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Have an interest in pentagrams? Wanna do some fun rituals with friends? Longing to summon a creature from the beyond?

Well then, here’s a once-in-your-lifetime chance to bring forth your very own Summoning™!*

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Click here to learn more about the Pentagram Ritual!

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S̶̨̡̫͔̲̫̥̲̰̮͌̆̓̏̓̀̆ę̵̧̍͑̾̐̏̆͊̐̉̌̚͘e̴̢̧̝͔̘̣̩̥̭͚̪͗̆̂̓̾ ̸̧̹͉̟͉̲̏̌̚Ÿ̷̖͇́͑̓̉͛̓͋̈́͘͝ŏ̴̘͙̯͇̭̰u̷̡̨̘͎͇̥̘̱̤̺͊̓̓̓͗̊͊͑̋ ̶̤̼̬̣̟͔̍̄͒̚͘͝͝͝Ţ̷͉̫̣̱̝̠͎̰͍̪͕̇́̊͛͜ḧ̴̘̪͚̜̼́͝e̴͎̯̻̗̓͐͗͗̊͗̾͊͗͂r̸̨̹̪̤̣̞̼͉͎͂̓͑̂̏ĕ̵̞͎̫̯̏̽̇̿̕̕̕

 

*Souls of participants may or may not be eaten by the Summoning™.  Terms and Conditions apply.

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Giving someone directions can be a simple as telling them to go left or right, back or forward, to stop or continue.

 

But what if we reduced our words to abstract sounds? What specific movements would we associate to these sounds, and how many people would react the same way we do?

This is exactly what I want to find out in my instructional performance, Common Sense.

 

The instructions are pretty simple:

Listen to the audio being played, and let the sounds guide your movements.

You can do whatever movements you want in relation to the different sounds (e.g: jump, run, spin, freeze, etc.)

 

For this prototype performance, the main goal is to see if there are sounds that trigger common reactions in different people.

Below is a video of the prototype performance (ft. Fizal and Alina)!

 

 

It was quite interesting to see some of the similar reactions we had to the sounds. For example, fast paced beats got us to move around and add a bit more bounce in our steps, and when the audio stopped at points, our actions either froze as well or slowed down. It was also cool to see some moments where we ended up facing the same direction or stood in the same spot.

Overall, I think I can look more into different types of sounds and also see how elements within the space itself can affect the performance. A possible goal would be to create a sound track that manipulates participants into moving in a specific way; they think they are moving randomly, but may find out that many others reacted similarly too.

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I’ve only ever experienced VR games through watching YouTube gamers play them, listening to them marvel at the immersiveness and how cool the controls are (especially the Oculus Quest). That was until our amazing Profs brought a few VR sets to class to let us play around with them. I was indeed #blessed.

The moment I put on the VR headset, I was already tricked visually and mentally in believing that the VR world exists physically. Case in point, I tried to rest my hands on a virtual table, and thank the lord I didn’t put my full weight on it, or I’d have broken my head along with the headset.

 

TLDR: I love the immersiveness that comes with VR, and The Chalkroom, by was just an excellent example of how it can be used as an interactive installation.

Image from https://www.optionstheedge.com/sites/default/files/assets/2020/laurie_anderson_and_hsin-chien_huang_.jpg

“Chalkroom is a virtual reality work by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings and stories. Once you enter you are free to roam and fly. Words sail through the air as emails. They fall into dust. They form and reform.”
–  Laurie Anderson

Describe what you like and dislike about it.

I loved the design of the VR environment. It was nothing familiar in terms of what we see everyday; it was just many gigantic, black cuboids, placed at different altitudes. And when you look down between each platform, it’s just a bottomless pit (but like, with grey clouds drifting ominously below). This unfamiliar and somewhat creepy visual environment is super effective in evoking that feeling of being lost, totally clueless of where you are or what you’re supposed to do.

Another thing I love is that you can F L Y  in the VR world. The controls to do so, if I recall correctly, was to put the controllers together, point them in the direction you want to go, and stretch out your arms. The further you stretch, the faster you go. I really liked how with visuals alone, I was tricked into believing in the VR world I was in. For example, whenever I moved forward and then stopped, my body would actually jerk forward a little, as though inertia was actually acting on me. It was super fun. Until the motion sickness kicked in, which was the only thing I disliked. Because of that, I didn’t get to enter all the other rooms (and I think I only visited 3 main ones)

Overall, the interactivity was pretty cool, using the controllers to move, draw, and even using our own voice to create sculptures. The only issue I faced was moving backwards after entering the interactive zones. It was tricky, but I made it out eventually.

Image from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oY_jE1V7_hU/maxresdefault.jpg

 

Describe how this installation fits into the overall environment. How effective was it?

