Beginning our dive into multimedia, we were given the opportunity to learn and develop skills in different types of multimedia that we may or may not end up incorporating into our works. As well as different levels of camera work, I was most interested in the gaming and sound aspects of our research.
After a lesson on Makey Makey’s, it wasn’t long before I ended up investing in one myself. As an avid musician, the idea of being able to create and manipulate music and instruments in much a way was fantastic. Through experimenting with many mediums, the materials in which I was using narrowed down to a few that I personally believed worked great. Fruit was one of the great conductors, perhaps due to the large amount of water. By linking up the wires to the fruit attached to my electric drum kit frame, I was able to create a functioning full drum kit using the contents of my home’s fruit bowl! However, the most interesting element of my personal experimentation was the use of thick graphite pencil marks.
In the above picture, I began experimenting with thick graphite marks linked up to the Makey Makey. With the great success of this medium, I experimented more, making a few extravagant doodles that, if I had as many wires as I needed, could have been harp-paintings. The simplicity and the uniqueness of Makey Makey’s, I believe, is an extremely effective medium.
With this in mind and inventions such as the Oculus Rift becoming available for gaming use, the thought of using Makey Makey’s for gaming as opposed to sound was pretty immediate as “Sensors such as the Kinect, are readily accessible.” (Hansen, 2013, 136). By linking the Skyrim PC game with the Makey Makey software as a controller, creating our home-made Rift was fairly easy.
As you can see in the image above, the body controller consisted of three simple elements.
- The weapon and shield. Two simple handheld sticks that require no more than a touch of the thumb were linked to the left and right mouse buttons retrospectively. Opon touching these, depending on which one was pressed, the on-screen character either striked with their weapon or drew their shield.
- This is the vision control and determined in which direction the character on screen would move their head. By closing the gap between the foil on the side of the glasses with the foil sticks either side of the players head, the character would then look in that direction. In simpler terms, if you look left with your head, so would your on screen character.
- Connected to the A, W, S, D keys, the feet cause the movement of the on screen character. With foil placements on the shoes, by moving your feet slightly upon your toes, heels or to the sides caused a circuit completion with the foil below the feet to then cause the character to walk forwards, backwards and to the side.
Though I created this home-made Rift for my own personal use and interest, it would be interesting to see if something similar could ever be used as part of a performance. As a player, the emersion into the game was more intense than ordinary game-play, and being able to give that experience out to others would be something to think about.
As part of the course, we had the opportunity to watch and enjoy many multimedia performance videos by a variety of companies. One of these that stood out particularly to me was the work of Gob Squad – Super Night Shot. As a huge fan of video and video production tech, I loved the concept of live mixing something that had already technically been completed for an audience in the present. By actually starting the performance through four recording cameras an hour before the performance was due to take place and the audience was to arrive, four individuals set out on the local time to shoot the content of the movie. Having four perfectly to sync cameras that are to be digitally edited live in front of the later audience along with the music, the performance technically starts an hour earlier than itself and ends with its own beginning of the actors running with their cameras through the audience waiting to get seated in the auditorium. Using multimedia in this way, Gob Squad were able to manipulate time by extending it outside of the time in which it was to take place. Because of this, the audience watch live, something that has already been completed before they even arrived at the venue.
With the theory that time is a stack as opposed to a timeline, the idea that it can be manipulated by picking out pieces and slotting them into others is one that multimedia can assist in producing. By being able to use premade projections in addition to live feed, the idea that time is merely a element that can now be shifted and changed within a performance rather than the performance being the element that is shifted is not only available but should be encouraged when it comes to multi and digital media. By fully immersing the live bodies within the pre-recorded bodies in the performance space in order to create a type of augmented reality as ‘live and recorded images are perceived as belonging to different realms’ (Auslander 1999).
As part of our personal experimentation, we wanted to experiment with the idea of ‘Dark Thoughts and Confessions’. The idea of having a confession heard visually while viewing a video of an individual on screen was a very interesting way to break down that idea of a screen between the actor and the audience member as they could effectively ‘read minds’. But in order to do this, we needed confessions that were real for validity purposes.
With the idea of having people sending in confessions anonymously, I set up a tumblr account and promoted it to my internet base. Within a week, the page got many messages (that are still coming in so the page will have to be deleted shortly) and over 400 people following the page to view confessions. It was an unexpected and overwhelming response, but it gave us some great material to experiment with and was a perfect example at how universal the idea of a censored mind was as the submissions came from all over the world.
Find the blog at dark-confessions.tumblr.com
With an active site, we were given lots of new material to work with. These included but weren’t limited to:
Above: personal, violent actions.
Above: various suggestions about society
Above: personal sick fantasies
Though we didn’t decide to go with this particular element within our performance, it was a fantastic experiment and really showed the power of the internet in terms of performance and material.
