MeMentoMori :: Inside a Live Reptile Tent From a student's point of view :: :: :: :: ::

Farewell to the crew!

2007-03-09T23:57:00.001+02:00

This is the last official day of the Inside a Live Reptile Tent project!

In the morning we had to take down the set and props that remained from yesterday, let the space neat and clean...

But the big thing today was the feedback session with the students and teachers, where everybody had a chance to share their view on how the whole process went. This is a healthy practise here at the Media Lab, and people are honest about it too.

The general feeling among all was that the three performances went really well and everybody was proud of the show they managed to build, but that along “the making” process there was a lot of unnecessary delays, mainly because communication between all parties involved didn’t work very well. Maybe we would have needed some more teambuilding activities, especially because most people who were involved had never worked with each other before and this was a particularly intensive course.

Also we discussed about the feedback we got from the audience, which was mostly positive, as well as some accessibility issues we noticed could have been handled more carefully, such as having ramps instead of stairs and calibrating the picture cameras also for darker skin tones.

The learning process and outcomes were mentioned as well. People were enthusiastic about the alternative means of conveying a narrative using interactive technologies and although some felt the technological approach could have been more tutored some other enjoyed the opportunity to deepen knowledge by themselves. Students also learned a lot from each other as they worked in teams, and from working with field professionals.

Discussion went on for about one hour and later the written feedback will be collected so that future courses can be improved.

In the evening everybody was invited to an afterparty with a chance to chill out and enjoy some snacks in a friendly atmosphere. Thanks all for the great effort to build this MeMento Mori!

... And the grand Finale

2007-03-08T23:28:00.000+02:00

The second and third shows happened today.

The last one was the best, in my opinion, I think we had got the hang of it by then. It was the one that had less people, around 30, which made the flow quite smooth. Also we could manage to give out the instructions both in English and Finnish – in the previous shows we mostly spoke in English. All in all, we had a total of 122 people visiting the 3 show performances.

We were so tired after both presentations but we still managed to clean up a lot of things. Something that took more than two months to build and now it will be wiped out in just one day! The space has to be empty by tomorrow. Luckily we will have some video footage of the shows since it is promised that a DVD will be made of the live performances and even includes some of the “making of”. I’m looking forward to that!

The premiere!

2007-03-07T18:55:00.000+02:00

Last minute adjustments, last minute stress… Elina came again to taught us some body movements to lower the stress and relax before going on stage. We were pretty nervous so we really needed to!

People were very curious about MeMento Mori and this first round was a bit crowded, over 40 people came to the show. Most people were from UIAH, but also some unexpected guests from outside the university showed up.

I was the "host" at the fireman's Miniroom guiding people around and Tommi was on the floor inside the fireman's suit (we decided that it would look more realistic). It was really funny because people didn't know that and they got really scared when they realized a real person was there. Some tried to poke him - poor Tommi!

In the end of the first show it felt great, a big relief that all went well (and the best for me, nobody got hurt!). Of course we noticed we need to make some adjustments to improve the flow along the different areas, and some installations need minor corrections for better performance. But as we spoke to people in the audience later, everybody seemed to have had a good time and the winner was surprisingly the rope pulling contest – something totally unexpected for the audience!

Also the talking duck back at the Foyer before leaving the place got a lot of positive feedback, people didn’t mind queuing for a long time just to listen to it giving them a personal comment (also printed) and speaking out their name…

One day to go

2007-03-06T18:52:00.000+02:00

The rhythm is frenetic, tomorrow is the big day! Tommi finally got the light sensors to work and we are now able to complete the Miniroom with all the props correctly wired to a hidden computer and make the Comic strips appear as people flash their lights on them.

Everybody else is at least as busy and stressed. The Main Stage got it’s four screens set only yesterday and Atle has been trying his sound installation with the real setup. The Foyer looks like it will be ready on time as well, Chris and Anna-Maija are working around the clock. The rope pulling event is a bit behind schedule, but Teijo is giving his best shot.

I’ve been disappointed though with the accessibility and security issues since today we heard that it will be impossible to build the ramps and the only thing securing people from accidentally falling in the pit (the Main Stage) will be a rope stretched around it. In our artistic concern we have overlooked these issues, and now we have run out of timeto solve them…

Lousy board, problem stairs...