In terms of physical and VR environments, both of them seemed to fit seamlessly together at the beginning. The walls of the physical room were black, with chalk markings all over. In the center were four stools, the VR equipment, and the metal frame with motion sensors on them. The mapping was done so well. Putting on the VR headset was like putting on goggles; even though it was obstructing my view of the physical setting, the display allowed me to seemingly see though the headset. The cool part was when I turned around in my stool to see what’a behind me and saw the other four VR stools were exactly where the physical ones would have been.

So, effective? Hella.

 

How is the audience invited to engage with the installation, and how to they interact with it?

I guess the invitation to interact was mainly though the narrator sharing information and guiding us on how to interact in each particular room. Without the narrator’s prompt, I think we might have missed out on interaction opportunities in certain areas. To interact within the VR world was to simply point and aim the controller at whatever you wanted to interact with and pull a trigger. Even the controls for flying, which I’ve explained previously, was easy. And that’s very important, in terms of ensuring that the participants remain immersed in exploration and interaction.

 

Pick one feature/idea/concept from the installation, and discuss how you can incorporate it into your own interactive environment project.

I really liked the concept of using people’s senses against them; making them believe one thing when it’s actually something else. I also like the idea of physical exploration, where the participants can move about an area that is unfamiliar to them, having to interact with things to make sense of the world around them.

I would like to incorporate these two main concepts into my IE project, combining it with the topic of guilt-tripping. Through incorporating these two concepts, I intend to make the participants have this constant feeling of unease; to make them curious, yet cautions. It would be like thinking you might be in danger, but you keep exploring anyways.

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Everyone leaves a mark throughout their daily routine. Even at the very start of our day, we leave a trail that captures our movements. For instance, the specific arrangement of pillows and blankets on a bed can show us exactly how its sleepy human rolled out of bed. And at the end of the day, we can tell where a person has been or what they have done based on the positioning of their unkept shoes at the main door.

There are definitely many ways to evoke a sense of presence and movement, without having a physical body there to show for it, but here are just two ideas for interactive spaces that focus on that!

 

Idea #1: Impressions

This is idea does not involve any digital tech; just a couple of sticks, some charcoal dust, and one (or four) long sheet(s) of paper.

 

Set up and flow:

The interactive space will be set in a standard 4-wall room, each wall lined with paper (strong enough to be embossed without easily ripping). Participants will each be given a stick for writing/embossing, and will be free to scribble on any part of the paper-covered walls they want. They are encouraged to write down a personal message, preferably a secret that they’ve kept to themselves so far. Overlapping of writings is allowed. At the end of the day, the next batch of participants will be given charcoal dust to rub on their hands. Once that is done, they are allowed to have free roam of the room and rub their hands on any of the walls again. At the end of the day, the secret messages will be exposed for everyone to see.

 

Results:

I’m not sure what an actual result would look like, but I would predict that majority of the messages will be at the average eye level. The length of a single message reveals the writers movements, and the various handwriting show the presence of multiple people with their own unique personalities. The level at which the message was written can also be telling of participant’s height. Likewise, for the charcoal hand prints, the type of smearing can tell a person’s movement; whether it is being wiped in a concentrated area or if its a sling sweep from one end of a wall to the other. They all signify a sense of movement.

 

Idea #2: Broken Gramophone

We all know they classic game of broken telephone: a group of players line up to pass a message consecutively from one end to the other. That message, however, always gets butchered and what the last person recites can be vastly different from the original message.

For this idea, roughly the same concept is applied, but this time through sound recordings.

 

Set up and flow:

The interactive space will take place within Pasir Ris, where a crew member will set up the first audio recording, travelling from the MRT station to Pasir Ris Park, and eventually to Down Town East. The whole walk will take about 45 minutes. Once the first route has been recorded, the recording will be uploaded to a drive where the first participant can access and listen to it on. All participants will start at the exact same point as the crew member at the MRT station, but from there, they will play the recording and decide where to go from there. As they go about their way, they have to rely on the sounds in the previous recordings; the crunching of sand beneath shoes on a pavement, the crashing of waves, the beeping of traffic signals. As they are walking, their own path will be recorded simultaneously. Once the participant reaches the end of 45-minute walk, that new recording will be shared with the new participant, and the process repeats. There will be about 4-5 participants, and by the end of the day, where will be 5-6 complete recordings.

 

Results:

Again, not sure how this would pan out exactly, but based on what we know about broken telephone, we can suspect that the very first recording is no doubt different from the first. Each audio recording captures the participant’s unique path, and when compared with each other, you can tell roughly at which point do they diverge from one another. This gives a mental map of the physical area they covered, with familiar, synchronised sounds forming a common path and new sounds forming new ones. Together, the recordings show the listeners a sense of movement through sound alone.

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The Stanley Parable is a video game designed by Davey Wreden, that uses interactive storytelling. It was first released as a free modification for Half-Life 2 in 2011, but a stand-alone remake with more story elements was released in 2013.

