Depero Futuristi is hard at work after their performance in New York City on November 12th.  As part of the Performa 09 Festival, we presented our re-imagining of Fortunato Depero’s Balli Plastici as directed by Franco Sciannameo.  We had a great turnout!  We also did a live demonstration of the software we developed and used to create the show.  Afterwards, we had a lot of awesome questions and interest from the crowd.  We’re very proud of our accomplishments and are happy we could bring something entertaining to the table at Performa.

After returning from New York, we completed our first guest test.  We invited people from the ETC Pittsburgh community to come to our office and get some hands-on experience with our software.  The feedback we collected based on those experiences has been invaluable in charting our course for the rest of the semester (only 2 weeks more!).

After condensing and talking through the feedback, we were able to prioritize modifications to the existing software as well as new features we’d like to implement.  Now we’re working hard to not only make the software as fun as possible, but to ready it for public release at the end of the semester.

Also, this software now has a name!  Meet Toybox Futuristi.

As we approach the end of the semester, we will also be writing a post-mortem of our experience and process developing Toybox.  We hope that we will be able to appear at several conferences in the coming year to present our work in digital puppetry.