We are doing a series of exercises and workshops so to understand better how interaction between people or people/machine works.
We started by writing a simple exercise – to predict the flow of a conversation between two people, and finding ways to lead that conversation into an area that is of our interest. Our starting point was an anti-telemarketing script – something made to react against annoying calls from telemarketers; following the same sort of flow-chart each student made their own chat simulator. We should have tried them out live in the streets, but most of us did not have the nerve for that!
Then we had a workshop at Lume studio with Jouko-Thomas on how to set up a simple live performance. We wrote 3 short sentences on casual observations or personal experiences from everyday life and staged them for each other by improvising, using just our verbal skills and body language. The next step was to write again a short phrase story from our personal experience that was related to one of four emotions (sad, happy, angry, amused) which had happened between two people; we staged those with a partner, the same way.
In the end we gathered all the short stories and made a play out of them, also by improvisation. We have some natural talents there :) just take a look at the video on YouTube!
On our next workshop (January 18-19th) we had Chris and Teijo helping us to tame some technologies commonly used for interaction. The purpose was to understand the basics of live camera capture and to build a very simple interactive video that required the audience to be involved as a group. To build this interactive video we were split into two teams.
Team A was quite successful making a game that would project the image of a half-clown-half-gorilla onto the body of a live person. The audience would interact with this video by pulling a rope; if they would pull more to the left the person would become totally a gorilla, and more to the right would become totally clown. This rope had a red ribbon that was tracked by a camera so to know whether it was more to the right or left.
As for us team B it didn’t go so well since we planned to do a game like hit-the-mole. A mole would pop up randomly from four holes in a field. The audience’s aim was to hit the mole by rolling a ball on the floor. This ball was tracked by a video camera that would translate its position onto the screen displaying a hand with a hammer. This did not work very well since the movement of rolling a ball was different from the perceived movement of hitting with a hammer and also, the camera was not able to track so well the place of the ball onto the screen.
- Watch our video - yes we are now on YouTube!