2007-03-04T22:15:00.000+02:00

So we did spend the weekend working on the light interaction… Tommi is learning how to make the Arduino board work, but it’s really difficult, he had to learn it from scratch in the last few days. We made some progress though. I’m still designing more pieces for the Comic.

I had to decide to quit the Swimmer turns to Goddess installation, so I can have time for the others. Maybe I can do something with it later? Well, and I think Teijo also didn't have the time to help me with it anyway.

Also I just realized, maybe a bit too late, that the layout of the stage and different areas will not be accessible to people with restricted mobility, since we have several stairways but no ramp alternatives. Actually the ramps were mentioned at the beginning of the stage design process but somewhere along the way the issue was dropped since we would have to build them, there was none already available. We will talk to the Lume technicians and see what can still be done.

The flaming hotel

2007-03-02T22:07:00.000+02:00

I had a meeting with Tommi and Anna-Maija about the fireman’s Comic project. We decided that I should take responsibility for the visuals of this Miniroom, since Anna-Maija is having a lot of work with the Foyer alone. That and trying out the interaction with the light detectors along with Tommi will keep me quite busy through the weekend! The show has its premiere already next week… here is a preview of the designs I made tonight for this Comic.

Pyromania

2007-03-01T21:37:00.000+02:00

We started the day by setting some furniture on fire. We intend to place it in the fireman’s Miniroom – not just for decoration but also to give that realistic burnt smell…

An outside perspective

2007-02-28T18:52:00.000+02:00

Today was an important day: Elina, a friend of Teijo with experience in theatre came to give her opinion and feelings about the sequence and contents of the show. We had a walk through the spaces together and afterwards a long discussion with everybody. We took some more tough decisions there, we “killed” another project, Tommi’s "Divine discourse", because we are really running out of time and still so much to do.

We also decided that for the Exploratory Area (now called the Game Area) there will be that rope pulling contest. In this way, we can make the audience decide the fate of the characters: one team for the fireman, one team for the swimmer. Will the fireman be able to return to life or will the death goddess/swimmer have the strength to force him into the death world?

Mind a bath?

2007-02-27T17:50:00.000+02:00

Well, we continue to build the stage props. Kasia got the bathtub for her installation, and we were testing how to project pictures there.

Things turn around

2007-02-26T17:44:00.000+02:00

Chris came back from England and we were walking around the set to get him up to date with all the changes that went on, we even discussed it a bit further. The changes in the corridors were so drastic that Antti and I are now a bit lost on what to do with it. Maybe Teijo can help with some ideas later. Also the Exploratory Area suffered major changes, actually it was abolished since there were not enough contents to fit there! We will have to come up with another idea for that space, the rope pulling contest was again mentioned, Teijo is quite fond of that.

Everybody is so busy that it’s getting difficult to keep everything in schedule… some things have to be dropped… at home I’m finishing the swimmer animation but I’m wondering will it ever be used now that the Exploratory area is gone?

The swimmer was a Death Goddess...

2007-02-23T21:22:00.000+02:00

The set building has definitely begun. In the last days Ilkka and Tero, the technicians from Lume, have lowered parts of the stage, build a wood wall to divide the Corridors and the Minirooms – and we covered that with black fabrics donated by Finlayson! We also used some of the fabrics to sew curtains that will hide the Main Stage during the initial part of the show.

In the meantime, at home I’ve been working on a project for the Exploratory Area, it’s kind of a game that will tell how the Swimmer turns into a Death Goddess, with black swans coming out from her belly.

A poster just came out!

2007-02-21T11:54:00.000+02:00

Viara presented yesterday her proposals for the poster announcing MeMentoMori. We all liked better this one!

Back to the Black Box

2007-02-19T17:53:00.000+02:00

We are back to Lume studios for the next two weeks to build up the set. The first thing we noticed was that the cardboard model of the Main Stage area did not exactly match the parts of the stage that can actually be lowered to make "the pit", so we started by changing that…

Then we had a walk through the space with Teijo, trying to visualize what happens where and how long it takes. We had a clash with some of the ideas and had to reformulate a couple in virtually all areas! Some of them were let a bit on the air, but like we have to start building the set, lets see what really happens…

Shooting Water II

2007-02-16T19:42:00.000+02:00

The development of the Main Stage video performance goes on: I assisted again Viara and Heikki, but this time we went to shoot some more water scenes at Antti’s apartment since he was the only one around that had a bathtub. Apparently bathtubs aren’t that common in finnish homes?

