Punchdrunk/Media Lab Project Update 3
Over the past month we have been concentrating on the online element of the project, which has involved coming out of our comfort zone and has been both challenging and exciting. We have also been allocating portals to spaces in the real world within a newly filled out narrative, and as a team have honed in on the portals which will be most useful, practical and stimulating.
We have been looking at different models of communicating with an audience on screen, and what the online experience can be. Knowing that 3D rendering is not the direction we want to take, as it is expensive, derivative and limits the work of one’s imagination, has led to discussing other ways in which we can stimulate an audience whilst they are using their computer. We have realised that binaural sound is hugely important, and can be used to navigate space, tell a story and evoke a mood.
The MIT team have been doing amazing work (they have already pulled an all-nighter!), and have given us ten practical examples of how the experience could be played out online. Their ideas have been extremely inspirational and of course, sadly, we cannot reveal what they are, as that would spoil it for you!
Although our attentions have been focused on the online aspect, we have, of course, not forgotten about developing the on site experience. Surprisingly, for a show that has no text, language and the written word are an increasingly exciting way to give an audience member free reign to roam the space, and the ability to interact with performers. The next step is to try and apply the right discipline and method of communication to each element of the story, which is what we are currently working on.
Following Livi Vaughan’s (one of our lead designers) seven-day visit to New York, our designs for the new spaces are almost complete. We have also pretty much completed the full narrative of the show. This has led to the realisation that we are going to need at least one new live performer and quite a few online!
The final step is to work out where the portals of communication sit, before we all head to New York on the 5th March to begin the process of casting and building the show.
Punchdrunk
BAC Scratch Online: 2nd Update
Hello!
We’ve had a busy time of it since I last blogged; for one thing, we’ve finalised our first ScratchOnline Projects! More details of each of them below;
Shlomo
World Loopstation Champion // Beatboxer // Composer //
Teacher // Southbank Centre Artist in Residence
shlo.co.uk
Shlomo’s idea is to experiment with creating material for a new kids show, which will be made with a group of young people, bringing together the arts forms of beatboxing and streetdance.
His scratch will take the form of a residency during the school holidays. Each day during the residency, Shlomo and the young people will be holding an online webcast to share what they have created that day, with hope to gather feedback and ideas from the internet audience. Among other things, the group will also be recording a daily Audio Diary which will be uploaded to soundcloud and be used to document their thoughts and feelings about the process. At the end of the residency, these will then be edited together into a full podcast to be published at the end of the project.
Shlomo is one of our more digitally literate artists, he already personally has a large online network, and regularly creates online events including a recent live webcast of his collaborative piece at Glastonbury (Shlomo’s Glasto Circus which featured Ed Sheeran and Bellatrix), and an experiment in improvisation called Relay Loop Sessions which was broadcast in collaboration with VideoJuicer online throughout the world. We’re really excited to see what happens with the development of this residency.. Enjoy the video above of Shlomo performing at BAC in 2006.
Hollie McNish
The piece that Hollie will be scratching is called Journeys, and it is a poetry/ spoken word piece based on a poetry album she wrote in 2010 called Push Kick: The Beauty, Brilliance and Bollocks of Having a Baby (which you can listen to on the bandcamp link above), which charts her journey from pregnancy to parenthood.
She’s found that the album had a huge reaction from parents, with many of them getting in touch to tell her some of their pregnancy stories. This led her to want to transform this personal collection into a spoken word showcase, which includes her own pieces threaded with other parents’ experiences through integrated audio, video and visual art. These will all be gathered using the ScratchOnline platform, enabling Hollie to gain feedback from, stream to and interact with people from across the globe, who she otherwise might not have access to- either because they are parents (and so are sometimes unable to attend performances because of childcare commitments), or because they are based overseas.
From a research point of view, she’s interested in exploring how the audience member feels when watching the videos, depending on whether they are watching alone, or in a group or with their partner. She’s also interested in how different stage settings generate different reactions, so how does a video recording made in an informal setting like on a bed compare to if she was sat in an armchair or stood in front of a mic.
Hollie has a great project and a really interesting set of questions she’d like to explore, so we’re excited about working with her on this scratch.
