This week I revised the telescope design based on the mockup, and the experiences I’ve had making it, testing it with other people, and using it as a reference to generate the final design. The construction process changed several ideas about how the final product should look and function. Testing it with other people also let me discover strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities with the design. The physical model itself also gives me a reference point to create a design that I’m able to manufacture, assemble and fit the necessary electronics in that also fits the desired design language.

Specifically, I’ve been focused on the paddle portion so far. My plan to use a Makey Makey was based on the familiarity I have with them. I’ve started looking at an Arduino as an option, however, since it would talk to the encoders also on the device, and could also handle a variety of different paddle-detection methods. I’ve considered working an infrared led strip into one side of the slots and a series of photoreceptors to the other, using tiny limit switches, and either reed or Hall effect magnetic sensors (along with a magnet embedded in each of the paddles). The magnetic sensors have an advantage in that they would be invisible and unlikely to be triggered by objects other than the paddles inserted into the slot, but on the other hand I’m concerned that one could be triggered by a paddle in an adjacent slot, and that this option could take some time-consuming tuning. There’s also alternatives to an Arduino, including this straightforward-looking Midi interface (that may not be sold anymore), and the expensive but very cool I-CubeX. I’m not sure either of these would be that much more effective than an Arduino in this case, but either could be great in a more complex human-interaction project.

Based on all this, I also had to create a design that could be easily manufactured, fit these electronics and work with the desired style. To get a sense of the style, I finally dove into the Roman satire I’d checked out earlier and revisited some early research into Ancient Greek woodworking. The translation about which I had been most excited – over a century old! – turned out to be very abridged, but the other more recent editions (‘50s and ‘70s) are full translations (and I also found a webcomic of the story’s first half). The author Lucian mocks the stories of famous so-called “historians” that try to pass of false or exaggerated stories as their own personal experience. Without writing a full analysis on the topic, I feel that both the story and its satirical thesis fit the theme of the telescope at least well enough for now. There’s also a few interesting points that the telescope could connect specifically to (a looking-glass from the moon to the earth, and an “island of dreams”), but that sort of thing will be more important later on.

Lucian urges us not to let the truth of any story reduce the joy we glean from it, but also cautions us not to mistake the beauty and craft in a story for veracity. I like to think of this telescope as the sort of device that he himself would construct as “evidence” of his ridiculous story, to give the part of us that wants to believe this fiction a little more ammunition. It all rather reminds me of Andy Kaufman.

With that in mind, I’ve revisited and expanded my earlier research on Ancient Greek crafts woodworking, and used those ideas, with the reference of the physical model and the electronics I’m looking at to create a design for the paddle section that can be assembled of several easy-to-construct pieces, with only one complex shape that can be easily milled (upside down) on a CNC and inserted into the rest. This is only one part of the telescope, and it’s clear now that translating the mockup and early into something realizable will to take more time than I’d anticipated, even just last week. I’m optimistic that I can offset the added time on this design phase by ending up with an end product with less pieces to construct.

Telescope Project

The prototype telescope is complete! Through the past week’s construction process, I’ve had chance to explore some options for handle placement, yoke attachment, and paddle designs. The handle’s location is really determined by the placement of the yoke’s hinge point, but seems to work great in “testing” with the rest of the MFA cohort. I’m delighted that the bolts inside the telescope housing hold the paddle section in perfectly, but I’m not sure that will work for the real device.

While my original plan involved using either opaque or transparent bricks of material as paddles, with a cable attached leading back to the telescope, at the moment my test paddles use a different concept. These are a solid frame with a window cut out – something that I see being made out of wood and metal, and holding a slice of some transparent material in the center. This design idea emerged as a product of necessity, discovering how expensive ½” acrylic sheets can be, but I find I really like the idea, and it lends a certain handcrafted quality to these parts of the telescope. I can imagine creating a more intricate pattern for the window, or perhaps suspending more unusual materials. I’ve encountered sliced gemstone stalactites that could be mounted or suspended in the middle in a fun way. My grandparents used to make jewelry a little like this – pendant necklaces with a sort of wrap-around wire mounting.

