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Online Performance: Shared Video Space
Drury
An evolution of earlier work, this project experiments with Internet2 as a vehicle for two-way live audiovisual connection using online performance pieces. This project engages concepts of simulation, surveillance, presence/absence, representation, improvisational narrative, layering of live video, media simulation and virtual interaction. The work will continue in a workshop/laboratory setting at Temple, drawing on interdisciplinary resources: the digital and performing arts, computer science, communications and cultural studies.
Physical Computing
Drury
The physical computing element of the New Media Performance Lab addresses issues of mediated presence, "liveness," human-computer interaction, and immersive media through artistic collaboration. Supported by the methodology of open-ended creative experimentation, the goals of NMPL researchers and participants are twofold:
to work with new media processes and concepts that recast conventions of authorship, space/time, physical embodiment, communication, epistemology and spectatorship; and to develop new interfaces and performance structures out of this work
to find new applications for experimental interfaces, so as to address the integration of digital interactive technologies in everyday life; thus applications developed in a performance context may also find practical applications that extend human capability.
The NMPL is a creative thinktank for the experiential study of the ways in
which human-computer interactional models are reshaping contemporary life.
Vocability Voice Interface
Drury
The interface between the human being and the computer both separates, as representation, and creates a bridge between a sentient processor (human) and a logical processor (digital). This project explores interactive narrative/musical structures that involve an active microphone that senses attributes of the voice. The current iteration of this project is VOICEBOX, an interactive performance installation that senses the voice and consequently engages the Participant in a responsive and lyrical audiovisual narrative. VOICEBOX provides a visual and vocal "cover" or mask for the Participant, inviting them to engage in verbal/vocal expression that translates their hidden performance into a multi-layer video narrative. The Participant drives the performance with his/her spontaneous vocal/verbal interactions, which evoke a stored narrative that plays out differently, based on the interaction. The sensing capabilities of the Voicebox microphone interface are being developed, as are new compositional structures, the audio and video repertoire, and new performance structures.
Part II of this initiative is Vocability: a collaborative research project developing interactive voice/physical interfaces to the computer, as well as software and formal structures for performance by people with speech/language and related disabilities. This work will include disabled and non-disabled participants in most aspects of the collaboration.
Part II will explore the following areas:
experimentation with interface design and sensing possibilities. This collaborative experimentation will consider particular issues of speech and vocalization disabilities, based on the collaborators and the nuances of their sensori-motor capabilities, as well as their intentions and desires for extension/elaboration of interaction.
consideration of the interface as a phenomenon that is in some sense common between disabled and non-disabled vocalizers: issues of difference between intended meaning and received meaning; issues of poetic language versus everyday speech, etc.
consideration of "normal" and "abnormal" voice and speech capability
technology as human extension: empowerment, theatricality and the mask
Part III of this initiative involves the development of a web application for online voice interaction, both as an asymmetrical, client-server relationship and as a two-way transmission involving a shared acoustic space for collaborative online vocal improvisation.
Archives:
Physical Media
Former NMIC producer-in-residence Heather Raikes
Physical Media is an ongoing investigation into the relationship between sensation/kinesthetic embodiment and digital media. Directly addressing the issue of "disembodiment" and synthesizing the perspectives of dance and media, Physical Media seeks to discover:
An evolution of the body, in which the technological extensions of our physical beings that have created and defined expression and communication in the modern world (the global network of cameras that has become our eyes and ears, the telecommunications infrastructure that has become our voices, the interactive web of digital information that has become of our nervous systems) are integrated with our relationship to sensation, presence, physicality, awareness, and embodied experience.
An evolution of interface, in which we interact with media in fluid, physicalized forms. Reconsidering the mechanized interface developed by the military and corporate engineers that involves only our eyes and our hands, we explore new questions: What is an interface that empowers our bodies in relation to our machines? What is an interface that facilitates sensation? Is intelligence confined to cerebral reasoning? As we design our relationships to our intelligent machines, should we not consider the intelligence of our physical bodies? How can we evolve our relationship with technology in such a way that interface becomes an expression of our physicality, our life force, and an experience of vitality?
Media/Architecture
Former NMIC producer-in-residence Heather Raikes
This exploration focuses on the mapping and representation of physical space in virtual realms, both through digital notation of actual spaces and 3D renderings of virtual worlds and media experiences. It will also investigate the design of physical spaces that integrate media displays, including public spaces (from Times Square to kiosk centers), exhibition environments, artistic/performance settings, and new ideas for weaving media information into the fabric of space and vice versa.
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