Gemma Brockis and Silvia Mercuriali
‘Still Night’
A ScreenGrab taken from http://www.silviamercuriali.com/STILL_NIGHT.html
Still-night, based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a forty-minute theatre piece that takes as its protagonist the City in which it is being performed. One of the exciting sides to Still-night is that it spills out of the theatre, drawing a line between watching theatrical performance and watching the outside world – which is not only about seeing the streets as a set, but about becoming an audience to the fabric of modern life. As on-line activity becomes more and more a part of this fabric, it seems increasingly appropriate to Gemma and Silvia, that their work should find some way to spill into the virtual world. Since Still-night has the real world around it as its central interest, it feels like the perfect project through which to develop an on-line presence.
Gemma and Silvia said;
We anticipate that this presence will be a significant part of the audiences’ experience of the project as a whole and be, in some senses, a show in itself with its own audience. Their involvement will, we imagine, be an integrated part of the show’s development, not just in its early stages but throughout its life, as well as helping us to shape our creative process.
A key part of the project will be the sourcing of local stories, images, myths and maps, and then feeding these into the fiction of the piece. As part of the Scratch process, they will be creating a blog which will constantly be up-dated with pictures and story, from the city in which they are working. The first of these will be Lisbon, then London, and this will grow as they perform in more cities. They will mix their findings with comments from the online audience who are viewing and interacting with the blog, and all this will work together to create and develop the piece.
Nic Green
‘Motherland / Fatherland’
To help with the Scratch Online research, we’ll also be using one project as a ‘control’, this will be a scratch which continues as normal at BAC, which can be monitored by the researchers. For this we have chosen Nic Green’s piece ‘Motherland/ Fatherland’. Nic will be completing her ethnographic performance series Fatherland, Motherland, which will consider family, place and identity. She will be looking for a chorus of Mothers, of all ages, to help her complete Motherland in March. For more information on the genesis of the piece, please visit this article.
in other news…
So there you have it, our first three ScratchOnline residencies! In Mid January we had our first get together as a group, where all the artists and producers (each Scratch has its own producer) were able to meet one another and talk through their hopes and plans for the project. We were also able to see the first wire frames that had been designed by Nick at VideoJuicer, which were fabulous. From that meeting, a number of tweaks were made as a result of feedback from the artists, and yesterday we were given access to the first iteration of the site.. which is shaping up brilliantly!
I’m going to leave it there for today, but as always- if anyone has any questions, do drop me a line!
Katherine
Culture Cloud -Part 5 Creation
So we decided to create some promotional material and created an advert for our 2012 programme for Rashid Rana. I worded it to keep it open and not give away too much asking people to send initial interest or contact to an email addressee we had set up theculturecloud@nae.org.uk I also created the websites
I put the same text and images from the programme onto the site. This means we can use these urls for the project in the future.
Whilst this was going on we started working creating business plans and legal documents in preparation with our next meeting with Artfinder and Skinder started contacting partner galleries and spaces.
by Ravi James Abbott Project Assistant
Culture Cloud – Part 4 First Contact
The first big meeting was held on 15th November 2011. In attendance from Birmingham City University (BCU) were Dr Paul Long, Dr Nick 
Webber and Dr Simon Barber. From NAE we had CEO Skinder Hundal, Ravi Abbott, Islam Muhammad and Laura Rossi. We were also later joined by Will Doward and Priscilla Li (former CEO and NESTA bid partner) via conference call.
Initially we discussed the level of the Researchers input and how they did not want to dictate to us, but draw advice from previous experiences they have been involved with. They want to work out our sense of what we are thinking, prioritising, what we can learn, how we can use our time effectively.
The research team highlighted that anything we write about and blog, will be under public scrutiny, as this is a publically funded project. In light of this we supplied the researchers with the original ideas, drawings, mind maps and documentation to show how we came up with and developed the idea.
We then talked about people’s intentions and what we could do to drive people to get involved and be active on the site. Can we use incentives and keep people coming back for multiple reasons?
We arranged a schedule where the researchers would be interviewing us and getting our feedback and getting them involved in projects as soon as possible.
Having set up a Skype call with AF we found technology failed us and we were forced to retreat to the old style of telephone conference call.
Talking to AF we discussed the advantages of the project and what it could bring to each organisation – raising its profile, more traffic and recognition. Getting more into the details of the project, we talked about marketing and placing an advert into our latest programme. Making sure we had a decent amount of artwork on the site when it first opens so people do not instantly lose interest. We then decided to produce a set of milestones alongside the researchers, AF and NAE so that we were all working to the same timescale.
by Ravi James Abbott Project Assistant
Punchdrunk Media lab Project Update 2
How do I write this update without revealing too much?