Viara did most of the modelling, I tried too but I couldn’t relax! It just scared me that we had a lamp hanging over a full bathtub, I really thought I was going to fry there. But Viara didn’t – and Heikki took great shots! Kasia was also there, taking pictures that she might use for the Swimmer’s mininroom.

Experimenting with Director

2007-02-15T23:38:00.000+02:00

Last monday (12 Feb.) there have been more discussions with Chris and the students about the story development, and the STORY team could not rest yet – some more changes had to be done! So today we had a meeting with Joukko-Thomas and made some adaptations to the story being told at the ending of the show (we decided last monday that people should exit the show not from the Foyer, but from the Exploratory Area).

So, in the Exploratory Area people play the games or visit the installations to keep the tension rising as they are waiting to be summoned to the oracle and get their turn to speak with the goddess (entering the Divine Discourse installation, Tommi’s own project). Following that they are allowed to leave the show area.

Another thing I was doing with Chris and Tommi was a mockup for the interaction part in the fireman’s Miniroom. The room will be dark, so we want to use flashlights in it.

We are planning to have some objects scattered around the place, each object telling a small piece of the fireman’s life. So when people point their flashlights towards the objects, they will trigger some image projection; these images would be designed as a comic strip, telling pieces of the man’s life.

What we have done today was to experiment how the light sensors would work with a normal flashlight (we used a camera to work as a light sensor for now, since we didn’t have any!), and try to mock how the images would be shown.

Scheduling

2007-02-14T23:14:00.000+02:00

Today we had a general meeting to discuss the flow of the events from the audience point of view, deciding how long should take each performance (the whole show should be about 1 hour long):

At 17:45
Audience members can enter the foyer. They are greeted by two "furies" who give them a TUIO sticker and ask a few simple questions (audience members write down the answers, like a questionaire). They look around and mingle.

At 18:00 (or probably a few minutes later)
The show starts. Audience members will be given a torch and told to enter the Swimmer or the Fireman corridor. As audience members enter the corridor, a video of them is being sampled by Viara's CCTV camera. This continues until all audience members have entered the corridor. It is expected that each person will take only 20 seconds to traverse the corridor experience.

At 18:05
Audience members find themselves then in a "miniroom" with an interactive installation in it. Fireman's room will involve using torches to illuminate/display sections of a comic book. Swimmer's room involves using torches or water (not sure yet) to change an interactive movie about the swimmer.

They will be held for c. 10 minutes in the room, under the guidance of a "fury", after which they'll be sheperded into the sunken audience area known as "the pit" i.e., the Main Stage.

At 18:15
As audience members enter the pit, a short audio piece is played (c. 5 mins, directed by Jouko-Thomas Kleine and Tommi). After this, Atle's "responsive surround sound environment" takes over (c. 5-8 minutes) and blends into Heikki&Viara's audiovisual show. (c. 20 minutes).

Finally, musical instruments are lowered into the Pit and a 5 minute "interactive cacophony" takes place (Antti and Tommi).

At 18:50
Audience members are shepherded by the Furies into the Exploratory Zone (E-Zone). They will spend c. 15 minutes here. The E-Zone is horseshoe shaped and contains about 8 self-contained small screen-based interactive projects.

At 19:05
The exact "closure" of the show hasn't been decided yet. Probably:

One installation, the Goddess Shrine, is the exit to the experience. Once audience members pass through (and interact with) the shrine, they leave the show (it is the rear exit to the Lume Studio Stage). On leaving, their TUIOs are recognised and they get some personalised goodbye spoken by a talking head (or rabbit, or monster) and they are given a printout about their personal "ending" to the show.

We will need:
Total computers: 20
Total projectors: 9
Total projection screens: 8
Total cameras: 6 (3 can be iSights)

Shooting Water

2007-02-11T23:53:00.000+02:00

Today was the first day I felt the Memento Mori was really moving on: I went to Malmi swimminghall to help Viara and Heikki to shoot some video scenes that will be part of the Main Stage sequence. They had some more friends there to help out, mainly the girl swimmers and even a professional diver for shooting the underwater scenes!

The purpose of these video sequences was to visualize emotions related with a mystic character (the swimmer), in a mix of sensuality and deadly struggle with the water element, associated with her Near Death Experience.

Viara made the costumes herself and also put the make-up on the 3 girls that came to do the acting. They were really brave, having to swim with costumes and rope around them, and act as if they were drowning… it was scary but in the end nobody got hurt and we got really nice film shots!

Visiting the cave

2007-02-09T01:05:00.000+02:00

We have visited the storage rooms of Lume Studios to see if we can recycle some of their stuff and use it in our show since we’ll have quite a limited budget - around 1.000,00 euros!

Also in the last three days we have been planning in more detail the narrative sequence of the show. During the last three days we have changed opinions a lot; also it has been difficult to coordinate story development with the people responsible for actually producing the contents (we have been split in five teams to manage the content production for the different zones, and not all are part of the Story Development team).

Well, the good news is that we came up with a name for this show! By Antti’s suggestion, the Inside a Live Reptile Tent crew is proudly presenting: Memento Mori (remember you will die).

Sharing (more) responsibilities

2007-02-07T12:27:00.000+02:00

Today we have decided to split work and make more teams. Each team will be responsible for the things happening at different zones of the performance. This has also helped to better define the different zones. They are:

Foyer
Corridors
Minirooms
Main Stage
Exploratory Area
Exit (the same as the Foyer)

We have also decided that each student will have his/her own project developed for the show, but this project can be in a different zone than the one he/she is managing.

As for this, I feel the show would work better if several people would do several projects together because this can make each project bigger and more complex. So I've decided not to develop any own project, rather join others and develop common projects.

These are the things I took up so far:

Corridor zone (zone 2, with Antti)
Fireman's comic (zone 3, interactive part, with Tommi and Anna-Maija)
Swimmer's bathtub (zone 3, with Kasia)
Transformation of the swimmer into a Goddess (zone 5, visual part, with Teijo)

More decisions...

2007-02-06T00:46:00.000+02:00

Today we decided another two things: we are going to provide the audience with flashlights (so it will be dark inside at least sometimes! eheh spoooky) and we will take data and maybe images from them also. But how these will be used we don’t know yet…

Story general outline – Finally!

2007-02-05T00:27:00.000+02:00

Today we have made finally some decisions, in our afternoon meeting with Joukko-Thomas. We finally reached a consensual overview of the whole performance, relating parts of the narration with the physical space we are about to build. Here’s our storyline main events and spaces:

Prologue: the Foyer
Despite what's been said before, there's no story being told in the Foyer. Instead, any data needed later is gathered, and the audience is divided into two groups, one for the fireman and one for the swimmer.

Entering the show: the Corridors
There are two corridors, one for the fireman and one for the swimmer. The fireman's corridor is filled with smoke, while the swimmer's corridor has an underwater soundscape (and maybe some other watery/fiery stuff in both). The members of the fireman group are told to enter the tunnel and save the fire victim. The members of the swimmer group are told something similar. So the audience members are temporarily given the role of the main characters in the story. One by one, the audience enters the tunnels and emerges from the other side.

Two exihbitions: the Minirooms
After emerging from the corridors, the audience find themselves in a smallish space with some sort of a static exhibition telling about their character. It could be, for example, a comic detailing how he/she ended up near-dead. This is static because the audience will enter one by one and will need to pause a little after the "task" before.

The Main Stage
After a while the audience is led to the main stage (the pit), where they all see the same video/performance based emotional flashbacks of the two characters. There are about four scenes, in which the characters are developed further. Also, during this part, the swimmer gradually changes into a goddess of death.

The scenes of the Main Stage are interactive in the way that the audience can affect their mood and content (such as dialogue spoken). However, this interaction isn't relevant outside the scenes themselves.

The Game
The fate of the fireman is decided in some kind of two-team game, where the swimmer group plays against the fireman group.

The End Scene
In the end scene the goddess either takes the fireman into the afterworld, or releases him back to life. One suggestion on how to do the first is to lower the goddess from the ceiling to pick up the fireman and carry him up into the heavens. The second could simply include the fireman walking out of the door.

Epilogue
The goddess orders the audience to leave through the tunnels. They go through a different tunnel than the one they entered through. Some shortcuts may be needed to the sets, such as bypassing the exhibition spaces.

Finding our story IV

2007-02-01T00:05:00.000+02:00

It’s been hard to fit everybody’s ideas and expectations into one coherent narration… we are trying hard not to restrain anybody’s creativity! We have had the help from Jouko-Thomas in building a meaningful emotional experience, thinking from the audience’s point of view.

So far we decided to have 2 main characters, strangers to each other, but who end up sharing the same Near Death Experience (NDE).

Characters
One, a fool-hearted fireman who always tries to be the centre of attentions. The second one is a young woman who is a professional swimmer.

Plot
The young swimmer was taking doping pills because of a competition. She accidentally took an overdose, so she faints while having a bath. She cries for help while loosing her senses. She starts to drown in the full bathtub. And so she didn’t realize that in the meanwhile a fire broke in the hotel.

At the same time: The fire brigade is called to the hotel to fight a fire. Our fireman and his partner enter the place on a rescue mission. He hears a noise in one of the rooms and wants to investigate so he calls to his partner but his partner doesn’t hear him. In his rush to play the rescue hero he makes the decision of going inside the room alone. Unfortunately there is too much smoke already and he starts to suffocate. As he reaches the bathroom, he faints on the floor.

By then, both characters are unconscious in the bathroom and start experiencing a common Near Death Experience viewing flashbacks of each other’s lives. As they meet in the NDE realm they seem to be willing to help each other returning to life. But after awhile the woman starts changing into a Death Goddess, and her actions turn into dragging the fireman to the Death world.

At this point the audience can make a choice, whether the fireman should be allowed to live or not.

Other forms of interaction with the audience are also being thought.

Finding our story III

2007-01-31T15:30:00.000+02:00

We spent the last days (29-31 Jan) coming up with a concept for the story. As major guidelines we decided that this is a totally fictional plot, presented as a collage of small stories that undergo one same theme.

Brief story outline:

Overall subject matter is the Near Death Experience (NDE)
This is linked with the theme of FIRE (and this might be balanced with WATER)
Overall "idea" is MAN FACES HIS MORTALITY
Main character is a FIREMAN. He will suffocate in a FIRE
Second character is a YOUNG WOMAN. She will drown in WATER.
Important SPIRITUAL/MYSTICAL aspect eg Voodoo, Shamanism, Kalevala. Might take place in an exotic warm location eg. Haiti/Cuba
The role of the audience will be bringing one of them back to life.

Stage design

2007-01-30T15:43:00.000+02:00

I am collaborating with the stage design team, and in our first afternoon meeting this is what we came up with:

A foyer area
Corridors
Two small screening areas
A main performance area
Two more 'open' spaces for installations that can be "browsed" by the audience

We even built the scale model shown above!

Developing interaction concepts

2007-01-29T15:35:00.000+02:00

After viewing some interactive videos provided by Chris and Teijo, having read other shows description (like Desert Rain) and after having had that earlier session of manipulating interactivity we have been thinking of creative ways to perform interactive happenings in our show.

We outlined a series of possible items or technologies to use (inputs), and possible results to be achieved through them (outputs).

Inputs:

SPATIAL:
G.P.S.
Radio Fequency ID tags
Pressure sensors
Rotation sensors
"gravity box"

AUDIO: Sound frequency, sound volume, word/voice recognition

BODY: Pulse, Skin conductivity

VR: Augmented Reality, use VR headset and apparatus

VISUAL:
Motion detection.
Motion capture suit
Light or infrared detection
Gesture, shape, colour recognition. Image and pattern recognition

DEVICES:
Keyboard, mouse.
Scanner
MMS/SMS sent to audience member's phone. Calling to a phone.
Smoke detection
Videogame controller, joystick.
Use functions on a website.
Barcodes

Outputs:

Choose or change the plot or in some way to select story fragments
Dynamically control multiple audio channels
Explore a 2D or 3D territory i.e. spatial
Receive an SMS or a call onto a phone.
Compete or take action in a game.
Generate or process visuals using realtime algorithms or effects.
Upload to a blog/vlog/chat
Printout/photo given to audience
Control a 2D or 3D avatar.
Give information eg. a clue or a fact
Physical result (there could be many, such as squashing a flea with a mechanical hammer, moving a giant ball, lift somebody up and down, cause a performer to react.)

Some examples of how this inputs/outputs can be creatively linked:

Twisting a real marionette or puppet (rotation sensors) --> controls an avatar in 3D world
Pumping an air pump (pressure sensor) --> makes virtual character go up and down
Playing a wind instrument (sound sensor) --> the resulting sound is transformed.

Finding our story II

2007-01-26T23:46:00.000+02:00

Yep, we have done some web research about death experiences by now. That included viewing and analysing two movies:

Saw – (2004) by James Wan. A horror movie!
M – (1931) by Fritz Lang. Crime, thriller.

I also found a performance that goes around this topic:

Suicide Fashion International - Inspiration for this project was the increasing use of suicide for political purposes and as a weapon and tool within regional conflicts.

And Chris gave us a paper on a performance called Desert Rain, which has the particularity of being acted out as a game for the audience; participants are placed in a collaborative virtual environment and sent on a mission into a virtual world, under the theme of Gulf War.

But… what about our story? Still a lot of work on this subject has to be done, we are now aiming to split tasks; so far I’ve joined the Story, Interactivity and Staging teams. Other teams created: Sound, Dramaturgy, Visuals.

NDE – near death experiences

2007-01-24T18:51:00.000+02:00

Well, now we going freaky! I guess the Carnival theme didn't convince us enough after all.

While discussing more deeply the theme issue, everybody presented their own vision of what kind of story we should have. But when the time came to make a choice, instead of presenting different proposals something made us converge on one thing: yes, we all agreed to make some narrative around death experiences: so we are aiming now to tell a story about what is going through the mind of somebody at the moment of death. Memories, mystery: who dies, why dies.

So we were sent off to do research on Near Death Experiences for the next couple of days…

Inspirational real character

2007-01-22T18:46:00.000+02:00

We started this week by presenting a real character’s life story that could be used as an inspiration for our project.

My choice was Niccolò Machiavelli. On his most well known work “The Prince” he wrote about the ways powerful man had gained and preserved power. He did not consider morality at all when we wrote it; he had a very un-emotional point of view about it, separating politics from ethics. And I liked also the less know fact about his private life – when living at San Casciano he used to dress up in his most elegant clothes in the evenings just to go to his library and read famous works from the past; he imagined himself talking to the writers, and from the knowledge he received from these meetings he gathered the material to write “The Prince”.

Other students presented:

“A Man” – life story of someone who because of not being able to build strong family ties with his own children, in the end of his life is suffering from loneliness.
Madame (Helena) Blavatsky – related to the Theosophical society and spiritism.
H.P. Lovecraft – author of supernatural fiction.
Joan of Arc - heroine of France, her visions from God helped her to guide the French army to defeat the English.
Jussi – a man appears to be suffering from amnesia. How to know if his stories are truthful? His twin brother helps to fill in the gaps.
"The Turk" - a chess playing machine, an early robot, with a figure of a Turk on it which toured Europe defeating most opponents. In the end it was said there was a real person in the box.

Grasping interactivity

2007-01-19T00:14:00.000+02:00

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!

Finding our story I

2007-01-12T16:53:00.000+02:00

We've started to discuss about a theme, each of us thought about a story to give a mood for this Live Reptile Tent. My proposal was about a biotechnology laboratory in Finland experimenting on DNA mutants to create a race of sub-human slaves. Themes by fellow students included “…Science fiction murder mystery, using multiple spaces and twisted narrative structure. Surprising visuals involving audience, having all mobile phones ringing simultaneously. And featuring the Armpit Band…” (as in the summary by Teijo).

