#1: Project Hunting
I’ve spent this past week picking and planning a project for the first semester of the Seminar course. What a journey that’s been!
In the end, I’ve settled on a sort of interactive telescope. It’s a physical device that the user (Audiencemember? Player?) can manipulate to explore some far-off fictional realm and discover a narrative. This concept is inspired largely by 19th century (and earlier) orreries[i], but also my astronomy-focused physics degree & research project[ii], and the lost Doctor Who episodes from the BBC, where only the audio remains and one is left to piece together the reality from a handful of captured stills[iii]. I’m not sure that a meaningful narrative is in the scope for this semester, but it would be a lovely vehicle to explore the first extant science fiction story, Lucian’s A True Story[iv].
I actually spent a little more time playing with my runner-up project idea – a similar concept of an interactive multimedia storytelling device, but in this case embedded in a book and inspired by the linking books in Myst[v]. In fact, a few people online have made real-life versions of the linking books, which would have been a great resource for getting to the actual interaction and media design, and I’ve also got some experience using a Makey Makey to create capacitive controls out of foil tape on flexible surfaces. Ultimately, the telescope project presents a much more interesting opportunity for human interaction, and also seems a little bit more doable on the technical front.
Both of these concepts came from a direction I’ve settled on to work towards for a Praxis project. With the idea that these self-directed seminar projects are an excellent chance to test, develop and otherwise work towards a praxis project or thesis topic, I felt like I needed a clearer idea of what that physical, interactive environment as a larger project might look like. After an exhaustive exercise in list-making, I’ve come up with a collection of possible ideas, but plan to work towards some sort of interactive library.
The library concept has a number of advantages. It’s scalable, and depending on the scope could be something like a little free library[vi], or in the right context could be realized as an immersive set for a more traditional theatregoing experience – or anywhere in between really. It’s vagueness is also important – one of my goals is to explore different interactive storytelling ideas, and the general framework of a library can adapt in some way to a variety of stories and methods.
Also here’s the first sketch I’ve made of this telescope concept. I’m sure it will look nothing like this in the end, and it’ll be wonderful to puzzle about what on earth I was thinking when I came up with it…
Kansas City
This weekend I traveled to Kansas City! It was an excellent trip for a long weekend. Naturally, the standout experience was the barbecue, including a spectacular Thai/KC BBQ combination that’s worth the trip to KC on it’s own.
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was a brilliant introduction to an aspect of baseball I knew nothing about. It’s lovingly crafted and incredibly dense, and while I didn’t go with the intent of exploring immersive design elements it was a wonderful example. It never pretended to be another world, but the design took every chance available to bring the world of the Negro Leagues to life, and the sheer number of artifacts so packed into the small space, often without plaques or descriptions, presented a riveting exploratory story. That it cast a pall over what little I do know of “America’s Pastime” is perhaps unsurprising, but also a testament to the place’s storytelling capacity.
The Museum of Illusion is a compact exhibit, near Kansas City’s Science Museum, embedded in a beautiful old train station. There were no screens here, but it’s an effective and particularly fun example of interactive media nonetheless. Optical illusions, mirrors, puzzles and more realize interactive brain teasers as everything from objects on a wall to a spinning vortex tunnel that does a stellar job of lying to your brain about which way gravity is actually pointing.
The main branch of Kansas City’s public library was also a beautiful environment, and I took the chance to do some research about the design of it’s spaces and, in particular, how it incorporated a handful of museum elements into its layout.
Other Recent Research
In no particular order, these are some things I’ve seen recently that have all factored into this telescope project, the Myst book runner-up idea, and/or the library framework for a possible Praxis project.
- Of the theatre shows I saw on a recent trip to London, two were billed as “interactive,” and each delivered in a remarkably different way. Punchdrunk’s dramatic return with Burnt City is a Trojan take on their tried-and-true immersive theatre experience. The physical environment is more than a set, but a whole slice of city acting as an explorable venue for a stylized, wordless performance based around the fall of Troy.