Since our last blog we’ve been working hard to develop the narrative of the piece and the spaces within the piece. We have treated the creation of this very much like the creation of a Punchdrunk production. Developing character and a through-line libretto style narrative. This has begun to frame the nature of the relationship between the online and the real world participant.
We have been trying to develop something that will complement the real world experience and also create something compelling for the online participant and viewers. The key is to develop something that feels exciting for an online participant and draws them into the experience. This has been the real nut to crack, both PD creatives and Media Lab team have very much been leaning towards creating the real world aspects. The real challenge is of course not this at all, but in creating an exciting online experience. Felix our artistic director has just returned from a trip to the production in NYC (Sleep No More http://sleepnomorenyc.com/) and after meeting with Akito, a student from the Media Lab, has seemingly made a break through on this front. We are learning that face to face communication is key and relish the moments when we can get in the room with Media Lab.
Things we’ve been exploring and are interested in:
Portals- How do the online and the real world communicate?
Aesthetic- How do we capture the set and the action, is it live, rendered, filmed or photographed?
Navigation- Related closely to the above, what does it feel and look to explore the online space?
Contact- Is this constant or fragmented. Is their freedom for both particpant’s or are they unified?
Interest- Can we maintain a level of interest for an online player over a long period of time? Do they need extra activity to hold them?
Feedback- how can the actions of both participants impact on one another’s environment or experience?
In other news, our research team completed their first trips to the production. It has been interesting to hear their findings and their interpretation of our work. Their insights will prove invaluable to the development of the piece, and also give us a unique understanding of audience’s response to our work.
Social Interpretation: Bullying Jack
Public house debate, 1945. An American soldier is amongst the audience listening to the second speaker of the evening, Miss Crooks (not pictured), on the topic of 'America and Britain'. The original caption states that "the few Americans present were unusually tongue-tied, had nothing to say to frank discussion of their qualities".
How do you control what information is online? In the case of Twitter and Facebook, with difficulty, as Ryan Giggs found out last summer. But these are huge sites with a lot of organisation behind them, and they will have a fair amount of resources to fight legal claims.
So what about your smaller site? How do you control content? What about the issues of defamation, data protection, and, with public authorities, freedom of information? Or just insults, bullying and heated debates getting out of hand? Read more…
Social Interpretation: SOPA, not so good
Sharing, at the heart of socialising objects in this project, is under threat from SOPA. Clay Shirky sensibly unpacks the issues in this TED talk. It is scary stuff.
“TimeWarner has called and they want us all back on the couch. Just consuming. Not producing. Not sharing. And we should say no. “
How to say no: http://americancensorship.org/
Jane Audas
Social Interpretation: Which phone stays? YOU DECIDE!
We’re starting to really get into the design of phase-1 of Social Interpretation, and this will the first of a few updates on various aspects of design for the in-gallery technology and signage.
As you may have seen (here, here, here, here and, um, here) we’re in the middle of wresting with how (or if) to best use QR Codes to facilitate physical/digital interaction. We already know from our research that part of this is to really make clear, in a small space, what the code is and how to use it. Part of that is placement, part is effective written prompt – being looked at by Claire Ross, and part is visual prompting. We’re finding out that visitors are likely to respond well to a clear phone graphic, to indicate what to use the code with. But what phone?
Which do you think it most recognisable as a smartphone?
You see, I have an aversion to using the iPhone as an icon. It’s recognisable, and definitely has a cultural recognition this definitely helps as far as being an icon is concerned.
But, I worry that it does three things:
- Alienate non iPhone users and imply that it’s an iPhone-only function
- Contribute to the public perception that Smartphone = iPhone. It doesn’t (it’s denying the antecedent)
- Contribute to the public perception that you need an Apple device to take advantage of basic smartphone functions
It’s possible that none of these matter – or that I’m just worrying about nothing. And we’ll be evaluating our choice anyway to see how people react.
But what do you think?
Social Interpretation: Mouthing off on QR codes
This is an interesting use of QR codes and print media in combination. There are a lot of ways this could be adapted to make museum objects really social. And have them, almost literally, talk. And in return have visitors join in that conversation. But you’d need a budget rather bigger than #socialinterp’s.
This Reporters Without Borders advert is a bit gimmicky. But still, fair play, as it’s a hard subject to get people engaged with.
Jane Audas