The game starts off with a narrator introducing the main character, Stanley, an office employee. The narrator describes his mundane work life where, day in and day out, he is tasked to follow whatever instructions appear on his monitor. One day, however, Stanley sat at his desk for an hour, but not a single instruction had appeared, and no one else was in the office. With the starting objective of find out what’s going on, the player controls Stanley in a first-person perspective while the narrator gives indirect instructions through his narrations.

As the player, you can choose to follow everything the narrator says; you stick to the script and discover that the company had been mind-controlling the employees, after which, you put and end to it escape the facility.

However, as players, we have the natural tendency to go against the rules; to find out what would happen if you don’t do as the narrator says. This is where the interactive storytelling gets interesting. The game itself provides the player with many opportunities to go against the narrator, be it going the right door when he says to go left, or going down the stairs when he says to go up. But with every order you disobey, with every move you make, the game long foresaw, providing each scenario with it’s own script.

As the player’s disobedience prevails, the narrator gets increasingly annoyed, constantly mocking the player, and at one point in the game, gives up on the main game and boots up another one. The narrator’s reactions makes it feel as though he truly is reacting in real time to all your actions. Obviously, that is not the case. Certain dialogues are only activated upon entering specific areas of the map, meaning that the game was very well thought out in terms of predicting the player’s moves and thinking of a response fit for the situation. There is even a dialogue prepare for when the player purposely stays inside a janitor’s closet (without being told to) for too long. The narrator even gets mad when you interrupt his narration mid-way. He even says somewhat conspiratorial sounding things that can make you feel uncomfortable as you play the game.

So what is the point of having a game where the player doesn’t have to follow the main story line? Why go through all the trouble creating so many scripts for multiple alternate scenarios when they can just make it straight forward with no room for disobedience? It’s simply to give the players the freedom of choice. Or rather, an illusion of freedom of choice. The Stanley Parable aims to question what choices mean in video game, mocking how limited the choices really are. Sure, you can choose to disobey, but the fact that there there is a witty come back for everything you do, it proves that your move was predicted; the game designer knew the possibilities of disobedience and created paths disguised as new choices. To phrase it better, how much power does the player really have when everything has been predetermined?

Every decision the player is able to make was already preconceived by the designer; he knows every choice because he made them so. The story only serves as a decoy, leading the players to believe that they are the ones in control. There are various paths you can take, and these paths branch out to a total of 19 different endings. After reaching the end, the player is brought back to the start menu, where they are able to play the game again, making different decisions in an effort to explore other possible endings.

It is the games intuition and large range of choices that allows the players to have a unique interactive experience.

 

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Human-machine interactivity has expanded considerably over the years, and enriching these experiences is one of Golan Levin’s goals when creating an interactive artwork. Quite a handful of his interactive pieces use projections and tracking as a form of control; a way to “get away from the mouse and use out full bodies as a way of exploring aesthetic experiences” as he puts it. And out of all these projection based interactive artworks, I feel that Messa di Voce best incorporated the various interactive elements.

“The mouse is probably the smallest straw you can try to suck all of human expression through” – Joy Mountford

 

In addition to focusing on the aesthetic experiences, Golan wishes to empower people through interactivity and “discover themselves as creative actors”, which, without a doubt, reflects in the performance shown below.

 

As they “speak” [enter performer’s flawless impression of raging Donald Duck here], little spheres are projected onto the scene, seemingly emerging from the performer’s mouth and floating upwards like bubbles. In a way, I guess they could be called speech bubbles. More than that, the bubbles also change in size depending on the vocalisation of each sound.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE. The bubbles eventually fall to the ground and the performers are able to push and kick them around, an interaction that made it seem as though both the virtual and physical spaces were the same place.

The performance goes on to show the various ways sound can be used in the interactive artwork; from creating ripples,

 

to drawing with lines,

 

to what it would probably look like if your soul was being sucked out by a dementor,

 

and even creating this weird spiky aura thing.

 

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1. Tilt Brush

Art can be created using various means, such as painting and sculpting. Likewise, in this interactive media project, participants are able to express their creativity through painting, only this time, it’s in a virtual space. They are not bound to working on a two dimensional surface; the room becomes their canvas. Every stroke of a brush is captured in real time, and since it takes place in the physical space as well, participants are also able to walk through their three dimensional creations.

 

2. Xbox BIG SHADOW Interactive Wall

In order to have a shadow, there needs to be light, and , of course, an object to cast the shadow. However, what happens if a huge shadow is just projected on the wall and tries to crush your shadow beneath its feet? Would the logical thinky-thinky parts of our brain help us understand that it is but a projection? Or would our instinct overrule all logic and proceed to make us go into full defense mode to survive the phantom foot? Evidently from the view above, the second option wins.

As suggested in the title, this project uses the projection of shadows onto walls to create an interactive space where virtual and physical spaces meet, allowing the audience to use their shadows to interact with a virtual shadow. Although the object/subject casting the big shadow is non-existent, the participants view the actions and instinctively react to them (e.g: when they’re about to be “stepped on”).