This article addresses the challenge of collaborative research between performers and technologists, seeking a model by which a common language can be developed between the collaborators. It draws upon the authors' experiences of projects where creative laboratory situations were used to support open-ended processes of exploration. The Performance Robotics project demonstrates how a cycle of iterative knowledge exchange between performance academics and robotics designers and engineers was achieved through an embodiment exercise that developed unexpectedly. The Projecting Performance Project resulted in computer operators 'performing' via the control of animated sprites that were projected on stage alongside dancers. Playful interaction in these projects enabled artists and technologists to find common ground on which to establish a rich dialogue for further research.
Abstract:This article builds on the binary rhythms of transparency and reflectivity described by Bolter and Gromala (2003) as being central to the design of interfaces in digital artifacts. It starts from the concept of experience design and suggests that the experience of the interface might better be considered in terms of the 'sensuous manifold'. The authors present the interactive kinetic light installation, Dancing in the Streets, as an example of how this sensuous manifold could be seen to work in practice. Many participants described this work as being 'transparent' and 'magical'. The article analyses elements of the installation in relation to transparency/reflectivity to assess the reasons behind these descriptions, and to explore how the sensuous manifold experience was achieved for participants. The location of the installation is defined as a 'non-place' whose uncanniness contributed to the potential for ambiguity and liminality. The use of light as a medium for urban scenography was also a critical factor in the design of the interface. The images and their behaviour in relation to the participants created the final element of the artwork. The installation was successful in getting the people of York dancing in the streets. In doing so, it foregrounds the concept of the sensuous manifold as a useful concept for experience designers.
While the significance and influence of Appia's writings and his storyboard scenarios of Wagnerian operas is uncontested, their origin has almost universally been explained as instigated by a combination of his musical inspiration alongside the technological development of electric stage lighting.While light was clearly at the heart of this new scenography, it was not as a result of the new electrical, incandescent lamps of Edison and Swan that had begun to populate the theatres of Europe and North America from the early 1880s as most commentators would suggest, but rather due to an older, preexisting lighting technology with which Appia was acquainted.In 1886, at the age of 24 Appia embarked on a four-year period when he was primarily resident in Dresden. It was a formative time in his education that although was instrumental in the development of a new scenic art, has received surprisingly little critical attention. Appia's writings and drawings for the staging of Wagnerian drama first conceived in this German city, were to revolutionise thinking about stage space, scenery and perhaps most importantly, the use of light as an expressive material in the theatre.This article therefore seeks to explain how a specific combination of circumstances converged, in a particular place and time, to provoke a paradigm shift in theatre practice -what we should consider to be the first scenographic turn of the modern theatre. It argues for a reappraisal of Appia as not simply an idealist or theatre theorist, but as a practitioner whose scenographic understanding was rooted in the craft of theatre production. It also suggests that we need to revisit perceived histories of theatre practice which have been established and subsequently re-enforced on the basis of linguistic translations which may lack a scenographic sensibility.
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