After being led through a vast portfolio of works and multimedia devices, we were left to our own devices. After eventually experimenting with two ideas: important moments in history, where we would explore moments in history that we would be able to revit with multimedia tech that couldn’t have been possible at the time, like a fly of the wall, and GOD, the idea of permanent surveillance, the ideas of conspiracy theory became very evident to me.
By its very definition, a conspiracy theory is an ‘explanatory hypothesis that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an event or situation which is typically taken to be illegal or harmful.’
Ever since the mid 1960’s and the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ developed a derogatory meaning and is now seen as a paranoid tendency to find influence of ‘more than what meets the eye’ elements within events. Though it is usually a term of ridicule, conspiracies have been proven to be true. A few examples include Watergate and how Richard Nixon and his aides conspired to cover it up, the theory that Ronald Reagan’s people conspired to cover up the Iran-Contra affair and also the that government mass surveillance was tracking a large percentage of the world’s free telephone and Internet traffic.
Observer columnist, John Naughton states that ‘The reason we have conspiracy theories is that sometimes governments and organisations do conspire.’ Though conspiracy theorists have often been labelled crazy lunatics by the media, a number of webpages and illuminati related public research being pushed into the realm of ‘deep net’ in order to limit trafficking, theories are extremely valid and the difficulty comes where one is to sift through what to keep or throw away within a theory. This was definitely a problem as we started to research moments in history.
All of the following moments were ones that struck interest, that also contain their own popular conspiracy theories: whether they be political or through deep space illuminati.
- Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory
- 9/11conspiracy theory of being faked/orchestrated by the government or being a cover up for the State of Israel.
- Assassinations, such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
- The final few months and death of Marilyn Monroe
- The Abbey Road, Beatles conspiracy
- Adolf Hitler’s death
As our original idea for history was that of fact vs. conspiracy, it was interesting to note that this was the idea that would eventually turn into our performance and how that had an underlying effect on the overall performance.. Perhaps a conspiracy theory in itself..
In terms of staging and my role of calling the show, it was a real eye opener to always have that God-like, bird’s eye view of the performance. With this at my advantage, I couldn’t help but see how effective, albeit subtext, the idea of the entire performance taking place in a news studio was. Before catching onto the idea of a news room during our final ‘BBC’ scene, the audience were allowed to watch every scene change and manipulation first hand. Nothing was hidden: be it camera workers, set changes, the tech being mixed live on stage or the stage manager performing within scenes wearing head cans.
With all of these elements in place, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it seemed to be making a statement about conspiracies. With the moon landing as our opening scene and perhaps one of the most talked about and publicised conspiracy theories of all time, it really set the mood for the performance being a visual staging.
With the audience in full view of the performers deconstructing and reconstructing elements in time, the audio and video mixed and projected live and camera workers personally manipulating what the audience is able to see on the screens, it really made a statement about the idea of constructed history and selective viewership. It may or may not have been obvious to the audience, or even an intent as us as a theatre company but it was evident either way and made its own subconscious statement about the staging of history and how this then effects the outcomes. Instead of accurately recreating and becoming those people from the past, we instead chose to represent them and what they stood for or achieved.
When it came to the final performance, to say that the tech went smoothly from the point of view of someone calling the show is neither yes nor no: but both. Though everything went smoothly through full runs, the actual performance was far from a perfect ride. Whatever could have gone wrong with the tech, due to no fault of ours, went wrong. We had failure of lighting, microphones needing resetting, cameras running out of battery and videos failing to make it to screen. However, between myself, the stage manager and the tech team on stage, every error was handles swiftly and effectively over the cans.
Being able to directly discuss with both the lighting and microphone techs up in the God’s, I was able to look through the calling script and make decisions about how to discreetly rectify small lighting or voice volume changes during the show, which really made a difference to the overall aesthetics of the show. More importantly, the method of being in direct vocal links to the on-stage tech and the stage manager involved in the performance was a general life-saver. If cameras were slightly off or volume levels needed changing, with just a few words they could be manually rectified. As a team, I believe we worked incredibly well together. In stressful situations with tech not working, we could discuss and come up with solutions mid-performance in a calm manner and ultimately produce a seamless tech performance.
It takes a lot to stage a performance that tech heavy, with performers and grades sitting on the backs of a multimedia tech team. If the moon landings were a conspiracy, the pressure there would be pretty high. Of course, I cannot ask them if our stress levels were similar as my contacts with NASA aren’t that great.
But then I would say that wouldn’t I?..
Wheeler, Brian. ‘Are Conspiracy Theories Destroying Democracy? – BBC News’. BBC News. N.p., 2013. Web. 23 May 2015.
Hansen, L. 2013. ‘Making do and Making new: Performative moves into interaction design’. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. 9 (1). 135- 151.
Causey, M. (2009) Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture. London: Routledge.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.