Research
This week we met frequently with our instructors and made additional entries for the knowledge base and agency spectrum wall mural, including
- Interactive art installations such as Text Rain
- Frankenstein AI
- SXSW westworld
Our focus for these cases is less on their granting a large degree of agency to the guests but on their often creative, innovative and purposeful integration of technology.
Our spectrum with addition of interactive art installations spanning a wide range of degree of agency
Technology
Advice from our instructors is that we should prepare a list of technology for meeting with project partners next week. We’ve determined through collective discussion as a team that the type of technology we’re interested in includes both the tech the team is familiar with through our shared education in Building Virtual Worlds, as well as anything we might know from our backgrounds – Marieke is passionate about actuators for art installations and the rest of us have background in digital media, computer science and computer graphics. Anything that could prove interesting or novel, goes!
Taxonomy
Theatre vs Art Installations
Terms came up in discussion about the interactive art installation entries we added. We weighed whether it’s useful to make a distinction between passive interaction, where the installation makes unanticipated responses to an audience presence, and active interaction, where the audience is doing something with a purpose for making an expected result happen. This distinction seems related to discussion of interactivity in Virtual Mediation #1 and warrants further discussion.
Theatre vs Games
We discussed the importance of distinguishing games and theatre; Brenda suggested we return to Aristotle’s poetics for a definition of theatre.
Reaching out
We’ve heard back from several people in the industry, as well as faculty and peers at the ETC, who largely passed us resources, recommendation of past or existing works to review, and raised interesting questions.
Some questions raised:
Which aspect of the interactive theater problem are we tackling? We can work to improve audience experience or work in the backend, and study methods for making the experience easier for stage managers to control. The latter is a very promising avenue of exploration but is it what we originally set out to do?
Production
- Team retrospective:
- What went well:
- Printing entries to paste on the agency spectrum wall mural
- A Trello with links to important documents
- Conversations between team members to clear up theoretical understanding
- What didn’t go smoothly:
- Moving things from the Google doc list to the mural
- Fix: try to enter things on the mural at the same time. Indicate on the list with bold type when added.
- Documenting our conversation
- Fix: We are moving “research questions” Google doc to a physical post-it board where any questions we have and discussions we have can be posted.
- Not knowing what to do daily
- Fix: We are starting a physical, common, ranked to-do list, or a simplified project backlog that anyone can enter the room and look at for what to do next
- Moving things from the Google doc list to the mural
- What went well: