theatre.exe

Research

We’re reducing our time spent on additions to the wall mural this week to focus more on ideation for prototyping. We’re still adding anything we stumble across that we find particularly interesting or related to our project.

For example, this week we came across the Playable Theater Project at Northeastern University, with very similar goals to us, and will read up further!

Taxonomy

We decided likely can’t organize categories as strict branches off of each other, as there will always inevitably be grey areas and crossovers from different branches. We have several sections:

• Defining our scope (scoping interactive theater relative to LARPs, games and art installation, for example)
• Defining the terms we ourselves will use
• Listing relevant categories and drawing occasional diagrams where needed to illustrate relationships between categories

Prototyping

We talked about several ideas we had as a team; our main strategy will be to:

• Use myth, folklore and other existing stories as our narrative
• Do something easy to start – perhaps by updating existing works

Knowledge Base

We determined this week that we are not focusing on data visualization and webapp building for the knowledge base. Instead, we’ll for now simply list all our works consulted and store our work in a simple spreadsheet format so that in the future it would be easy to convert to other formats if needed.

-Team

Production

This week we made a simplified RACI chart that outlines our roles in the project, to help division of labour when it came to prototyping.

Weekly check-in summaries:

• We’re feel our team is working well and contented with each other; we think we work efficiently together when we have a task in mind
• We’re worried about understanding our individual goals for research and sticking with them
• We think once we move into prototyping much of our problems will be resolved

-Healthy & Tina

Wall mural 

As usual we’ve continued to add to our database and wall mural:

Taxonomy

We’ve synthesized an outline for our taxonomy, linked here. Main takeaways: 

• We’ve decided to specify what we mean when we discuss theater as opposed to games, role-playing and art installations.
• We will define how we will use the terms agency and interaction.
• We will describe a list of categories related to our project, among them interactive and immersive theater.

Reaching out 

We’ve heard back from more contacts; more works were recommended to us, from theme parks to LARP communities.

We’ve also met our project partners Sam Turich and Gab Cody! We will consult with them particularly as we try to prototype.

Decisions

We reached a number of decisions for our project:

• We are interested in creative innovation more than solving practical problems in interactive theater
• We will start prototyping next week, starting with the story and then thinking about how technology can be used to support its moments
  • We think it would be a good idea use a story that already exists, to reduce our workload and prototype more quickly

Tech

We’ve determined that part of the specific deliverable for our research should be some type of list of works more sophisticated than its current form as a Google Doc. We’ve begun looking into quick ways of publishing data; among them datasettes are an option.

Quarters & sitdowns

We presented our metrics and deliverable to the faculty. We will also maintain our project goals, metrics and deliverable on our website. We emphasized that our main goal is to answer the question:

“How can technology be used to make interactive theater a meaningful experience?”

We are particularly interested in the “sweet spot” that is at the convergence of use of technology, live performance, and guest agency.

Much of the feedback from faculty is that we should make prototypes as early as possible; though we emphasize that research and taxonomy is half of our project deliverable, we agree that prototyping will help focus our discussions and discover answers to our research question.

Production

• Team retrospective summary:
  • Branding & walkarounds went smoothly!
  • We will try to come up with questions and topics before any major discussions as a team to ensure that our conversations stay on topic and stay helpful
  • Balancing project work and elective work is difficult; we’ll try to be understanding of each other and try to use a simplified scrum board to keep track of what needs to be done next.

• Decorations

-Healthy & Tina

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

Our research is going well but we still have more work to do! Following this week’s meeting with our instructors, the following points were emphasized in our research:

More examples

We’re adding more examples to our list, focusing on “what” and “how” (concrete descriptions of the experiences and the manner of interaction) rather than “why”. This should give us a common knowledge base of the work already out there that we can use in conversation with our instructors and project partners.

We’ve edited our wall mural to better organize conceptually the results of our search. We still have an “less agency – more agency” spectrum, but vertically we also separate the works we find by categories. 

• We find that with this method similar works are grouped together and works which give audience a particularly large amount of agency stand out. 
• We also added tags for use of technology to help those projects stand out and help us take a look at where they are scattered. 
• We are starting to notice interesting gaps where a particular medium hasn’t given guests much agency, or a particular point on the chart that doesn’t have an example of heavy use of technology.
• We need more examples to help potential gaps become clearer

New wall mural and key: x-axis – agency, y-axis – category; performance or game-like

Previous ETC projects

We’ve included relevant ETC past projects in our list. Projects that particularly interest us include:

Virtual Meditation #1

Kotodama Fruit Juice

Give Me Your Gun

Chautauqua Interactive

In all cases there were interesting or demonstrative use of technology and the guests interacted in interesting ways. The amount of agency they grant to guests tend to vary and they place at very different locations on our charts.

Reaching out

We’ve begun to reach out to creators of live performances that particularly interest us to ask more questions. We keep track of our communications on a spreadsheet. 

Taxonomy

The most valuable result of our early research would be a taxonomy (or quasi-scientific classification) of the works that we have encountered.

To start, we have come up with a working definition of the most important terms:

Agency – the capacity to influence the narrative

(Example usage: “The audience has (some) agency in the performance”)

Interactive – an experience that give guests either a sense of agency or actual agency

Immersive – an experience that surrounds guests and may allow them to participate but does not necessarily give them agency

Chart describing how we are currently measuring the amount of agency in a performance by the guests’ capacity to influence the narrative

Production

• We posted to our composition box to a Playtest to Explore workshop to receive feedback from our peers at the ETC

Composition box for our project

• Quarters
  • We’ve started our quarters slides, to be filled in next week. Our goal is to present our team’s taxonomy, research questions, and potentially prototype ideas to ETC’s faculty for feedback.
• Team dinner:

HungryTeam.gif

-Healthy & Tina

Is there such a thing as true interactive live theater, by which we mean that the audience has real agency to impact the story? Our discovery project was borne of a discussion that generated a lot of interest at the recent foldA (Festival of live digital Art) festival which Brenda, one of our instructors, attended. Our team will be trying to explore this definition of interactive theater and the possible use of technology to help realize it this semester.

We’re all excited to get started, so we began first thing this week with meeting with our instructors to establish some scope and areas of interest for our project. Some points emphasized are:

• Live theater
  • Our focus is on live theater, where the audience is present for the performance.
• Use of technology
  • We are curious how technology can be used to make live theater a meaningful interactive experience. We don’t want a “gimmick”; we want the technology to be an organic part of the experience.
• Interactive theater with agency
  • The term “interactive” is often used to indicate audience participation of different degrees, but we want to specifically explore the possibility of audiences having the agency to make significant changes to the story.
• Interactive vs Immersive
  • One thing we will find is that interactive theater is often actually immersive theater, that is, the audience is surrounded by the world of the story, but their action does not necessarily impacted the story itself. It will be important for us to define these terms clearly for ourselves and build a common taxonomy.
• Live performance <———–> Video games
  • Immersive theater like Sleep No More are known to be inspired by video games. We want to find more inspiration on the spectrum from live performance to video games, where there are a range of degrees of audience involvement and different use of technology.

We recognize that these topics are tall orders! Along the way, we may discover new questions (Do the audience even want agency? Is technology the best way to achieve interaction with agency?), and our goal is not to make a production, but to make prototypes that answer our research questions.

We will spend our first three weeks researching, looking at existing work both in and outside the ETC, developing our own understanding of interactive theater and getting on the same page with each other before we start working with project partners.

To start our research, we have compiled a list of works (Note. Permission required to view some links in this blog) that we have read about and started a mural to visualize our research. We’ve also attended one relevant work-in-progress project personally as a team.

The start of our mural; orange notes are for categories, yellow is for examples, and blue is for comments.

-Team

Production

Production is the busiest early in the semester! Tasks we completed:

• Decided on our team name: theatre.exe
• Set up our paper calendars
• Set up team Google Drive and team Slack.
• Put our core hours & personal hours where we would be working on the project on Google Calender
• Set up regular meetings with our instructors who also function as our clients
• Had our first team retrospective; the conclusion seemed to be that that shared Google docs are helpful for collaborating and having a sense of progress when researching but we should have more group discussions to help us get on the same page

Excellent paper calendars courtesy of Healthy’s sure hand and artistic eye

-Healthy & Tina