This is an issue to debate further. Will it be a guided tour or the audience wonders around at their own will? The space itself could change dramatically…

We didn’t decide on any of these proposals though, and next week we’ll keep exploring different kinds of narratives and stories. So far we agreed only that it would have something to do with a carnival. Well, that’s quite funny, since “Inside the Live Reptile Tent” is actually the title of a book by Jeff Brouws and Bruce Caron, featuring photos of American carnivals…

January 10th, day three

2007-01-10T00:07:00.000+02:00

The morning lecture with Chris Hales went around the concept of narrative. What is a narrative? What kinds of narration exist? Definitions were pointed out by authors such as Edward Branigan and Seymour Chatman: for one it is "a global interpretation of changing data measured through sets of relationships", for the other it is "a text-type rather than a genre; it must have a narrator even if that narrator is non-human".

Also the issue of narration and video games was approached with the insight of ludologists Gonzalo Frasca and Jesper Juul. For ludologists a video game is not considered to be a narrative, although they do have plots, characters and other elements of narrative. Games are seen through the fundamental aspect of gameplay and not as a storytelling medium.

Different aspects and kinds of narration were identified: plots, stories, discourse, heap, episode, unfocused/focused chain, simple narrative, diegetic narrative, parametric narrative, mimesis.

As a conclusion we can maybe understand narrative as data organized into a special pattern by our perceptive ability to represent and explain experience.

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Later on Jouko-Thomas gave his presentation explaining his way of developing theatre plays. His big inspiration comes from Carlo Goldoni and Commedia dell'arte. He believes in a democratic process in which author and actors participate in the playwriting by sharing their views and emotions.

The process starts with the author and actors sharing their views about the general feel and aim of the play. Then, before anything is written, they go on an improvisation period where they explore more specific character details, story line, outcomes, emotions.

After they reach an agreement the author can start the actual writing of the play. So the difference is that when the play is staged, there was already interaction with the actors, and not a mere interpretation of the author's own intentions; it reflect also the actors interpretations. This kind of process leads to an unfinished play, open for new interpretations if needed.

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After lunch Jukka Ylitalo explained some of his background as an actor and showed some of his artistic experimental work with human body-computer interaction. He also showed some videos of other artists' work that relate to our theme: Golan Levin, La Fura dels Baus and Cirque du Soleil, among others.

Repulsion and curiosity

2007-01-09T22:50:00.000+02:00

On day 2 we were asked to do some background research on new media performances that we might have seen and that had provoked in us mixed feelings of repulsion and curiosity. La Fura dels Baus was my choice: Violent body manipulation and helplessness freak me. Although I had never seen La Fura perform live, I have heard much about them! I showed some videos of the Naumon project from their website.

Other choices by fellow students included:

Orlan - undergoing plastic surgery as a performance
Cremaster - psicadelic, surreal films
Ymim - unusual tatoos
Markus Copper - this guy is said to have cut his hand off with a chain-saw and cooked it in the microwave so that it wouldn't be sewed back. We didn't see that one, luckily.

In general, topics presented by students that would cause that kind of feelings had to do with social tabu, insanity, manipulation of body, fobias, ciborgs, robots.

Day one

2007-01-08T20:03:00.000+02:00

This first lecture was around the concept of "Inside a Live Reptile Tent" and what it could mean. Associating the ideas of "reptiles" and "inside a tent" had the purpose of arising mixed feelings of repulsion and curiosity; a metaphor for being locked in with something freaky, even if this "prision" was made of very fragile materials.

We discussed with Chris and Teijo about what kind of outcomes were expected to emerge from this project, generaly. It was clear for all that it would lead into a narrative under the theme of freakiness, repulsion, curiosity and disgust, presented as some kind of performance, combining computer generated illusion with human presence on stage; it should allow both live and virtual audience.

Ideally there will be interaction between the audience, performers and several technology gadgets. The audience should be encouraged to move through the physical space of this narrative.

Chris showed us some examples of performers/performances related with freakiness, repulsion and digital media:

STELARC
Epizoo (Marcelli Antunez Roca)
Hotel Pro Forma Jesus_C_Odd_Size
The Resident's FREAK SHOW cd-rom
Impalpability (Fujihata)
ConceptLab (cockroach controlled mobile robot)

Some material presented reminded me of the Catalan-Barcelona based theatre group La Fura dels Baus. Their shows have been regarded as violent urban digital theatre. They include unusual music, industrial and natural materials, video projections among other more traditional performance elements. They involve their spectators directly in their live shows, sometimes also through internet connection. The shows are often violent, not only for the performer but also for the audience.