I’ve also now had the chance to get feedback from the rest of the MFA cohort (and a few other people) on how this device is to encounter and use, and I’ve learned a lot. First of all, no one broke the machine, and given how flimsy it is I’m sort of surprised. The little antenna greebly mounted to the side immediately stood out as something no-one really understood – which makes sense, since I don’t really have any purpose or meaning for it either. But I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly everyone made up some reason for it to be there. The handle made a lot of sense in use, the paddles were pretty straightforward. I had a series of great chats with several people about the screen on top, the idea of the “brain” external interface box, and even into the story of how this will work as an ancient artifact. In short, the screen on the top really works, and is intuitive, but removing the brain box would be a real compromise, particularly to the idea that this is supposed to be a mysterious artifact. Someone (Ben, I think) suggested adding an external box with a larger screen to view the telescope and using the screen on the telescope purely as a sort of targeting system – which really lines up with my original ideas for this screen.

Moving forward, the remaining milestones will need some adjustment. I need to spend some time processing the feedback from Wednesday and getting as much feedback as I can on the physical model. Afterwards, I want to focus more on the physical object than the electronics and software and electronics. Having a real final prop at the end of this is definitely doable, but I’ll have to focus pretty exclusively on construction. The risk is that, if I skip steps of integrating electronics, I may need to do some modifications or rebuild pieces to get the electronics in later on.

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RJ’s Studio Project

The project is still going well, and I feel more and more grateful every week to be working with such excellent artists and engineers – “gamemakers,” to co-opt a theatre word. It sounds like I’ll have the chance to start helping train someone in producing as part of RJ’s project, so I think I must be doing a decent job so far. I’ve also started doing some visual research on vehicle and character design concepts, hopefully to give the artists a little extra meat to work with.

All My Sons

All My Sons opens at Worcester County Light Opera this Friday! I’ll be there for opening night, and gladly partaking in the post-show reception. The show is in great shape and running smoothly. We had our production photographer in on Tuesday and the photos look good. This is such a stellar production all-around, and it’s been an honor and a joy to be a part of it. All the leads’ performances are powerful and emotional, and they do wonderful justice to a heavy story. I’ve seen it all through at least half a dozen times now, and it’s a moving experience every time.

Photos by our wonderful production photographer Kara Emily Krantz

 Telescope Project

So far I’ve made two things: first, a mock up of the main body of the telescope and it’s adjustable slots; second, a mess of my dining room table. It’s all going brilliantly.

I’m working with foam core and white gaff tape at the moment.  The foam core is a very different experience to the “museum board” (soft, heavy card stock) that I’m used to making models out of, but it’s more durable and pretty easy to get the hang of. Gaff tape is not my first choice for model-making either, but it’s quick, durable, and lets me make a few mistakes and reattach items differently. It will wear down the foam core eventually, but I can get it wrong 2-3 times before it becomes an issue.

I also tracked down a spare lighting yoke to use as the “y-axis” pivot. Even for a mock-up, I doubt the foam core would’ve held up for this piece. It’s only 5-3/4” across, and that’s really the perfect size. I did have to scale down the whole 3D model in sketchup to match, but now that I can hold the thing, it’s plenty big enough. The scaling does land me with some wonky measurements, though, and so I’m sort of approximating them in to round(er) numbers to make it easier to make a new model based on the physical mockup.

By far the most time-consuming part was making the slots. This would’ve been so much easier with a thinner material, and looking ahead to whatever the final item looks like, I’m pre-emptively incredibly grateful to have access to a CNC mill at work and several 3D printer options. At the moment, while the 3D models had several paddle slots at the rear of the telescope, I’m not planning to include those. I’ll see how it reads when I bring it in, but I think that change won’t affect the end result and will make it much easier to build.

The paddle slots themselves are ½” thick, which is again smaller than the 3D model but definitely a better size not that I see it. I do still need to work out how to build the paddles, but that’ll be next week’s project (along with getting the yoke attached somehow. I wonder what a lag bolt would do to foam core?)

