Assignments

Due Next Week: Thursday, March 24

1 – Movement Workshop Preparation: Costume/Electronics Functionality

Next week is our Movement Workshop with Angeline. Everyone needs to have a functional costume and electronics to be used during this session. We did not expect the costume and wearable to be 100% completed, but functional and working. Next week we meet in room 4-13, my office which will be used for the performance.

(from now until the end of the semester, all workshop preparations will be worth 5 points each)

2 – Project Update #2

Document the work you have done in class as well during the course of the week: in this case, costume / electronics construction. Take photographs of your work, describing each image to document your process. This is a very important aspect of this course: we are not just concerned with the end result, but with process, the documentation of ideas, materials, objects, and creative activity.

Be sure to use the category “Final Project” with your post.

** You can use B-17 after 5pm each day to work on your garments and wearables. This room has sewing equipment. Your card access should be activated, please test.

Outline

Chat

IEM student Cynthia Wong has created a chat plugin for OSS. It is now installed in our class site and she will come in at 10:00am to present the plugin and explain how we can test it. It should become valuable for providing a chat forum for our final project.

Coaching Meetings with Angeline

Angeline is having 30 minute Skype sessions with each student to discuss your costume, narrative ideas, and to rehearse and development movement.

Here is the schedule:

Friday, March 18, SGT
11:00 – Yuhao, 11:30 Gladys, 12:30 Feliciana

Wednesday, March 23, SGT
10:00 Tiffany, 10:30 Charlene, 11:00 Xin Hong

Please send a contact request to Angline’s Skype:
angelineyoung

Angeline is going to Skype in today at 10:30am to briefly go over the plan.

Character Sketches

The following character sketches describe narrative ideas and roles for each student based on Project Hyperessay writings. Students should consider and reshape these sketch for developing the performance. Also, allow the the sketches to influence the design/creation of costume and wearable. I would also like to see each student come up with a name for their character.

Angeline: She believes in a liberated sovereignty and empowerment in the third space that is performed and maintained by multiple modes of expression. She has a grand vision of the future of telematics and the virtual embrace, but must work with the complex dynamics of an often unruly colony of beings who are not always sympathetic nor compatible with her ideas. Across the cultural and physical distance of the telematic divide, she seeks to integrate the remote and the diverse through artistic agency. Through her spontaneous actions, Angline invokes her dreams, as well as those of the colony, in order to achieve real communication, contact, and intimacy in the third space.

Charlene: A predatory virtual being in the third space, who through her pixelated-glitch representation, omits menacing sounds and preys on physical beings/performers, swallowing them through contraction and expansion. With the ability to wrap her arms around another members of the colony, as well as Angeline, Charlene is a presence who must be contained because of her desire to carry out the “touch of destruction.”

Tiffany: She is a seer in the darkness of a dystopic virtual world, haunted by strange, disorienting sounds when people touch. Tiffany has a desire to lead her fellow beings in the colony into a safer third space to find new life and refuge with Angeline.  She boldly engages the colony in the discovery of new forms of images that are constructed through the rejection of “perfect media,” as a new world begins to take shape in the third space.

Feliciana: She heads a resistance against Charlene, who attempts to attack others through the “touch of destruction” with her large, enveloping arms. When a dancer is forced to the ground, Feliciana tries to revive them, creating loud, startling sounds with her touch. Eventually, Feliciana is able to defeat Charlene by instructing the colony to pass their virtual presence through Charlene, creating an explosion of color and glitch in the blending of bodies.

Gladys: She is concerned with what lies on the “other side” of the third space: fixated on the idea of understanding and engaging Angeline, an amorphous figure, not entirely discernible, by reaching out to touch her, transforming Angeline’s presence through her touch. Gladys invokes a surreal, magical presence through her fluid, sinewy movement. In the end, through her undulating movement, Gladys breaks the spell of entrapment in the third space that threatens to engulf the colony in a telematic world that is devoid of physical, tactile interaction: ultimately allowing them to all engage with Angeline.

Xin Hong: When she touches another being, there is an electric shock that is accompanied by melodic vocal sounds. Sometimes the touch is comforting but often it produces fear, a numbing sensation that paralyzes others. However, the desire to touch is so strong, that no one can resist Xin Hong. Xin Hong’s touch produces various forms of biological transformations, altering other beings to change color, shape, luminosity, etc. No one can resist her touch because Xin Hong is so powerful and seductive.

Yuhao: He is a weaver of personal histories through sound, a composer, who conducts and orchestrates the sonic world that is generated by the movement and actions of Angeline and the colony. He carefully layers the sound to coordinate a sense of harmonic affiliation in the third space through the carefully blending of personal histories represented in sound. However, Yuhao’s efforts are often undermined and disrupted by the actions of Charlene and Feliciana. Yuhao seeks to overcome their resistance through mysterious answers from Angeline as to the amorphous and intangible nature of human communication in the third space to create a world of mutual understanding.

Sound Gestures

Movement and gesture will be translated into sound. It would be interesting if each character emits specific kinds of sounds. What kinds of sounds can you imagine would be associated with your character? Think in terms of loud, soft, dark, light, ambient, noisy, musical, instrumental, etc. Students will free associate sounds with their characters and this will be incorporated into the work.

Electronics and Wearables Construction

With the costume in progress, students will work on electronic / wearables for incorporation into the piece. There are many possibilities for input sensing, from accelerometers to temperature sensors, and the goal is to create the ideal mapping of input and output, embedded appropriately in the garment or accessory for the performance.