- In the Bridge Theatre’s Guys and Dolls a section of the audience, standing room only, milled in and around a fairly complex moving set, including period-friendly police officers to guide them around the large, automated set pieces.
- The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a strange and wonderful place. It is, on the one hand, a museum, and I can attest that their exhibit on the 100-inch telescope at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, and the memorial to Russian Space dogs are at least based in fact, and the microminiature carvings of Hagop Sandaldjian are impressive and authentic. On the other hand, I’m more doubtful of the radar bats that can fly through solid objects, as well as methodical exploration of how dice die. But maybe I’m not really sure what’s real at all anymore? I’m honestly don’t know what sort of place this is at all, but fortunately there’s an open-air courtyard with tea, snacks, and free-roaming birds to give my brain a rest. I saw more holograms and pepper’s-ghost boxes there than in the rest of my life collected, and clever optical trickery that I can only imagine how they came up with. It’s immersive and alienating, real and ridiculous, and is what can only be described as a wholly successful realization of the founder’s goal to create “a museum interested in presenting phenomena that other natural history museums are unwilling to present.” I wholeheartedly recommend it.
- A fascinating room struck me in the Getty Villa just outside of LA. It’s the “Family Forum,” a kid-focused exhibit that my friends and I had to be beckoned into. A number of small, creative stations looked like wonderful opportunities to engage young children with the wonderful world of classical art. For me, by far, the coup de grâce was a set of unadorned, life-size replica Greek potteries, with glossy paint and whiteboard markers for you to furnish them with your own decorations. Physically creating Greek pottery art is wonderful enough, but the true joy was that you could pick them up! Carry them around! Pretend to pour water out of them! Truly, I’ve studied classical art for two decades in one way or another, including part of my MA thesis project, and likely seen thousands of examples of Greek pottery in museums across my life. Yet I’d never, until that day, been encountered an example I could pick up, hold and interact with – which is what they were built for in the first place! It was revolutionary.
- In my chaotic journey to understand the place of theatrical interactive design in a game design context, I stumbled across an incredibly fitting talk titled Playable Theatre: Game Design for Immersive Performance, by Celia Pearce, a professor at Northeastern University. This talk was an excellent and dense intro to the breadth of interactive, theatrical storytelling going on and the tools game design brings to the table. it’s given me a list of companies, games, films, and organizations to look further into, and a wonderful summary of how game design practices and perspectives intersect with immersive theatre.
Footnotes:
[i] A beautiful 18th century orrery sits in the British Museum. They were never incredibly useful as scientific instruments, but were always really about trying to explain and communicate how people thought the solar system worked. Perhaps my favorite example is, in fact, not 18th century at all, but Ancient Greek! The Antikythera device was an orrery, but also a practical, functional mechanical calendar. In addition to it’s own fascinating mechanism and use case, but also since the next extant archaeological record of gears is from around 1200 AD. The discovery of this 1st-century-BC device (and the 70ish years it took for scholarship to recognize it’s genuine antiquity) shifted our understanding of the history of interactive technology by over a millennium.
[ii] My own research poster here, but it’s still currently ongoing!
[iii] This is an excellent side-by-side of a tele-snap reconstruction and the actual footage, which was later found in Nigeria in 2019
[iv] A satire of the increasingly outlandish dialogues and travelogues of Lucian’s time. Summarized on Wikipedia, but available in a full (albeit 19th-century) translation on project Gutenberg, and hell the original Greek is online on Perseus.
[v] The intro to Riven was the first time I ever encountered this linking book concept, and remains my favorite. It also turns out that a few people online have created passable real-life Myst books, which would have been a great reference for creating my own. I should also add that, when I was 5 and obsessed with Riven, the idea that it was a puzzle went way over my head – I just thought it was a wonderful world to explore. Seems like that perspective may have stuck with me.