Tom Scott has also released a video this week about “the largest optical telescope that will ever be built.” While I’m familiar with the telescopes in the video and the concept of optical interferometry (once upon a time I did want to go into astrobiology…), actually seeing what the light delay lines look like is pretty awesome. So too is the Extremely Large Telescope under construction, but as a fan of large telescope his thesis on this being the last of it’s kind is sad, but likely true. These telescopes and their adaptive optics have already killed the equally awe-inspiring visible-light space telescope (Hubble is one, and will also be the last of it's kind. The JWST, while it creates beautiful images, actually operates in infrared wavelengths, which is why it still makes sense to send it out to space and beyond the moon). Cracking the code on doing visible-light interferometry asynchronously and without those complex delay-lines will open up many exciting avenues of study, but you’d never really need such a large telescope.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s section on the Mt. Wilson Observatory was the big inspirations for this project. It was with this telescope that Albert Michelson used a stellar interferometer to measure the size of Betelgeuse – the same technology that will likely now replace these great telescopes (which the Mt. Wilson 100” telescope itself once was). The EU doesn’t have a monopoly on large-telescopes-with-a-stellar-interferometer-in-the-basement either. The twin-telescope Keck Observatory in Hawaii also has a (now-defunct) interferometer, and itself pioneered the segmented-mirror construction that the Extremely Large Telescope is using to achieve it’s eponymous size. This is all does seem like a strange series of coincidences, but since there’s only ever been one “largest telescope in the world” at a time, I can’t really call any of it coincidental.

RJ’s MFA Project

I think I’m finally getting the hang of being a producer, and I can tell by the growing list of things to improve or do differently moving forward. I’m sort of looking forward to finding ways to work these game-design management practices into the theatre environment.

In terms of non-producer work, I’ve dug up some images from the first racing game I ever remember playing (and loving), POD. I think it lines up very well with RJ’s game’s general aesthetic, and hopefully the research proves useful (whether to me or someone else)

Holy Cross

I’ve finished the lighting plot for Good Person of Setzuan, and the next step on it is to figure out how best to create hang paperwork – i.e. the information I give to the electricians to hang. Likely including sections of the diagram, but also definitely including details of color & frost, accessories, and DMX addresses for each light. I’ve only had to do that for this theatre once before, for a much smaller plot, so it may take a few tries. That one is tomorrow’s project, along with ordering anything I need for hang.

Other

Tech for WCLOC’s All My Sons is this weekend! I’m almost ready even. The plot is hung, basic looks are programmed, there are a couple of tweaks to make after a rehearsal I lit on Tuesday, and my biggest challenge left is going to be figuring out how to hang this porch light on the set. The lighting system at WCLOC is small and incredibly limiting, but in it’s own way that’s refreshing. It’s a theatre I can refocus in a morning, and rehang in a day, and while it’s certainly less capable than the multi-million-dollar spaces at my work, it’s also refreshing and fun.

Ed, our set designer & carpenter, has done an amazing job on the house – it’s small, but the details are beautiful. Often, in theatre, the walls of a realistic set are something you don’t necessarily want to scrape light across, since it’ll highlight all of the blemishes and unevenness. Not this one – the doorframes, siding, etc. are all excellent, and the one light that I have room to finagle backstage will look great across all that texture. (I’ve put it in writing now. Go ahead, come see the show next week and tell me if it works!)

This blog post is going to be quite late, I’m afraid. This covers the week of 9/20-9/27. 

Telescope Project

This week I’ve made fairly minimal progress on the telescope project. I’ve collected some notes from the sprint presentation’s feedback, with ideas to develop and some changes to make. I do still need to update the computer model to reflect that. I’ve also come across a few fun-looking concepts of tabletop particle accelerators, and tossed them into Miro to look at when I start work on the brain box I’m imagining going along with this telescope. Apart from that, all I’ve managed is a shopping trip to gather supplies for the mockup, though I do now have what I need to get started

RJ’s MFA Project

I’ve made a few updates to how our Kanban board works, am pretty comfortable with the work I’m doing as Producer, except perhaps the quantity – everything is running so well, I feel like I have enough time to take on some other roles. After talking to RJ, there are a few level-design areas I can contribute to, and may allow us to widen the scope of the project. noclip.website is a brilliant resource for this; It’s an archive of many of the now-vintage racing video games that our project is inspired by, and it allows me to explore the levels to get an idea of the layout, scale, and tools that those level designers used to get their results.

Holy Cross

I’m honored to have lit a staged reading of Lloyd Suh’s Far Country, a recent and evolving off-Broadway play following “an unlikely family’s journey from rural China to California in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act at the turn of the 20th century.” We also hosted the latest in Broadway in Worcester’s concert series, with Jessie Mueller and Seth Rudetsky. This event gave us a shakedown of a set of wirelessly-controlled, battery-powered lights we’ve recently gotten, and I’m grateful to the team at Immedia for lending us the missing piece we needed to get them working! And finally spent a wonderful morning on a photoshoot for the Estreno journal of contemporary Spanish theatre, which is now housed at Holy Cross. Needless to say it’s been a week of very long days.

I’m also nearing the end of the timeline for the design for our mainstage production of Good Person of Setzuan, and drew up a rough light plot and rough systems list all ready to completely change along with some groundplan updates to solve some fire egress issues and when I watch the full run-through of the show next Thursday.

AOB

In other news, I’ve discovered a minor pantry moth infestation in, well, my pantry. A brush with these creatures in my childhood home instilled in me a desire to keep all grains and pastas in sealed containers, and that really limited the damage. This cabal were particular fans of some sunflower seeds and almonds that had sat unused for a while.

I also watched the first full run-through of WCLOC’s All My Sons on Tuesday. I’m delighted to designing for such an excellent cast, including several recent Holy Cross alums and returning members from last year’s Small Mouth Sounds. The show is coming up quick, but going smoothly so far. Over the summer I’d designed and hung a rep plot with enough flexibility to adapt easily to multiple shows, and because of that I plan to finish hang, focus and most of the work in one morning this coming weekend.

And finally, on top of that, I’ve finally come to understand the gravity of what originally appeared to be a minor scholarship-related billing issue! Every time I thought I had settled, some new, exciting and totally contradictory information revealed itself. Unfortunate details aside, I’m glad at least that the matter appears to be almost over.

This past week has been busy! I’ve had a pair of high-profile events at work since last Wednesday, which were successful but have taken some work. I’d planned on having all of next week to finish my plot for the Holy Cross Theatre Dept’s Good Person of Setzuan, but have decided to move that timeline up to… this week. I was fortunate to spend a solid day on it, but that’s a bit stressful. It’ll help in the long run – we’re still working on hiring a Production Electrician, but it looks like we won’t have it settled in time for this show’s lighting hang, so I’ll need the extra time to prep hang paperwork myself.

I spent a lovely weekend in sunny Glens Falls, NY, exploring the Adirondacks and catching up with an old friend I haven’t seen in too long. We spent some time at The Adirondack Experience, and they had some wonderful interactive exhibits! A clever logjam-clearing game used an Xbox Kinect and a pair of projectors. You could clear stuck logs by jabbing a them with a stick with a tennis ball on the end, and presumably the Kinect tracked only points in the few inches above the floor. I also discovered a surveyor’s telescope in the museum that fits delightfully well with the concept of this telescope project. The compass-beneath-telescope design would be fitting in and of itself, but I think the telescope I’m looking at would obstruct anything below it.

On the telescope project, I’ve created a series of 3D sketches, to try different solutions to some of the problems with the design. Immediately apparent was that putting the time-axis-screen beneath the telescope, while fitting, makes it impossible to see. Even if the screen were on the base but to the side, in certain positions the telescope itself would obstruct it. But as it turns out, there’s a perfectly sized flat surface on top of the telescope, which might be a perfect location. I couldn’t find an elegant way to add a viewfinder, but adding an radio-telescope-greebly to the side (it currently has no function) definitely helped the look.

Based on these sketches, I started work on precise vector drafting to create build drawings, but have since realized that constructing and refining a physical prototype should happen first. And that’s the next step – I expect to spend the next sprint creating a mockup of this telescope, with a couple of variations based on feedback.

I also spent some time putting the sprint presentation together. Rather more than I expected, in fact – looking back over the past two weeks’ progress and formatting it to present was a challenge, but has provided a much clearer sense of my current status and direction. I’m incredibly grateful for the feedback from the Seminar class – several ideas and interpretations came up that hadn’t occured to me. A greebly I added as a way to route cables into the main box read as handle, and while that wasn’t my intention it’s brilliant, and this device should absolutely have handles. Generally, the transparent paddles definitely help the telescope read, and are probably enough as well. I’d been leaning towards an audio-heavy piece, but based on this feedback I think that a video focus, even exclusively, not only makes sense for the project, but lends rather better to my own skills.

Working on RJ’s Studio Project, I’ve spent most of my time managing tasks in the Miro board, but I’ve also done some research into how Agile & Kanban management are supposed to work, and I’m glad to have a chance to learn about these methods in action on the project. I’m also very curious how these might apply to theatre production (and I have to wonder if Interactive Theatre course is trying that).

It’s been another fun week!

            I’ve set up a mood board using Miro, and it’s a brilliant tool! I gather that there are a small variety of similar apps, but the ease of use has really blown me away. I’ve quickly made a collection of research from a variety of sources, including linked images, uploaded images, online news articles and videos, even a Spotify playlist.

            In my case, I’m using it to organize ideas about control components, output methods, examples of mechanical elements, and general style. I have some screenshots from Outer Wilds, Riven and Myst focusing on the general style, and particularly on knobs, switches and displays. I’ve included a generous collection on the Antikythera machine, and particular some beautiful reconstructions that are particularly inspiring. I’ve also put together a variety of examples of telescopes, including cosmic ray telescopes, neutrino detectors, and several different constructions of radio telescopes. Interestingly, I never actually collected any reference images of visible light telescopes.

            In addition to the visual reference material, I’ve also created a playlist of music that all has something in common with the project. Casually, it’s a great resource to use as background noise to get work done on the project, but several aspects really speak to the way I hope this telescope will work, and I’m hopeful that they might end up in the final product too.

            Brian Saia’s Uneven Oceans album really parallels the idea of this telescope as something that can distantly observe faraway objects in the past. He describes the album as “a sonic journal of [his] movements through lapsed landscapes,” and each song as a memorial to “a space that no longer exists, transformed through extreme weather or other external forces.” This device seems like a fitting corollary to that, especially with some ability to adjust the time that you’re viewing through it. This music seems to call from places familiar but just slightly too far to properly remember, see or visit – and that’s exactly how I hope this device will feel.

            I’ve also leaned heavily on Public Service Broadcasting, a British band that blends live performance with archive audio and video to, as they put “Inform, Educate and Entertain.” Each of their albums and EPs tells a story of historical events using audio artifacts from those events themselves. Their Race for Space album is built around sound samples from the British Film Institute’s archives (including contemporary newsreels, NASA audio, etc.) from the launch of Sputnik in ’57 up to Apollo 17 in ’72. This has, perhaps, a more technical and direct approach than Uneven Oceans, but in its own way also realizes places and events that are otherwise a little too far away, in distance and in memory, for me to interact with.

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            Looking at all the research I’ve collected, I’ve been able to make a few decisions to shape the project. I’ve narrowed the list of controllable parameters to x-axis, y-axis, zoom and time, along with a TBD “tuning” or “denoising” method. That might be a fine-adjust for those x- and y- axis controls, or possibly something more connected to the audio/video outputs. The output will ultimately include both audio and video, but I have also decided to commit only to finishing the physical protoype this semester.

            The physical look I’m moving forward with is based largely on cosmic ray telescopes. Their unorthodox appearance fits the unorthodox way this telescope works, and it also presents more interesting methods of interaction. As cosmic rays hit the earth’s atmosphere, they decay into a cascade of secondary radiation, and cosmic ray detectors hope to catch that radiation as it passes through a brick of specialized material. Cosmic Ray telescopes are simply a set of detectors in a line, searching for simultaneous detections that would indicate that this radiation is passing through from “in front” of the telescope.

            Using this as a design for the telescope has several advantages, and I’m particularly interested in using the locations of these bricks as a way of controlling the “zoom” of the telescope. It’s a unique method of interaction with a telescope, and also (I hope) a clear visual indication, from the outside, of the “state” of the telescope. A classic, enclosed, optical telescope wouldn’t provide those same opportunities. That said, I’m also concerned that a cosmic ray telescope as-is simply doesn’t look enough like a telescope to set the right expectation, and so I suspect I’ll have to find a middle ground with the design.

In addition to the telescope, I also have a rough plan for a secondary device to adjust time. Based largely on the design of the Antikythera device, though in a form inspired by a particular device in Myst, this would serve as a map of the solar system. Turning a knob will adjust the time axis, and the map provides feedback by showing the positions of the planets – which, of course, will change where the telescope needs to point to pick up different signals.

The next step is to create some proper drafting of the telescope, based on this concept. That, I can turn into prototypes to test the ways people might interact with the telescope, e.g. how much like a classic visible-light telescope will this strange contraption need to look, and how intuitive can I make all the control parameters?

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.

The end of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum included a large version of a baseball diamond, with a mix of statues, artifacts from the Leagues, replicas of artifacts that don’t exist, and some fun set dressing.

An entrance to a model train exhibit, built out of and echoing one of the old elevators from the station to the platforms in Union Station

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.

[vi] https://littlefreelibrary.org/