humanaquarium: A Participatory Performance System (original) (raw)
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humanaquarium : exploring audience, participation, and interaction
2011
humanaquarium is a movable performance space designed to explore the dialogical relationship between artist and audience. Two musicians perform inside the cube-shaped box, collaborating with participants to cocreate an aesthetic audio-visual experience. The front wall of the humanaquarium is a touch-sensitive FTIR window. Max/MSP is used to translate the locations of touches on the window into control data, manipulating the tracking of software synthesizers and audio effects generated in Ableton Live, and influencing a Jitter visualization projected upon the rear wall of the cube.
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011
humanaquarium is a movable performance space designed to explore the dialogical relationship between artist and audience. Two musicians perform inside the cube-shaped box, collaborating with participants to cocreate an aesthetic audio-visual experience. The front wall of the humanaquarium is a touch-sensitive FTIR window. Max/MSP is used to translate the locations of touches on the window into control data, manipulating the tracking of software synthesizers and audio effects generated in Ableton Live, and influencing a Jitter visualization projected upon the rear wall of the cube.
Phantasmagoria: Composing Interactive Content for the humanaquarium
2010
humanaquarium is a mobile performance space which draws upon the traditions of busking and street performance to engage audiences in collaborative, creative play. We describe how the conceptual and physical nature of the performance space affected the way we composed the audio/visual performance content in Phantasmagoria, an interactive art piece built for the humanaquarium environment.
Designing from within: humanaquarium
2011
We present an experience-based approach to designing a collaborative interactive performance, humanaquarium. Our research explores public interaction with digital technology through the practice-based inquiry of an interdisciplinary team of interaction designers and musicians. We present a method of designing experience from within, literally situating ourselves within the performance/use space and assuming the roles both of performers and of designers as we develop and refine the humanaquarium project over the course of a year's worth of public performances.
Hybrid Soundscape: Human and non-human sounds interactions for a collective installation
eCAADe proceedings, 2022
The paper describes a site-specific architectural soundscape installation created during a workshop in August 2021 at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in France. Far from urban noise, participants were attuned to natural, artificial, and human sound spheres, placing them in dialog and interweaving them through emulation, voice recording, and electro-acoustic devices including piezoceramic sensors, small motors, speakers, and embedded electronics. This expository paper includes qualitative descriptions of the spatial sound compositions, the technology that supported them, and the performance into which they were integrated. The results of this event were described by participants as trance-like, with phasing of multiple periodically organized emergent sound phenomena creating a deeply immersive distributed environment. In describing in detail, the tools, processes, outcomes and implications of the workshop, this paper offers an example of a design approach and model that can contribute immersive distributed architectural soundscape design through human and non-human sound interaction.
Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014
The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.
Containment and Contamination: A Performance Landscape for the Senses
The Senses in Performance, 2006
Please cite the chapter published in The Senses in Performance edited by Andre Lepecki and Sally Banes (Routledge Press, 2006) This chapter outlines a performance design for the Prague Quadrennial's central thematic exhibition in 2003: an international collaboration with over 50 artists that explored alternative spatial models for performance through live action within a sceno-architectural installation.
Hidden City: 'Being With' in Improvised Performance
This paper explores group improvisation and interaction through the concept of Mitsein (being with). The activities of the electro-acoustic ensemble 'Hidden City' are discussed, with emphasis on the way the group's approach to improvisation has expanded through the use of technology to incorporate not only the ensemble members, but collaborative machines and the audience.
Contemporary performance have always been recalled with the word “experimentation” in the modern world. Within the consensual dynamics of this improvisational practices, the most appropriate and yet necessary driving force is inspiration. Thus artists always tend to look at their surroundings and intend to criticize them in a most intellectual and aesthetic way. Nevertheless what usually appears as a consequence in this such discourse is that those such understandings bring forth to a particular knowledge which neither consequently bring about a change and discourse into the context, nor propose an alternative to or against it. This such non-existing communication zones in the public realm, as Marc Auge depicts with his book “Non-Places*, converts the work of art, especially that of the performative, into a state of mechanism that alleviates the repressed in the unconscious of the society, yet produces excuses for the ongoing of the State apparatus. Thereby intensities and forces that arise from the particular artistic practices are doomed to remain within the limits that are imposed upon them, not leaving much room for thresholds to be engaged against and beyond those limits, as it is ideally and realistically implied by the architectural philosophy of Bernard Tschumi, as well as the infinitely interpretable one, that of Gilles Deleuze.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 2015
A performer walks onto the stage. The lights are so bright that it is difficult to see, but she keeps her eyes open anyway. Looking out into the crowd, she sees no one she recognizes; the faces become homogeneous, blurred by the streaks of light emanating from above. A dividing line is not apparent between their bodies and hers. The stage, as it appears from her perspective, blends into the rows of people. The lines of people are not perfectly straight, nor are there ushers seating people in their assigned seats. There are people that have gathered behind her as well, and she knows this without having to turn around. The people shift slightly in anticipation. The space is full, and as she squints to find the end of the mass of people that surrounds her, no end appears in sight. Despite the enormity of the crowd, she does not feel closed in or claustrophobic by the situation as one might assume. The space still remains open, and the ability for movement is still possible. Making note of the expectant eyes, she begins her performance by moving her body in traditional Indian dance. The blended faces around her cheer, and they encouragingly chant for her to continue. She looks upward during her movement to see that it is not a bright, engineered bulb illuminating her embodiment. It is the sun at the highest point of the day.