgrade’s Republic Square. And their upcoming Blackout promises a pioneering virtual reality film transporting you into the memories of strangers on the New York City Subway.

• Augmented Reality Performance: There’s equally a lot happening in this arena too.
  • In collaboration with Intel Labs, the USC School of Cinematic Arts World Building Media Lab launched Leviathan as an immersive AR storytelling platform.
  • Marianne Weems and collaborators created ELEMENTS OF OZ. It blends theatre, immersive video projection and augmented reality elements: ‘through the use of YouTube tributes, a re-contextualization of the film, and the incorporation of new technologies, ELEMENTS OF OZ celebrates and deconstructs this incredibly rich cultural artifact’, namely the Wizard of Oz
  • Performance-based artist Adam H. Weinert, created an app that utilizes augmented reality technology to challenge the rules of what does and doesn’t belong inside a museum. Using the ‘Dance Tech Augmented Reality App’ he “placed” a permanent installation of his recent performances at MoMA in the AR environment. Through the use of the dance-tech.tv AR app, visitors are able to view footage of his performances simply by using their smartphones or tablet to the museum galleries where he performed in October of 2013.

• Living Performance: Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification uses living organisms to develop a real-time sythesized composition. It explores “the phenomena of interspecies communication, sonification of the environment and the underwater acoustic / bioacoustics. An interactive performance features live transmitted sound generated by Aurelia Aurita – moon jellyfish and performer. Sound loops are containing recordings and sonic experiments of jellyfish in closed environment and prerecorded from the jellyfish blooms at the sea. Both are mixed in generative sound which is assembled into immersive sonic and visual experience.”

Documentation:

Include a write up of the following:

• Statement - Include the statement you created for the work. What is the intention? what are the big ideas behind your project? what are the goals? why did you make it? what are your motivations?

• Performance - Present Describe the outcome. What did you create, how, etc.? What tools and technologies were involved? Include appropriate content and illustration. You must include at least one video of the outcome and describe how it is an emergent outcome.

• Context - Include references and discussion of artists, artworks, movements or aesthetic frameworks/techniques/approaches that inspired your outcome, process or approach. What has informed your outcome? How does your outcome relate to other artists and their work? What ideas, styles, or themes did you draw on any why? You must cite at least 3 critical texts, theories or works.

• Process - Describe how you translated your concept into the outcome. How did you approach the exercise? What were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What approaches did you reject?

• Critique - Critically evaluate the success of your own work. What does your inner critic say about this work? Did you match intent and outcome effectively? (note: use the framing questions to guide your response!)

• Group Reflection - Briefly outline what you took away from this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

• Sources - Cite and attribute any sources you used directly in your project. Document this carefully: be very clear about what media you worked with, where you found it and how/where it was incorporated.

• References: Reference and attribute any texts, concepts, ideas or related material that informed but wasn’t directly used in the creation of the outcome.

Each of these sections should be no more than 200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)

For the Project Info’s goal description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters